Disliking the Olympics opening ceremony does not make one a Nazi

At the same time as Carl Sargent was tweeting his comments, the backbench Conservative MP Aidan Burley tweeted his opinion that the opening ceremony was ‘leftie multicultural crap.’  Mr Burley’s previous form in the public eye does not make him seem to me an admirable figure. It is so obvious that it hardly needs stating that he was wrong to have stayed at a stag-party where someone was dressed as a Nazi and chanting ‘Hitler’. But I doubt that he, any more than Prince Harry, actually is a Nazi. However, Burley’s past form and his Friday tweets made him the source for a classic political bait-and-switch. Firstly it gave certain left-wingers the opportunity to imply that the conservative party is actually the Nazi party. Understandably fearing even a tangential connection to a Nazi-themed stag-party, this made certain conservatives go even further out of their way to distance themselves not just from Mr Burley but from anything he tweeted. So they praised the opening ceremony even more lavishly than they might have done before. This is a demonstration of what happens when you stop being willing to explain or defend your own positions. For instance, there are legitimate positions between complete hostility to the NHS and the jarring and fantastical cult-worship on display the other night. It might also be possible to explain that the relationship which CND had with the Communist Party of Britain and the KGB during the Cold War makes it a wholly unfit organisation for national celebration. But few British conservatives any longer defend their positions. So much easier to just go with the flow. And so, as we have seen over recent days, a radical left-wing orthodoxy becomes ever more entrenched until it becomes such a form of holy-writ that even being found not-guilty of liking it becomes wholly unacceptable. Now the crime of non-agreement-with-the-religion-of-the-Olympics-opening-ceremony is being levelled at Conservative ministers, alleged to include Michael Gove and Jeremy Hunt. In response Labour’s Paul Flynn MP once again crows of the ceremony:

This was not British history as Michael Gove sees it. There was an acknowledgement of the suffering of war, respect for fallen warriors without triumphalism. The centrepiece NHS sign was a worthy celebration of the greatest single political reform of the last century. The CND symbol was formed by the dancers. This is history from the perspective of Classic Labour.

Indeed. Yet what are those British conservatives who have been furiously dismissing exactly this claim for the last two days going to say about it now? To be clear: there were wonderful parts of the ceremony. There cannot have been anybody who did not thrill to the Queen’s scene with James Bond. But the claim that the ceremony did not become highly political is nonsense. If in doubt, consider the following thought-experiment. Among the people honoured with the task of carrying the Olympic flag was the left-wing campaigner Shami Chakrabarti. The stadium voiceover announced that this was because of her ‘integrity.’  The conservative philosopher Roger Scruton is some years Chakrabarti’s senior and I would say rather demonstrably her superior in achievement and ‘integrity’. Yet I do not believe Professor Scruton was asked to be one of the Olympic flag-bearers. Nor was Ayaan Hirsi Ali invited to be honoured for her integrity. Or Margaret Thatcher. Why not? To ask the question is to answer it: all are recognised, like Chakrabarti, to be highly political figures. As it happens I do not think any political figure – from any political direction – should have been involved in the ceremony. But the inclusion of Chakrabarti shows, as surely as the inclusion of Scruton, Hirsi Ali or Thatcher alone would have done, that the organisers were celebrating a particular political direction. This would have been obvious even without the CND logo and so on. As it is, though most people will remember the evening for some good jokes and a couple of stand-out performances, many people like Messrs Sargent and Flynn will continue to see it as a demonstration of the wholesale triumph of their particular political world-view. How sad that many British conservatives are now helping to prove them right.