I hope our Jubilee Queen, unlike the last, outlives a hopeless foreign war

War in South Africa — the second Boer war — was already brewing by Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee in 1897. Two years later it began. By the end of the century Britain was bogged down and struggling. On the Queen’s death in 1901 the unholy mess continued. In 1902 we were finally able to declare victory; but bloodied, shocked, shamed and considerably cut down to size. The whole campaign had been an ill-conceived, over-confident and grisly blunder. Even Kipling hated it. How could the numerical superiority and technical might of Britain’s armed forces be fought to cruel draw by a smaller band of ill-equipped zealots, as light on their feet as the modern-day terrorist? It was humiliating. We had bitten off more than we could chew, and an argument can be made that this was the beginning of the end of empire. The bitterness and grievance it generated echoed down through the whole of the following century, and beyond; and in South Africa it echoes still. It helped create the Afrikaner mindset, with all that that has entailed.

But search the newspaper archives of the period and you will undoubtedly find your Con Coughlins of the era arguing — as the Daily Telegraph’s executive foreign editor argued about the war in Afghanistan in The Spectator a fortnight ago (‘The Defeatists’, 19 May) — that our armed forces were doing a splendid job, that it was our duty to support them, and that to talk of anything less than victory was to betray the lives and sacrifices of all the young men who had died already in this cause.

It was ever thus, and one could just shrug one’s shoulders. But as an example of the genre, Mr Coughlin’s column really was such a corker that it should not be allowed to pass without comment.