Theodore Dalrymple

Our enemies are right to mock us

Britain has changed dramatically — and for the worst   

A taxi driver in Mexico City, who in my presence had just paid la mordida (the bite) to a traffic cop, taught me some lines by the 17th-century Creole nun and poetess, Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz:

    O who is more to blame,
    He who sins for pay
    Or he who pays for sin?

The application of this particular moral conundrum to the recent events in our own country is all too obvious. But whatever answer you may give to it, one thing seems indisputable: Britain has been shown in the past couple of weeks, quite accurately, to be a country of very slight account, with a population increasingly unable to distinguish the trivial from the important and the virtual from the real, led by a man of the most frivolous earnestness who for many years has been given to gushes of cheap moral enthusiasm (cheap, that is, for him, not for others who have to pay for it).

Indignity has been heaped upon indignity. Let us disregard for a moment the tremendous propaganda success that Iran achieved by parading 15 sailors and marines of a supposedly, though self-deludingly, great power whom they captured without a shot being fired, and who within a very short time appeared to be behaving like humble penitents. Any counter-propaganda was bound to be ineffective, even in the home country, because the government has so comprehensively lost its right to be believed on any subject whatever, even when, by accident as it were, it tells the truth.

What happened when the 15 sailors and marines returned home was even more humiliating.

The sub-death-of-Diana hysteria which gripped the tabloids was bad enough. The picture on the front page of the Daily Mirror, of Faye Turney reunited with her daughter with the caption of MUMMY! MUMMY! was enough to make any inveterate enemy of this country laugh with pleasurable — and justified — contempt.

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