Simon Schama’s migration muddle

Sooner or later, in this trade, one runs out of television historians to antagonise. I am doggedly working my way through the pack — and I don’t think any of the really big ones are left. I began by annoying Mary Beard and then swiftly moved on to David Starkey. Some time passed but eventually I found an opportunity to irritate Simon Schama, on BBC’s Question Time last week. He got very angry and his hands started waving all over the place. Someone on a social media site said he looked like a Thunder-birds puppet controlled by a person with Parkinson’s disease, which is a little cruel, I suppose. Simon ended a splenetic diatribe by calling me ‘suburban’, which raised a few eyebrows and indeed the accusation of snobbery. I do not mind being called suburban, even if I have never lived in the suburbs and I am being called it by someone who actually does (Westchester, in New York State, since you asked). There are many worse things you can call a chap.

As it happens, I enjoy the television programmes through which all three of these luminaries dispense their expertise, especially Mrs Beard’s. I’ve even ordered her new book about the Romans, and I would add that she is excellent company when not spouting blithe bien-pensant drivel about immigration. That was the sort of area which got me into trouble with Mr Schama, who easily out-drivelled Mary. Talking about the ‘refugee’ crisis, the art historian divested himself of a stream of emotionally incontinent non-sequiturs — and it was when I pointed this out that he became incandescent with pique.

The problem, as I saw it, was that Simon had simply not made any sense at all. It seemed to be sufficient to say that these people — the migrants — were ‘human beings’ and that feeling kindly disposed towards them was sufficient, in itself, to solve what many fear is the gravest crisis we have faced since the second world war.