With these documentaries, the BBC has lost any claim to impartiality

Because the rise of the Nazis is a topic so rarely mentioned these days, least of all in schools, the BBC has produced a helpful three-part explainer of that title (BBC2, Mondays) showing why the story of Hitler is even more relevant today than it was in the 1930s.

Back in the day, the BBC might have been content to strive for an objective take on the subject, perhaps with a voiceover by Samuel West and lots of period footage. But the danger of that approach, the BBC has since realised, is that it runs the risk of viewers making up their own minds what to think. Some of them might not be aware, for example, of the obvious parallels between Hitler, Nigel Farage, Donald Trump, Brexit and, to a lesser extent, Michael Gove.

Enter former Cambridge historian Professor Sir Richard Evans, one of the diverse talking heads who pop up at regular intervals to interpret the story being acted out by young men in brown shirts, Himmler-impersonators, etc. Hitler said he wanted to ‘Make Germany Great Again,’ he explained, and specialised in ‘empty slogans’ which, though vague, were ‘very powerful’. Also, Hitler was a man who ‘represented himself as an ordinary bloke, as it were,’ he told us with
a sneer. Gosh, which contemporary politicians could he possibly have meant?

Actually, we don’t need to guess because Evans keeps telling us via his Remoaner tear-drenched Twitter account and also in articles such as the one he recently wrote for Prospect in which he compared contemporary British politics to those of the Weimar Republic, and attacking both Trump and ‘Johnson and Dominic Cummings and their unelected, hard-right government’ with its plans to ‘force through a disastrous no-deal Brexit without parliamentary approval and against the wishes of the majority of the population’.