Rishi Sunak on D-Day

A letter to the British People

Dear People,

I want to apologise for apologising for leaving the D-Day Commemoration ceremonies early. When I do wrong, I do apologise for it. I am that kind of man (not ‘guy’, like Tony Blair). And my first apology was very wrong. It makes it look as if my reason for leaving early was what all those journalists say it was, that I was anxious not to lose any time electioneering. It makes it look as if my motive was selfish, as if all I care about is getting back in power (if you can call it power) for another five years, and don’t care whether or not in doing so I slight the memory of what took place 80 years ago.

My early departure has led to my being accused of being unpatriotic, and my apology makes it seem as if I plead guilty to the accusation. But I don’t. Not at all. In fact, it was just my patriotism and my respect for the memory of what those young men suffered – and what they suffered it for – that prompted me to leave early. What I couldn’t bear was the contrast between the way those men comported themselves on June the 6th, 1944 and the abominable tastelessness of the so-called commemorations of June the 6th, 2024. Nothing could be further removed from the way people felt and behaved 80 years ago than the emotionalism – the ghastly performing of emotion – that was mistakenly thought to confer honour and respect upon them in those so-called commemoration ceremonies in Bayeux and Portsmouth.

Not everything was ghastly and in contradiction of 1944, of course. Princess Anne’s speech was a good, sober speech, well – that is, soberly – delivered.  It was noticeably old-fashioned and, thankfully, out of keeping with most of the rest. The piping was fine, of course, and there was a certain sort of dignified poetry in the marching. I do admire the British style, our style, of marching. None of that robotic goose-stepping of the Russians and Germans. And none of the ridiculous strutting of the Pakistani and Indian soldiers trying to out-crow one another on the Kashmir border. Firstly, the style is that of men marching, a citizen soldiery, not some Frankensteinian mechanism.; secondly, it is sober and dignified as if acknowledging the gravity of marching to war. I admire it and I am proud of it, as a survival of a better past lingering on into the present

But as for the rest … . Whether or not the poem that got performed in Bayeux was any good or not and whether it was capable of commemorating anything worth commemorating was impossible to say. Any sense it might have had was obliterated by the emotionalism of its reading. Well, it wasn’t read, it was acted. It was like watching someone ‘present’ a tv show, where the stuff supposedly being presented is always upstaged by the presenter. And Portsmouth was worse. Portsmouth made one ashamed to be there. (Was I there or did I only watch it on tv. Was I waking or dreaming?)

The British – we – used to know how to do these things. I have watched film of the funerals of King George VIth and of Churchill. Nothing could be finer. The British state then knew how to mourn and how to commemorate. But now! It has handed over the duty to set designers: Dame Elton John’s ghastly “Candle in the Wind” in Westminster Abbey in 1997 (a portent), the Glorification of the NHS Cult at the 2012 Olympiad and now these D-Day so-called Commemorations, which are so antithetical to the people and the time they supposedly commemorate that they are more like a Ritual of Forgetfulness.

The Right Honourable Rishi Sunak, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom