Virginia Blackburn

HERE’S a harmless little snippet doing the rounds of social media: a bright spark has worked out that if you class Olympic medals the way the world used to look, then the former countries of the British Empire won 396, 138 more than a post-Brexit EU’s 258. The rest of the world comes in at 320. Makes you proud to be British, you might think, except not in this age of offence-taking – as Government whip Heather Wheeler has found out to her cost.

When she tweeted this with the comment, “Empire goes for gold,” the roof fell in. People are “outraged” that she should be glorying in the wicked former empire, responsible for all of the sins of the world. Labour MP David Lammy tweeted: “Unbelievable. So deeply offensive to so many people and their ancestors. Really hope Heather Wheeler apologises.”

Well, I really hope she does nothing of the sort and I am not alone. My own social media feed is full of people retweeting and reposting this enthusiastically and why shouldn’t they? I am sick and tired of being told we should be ashamed of the British Empire. We should be glorying in the influence we exerted in so much of the world.

Of course there were atrocities – no country’s history is without them (if any American complains to you about empire, respond with the words “My Lai”) but we did an awful lot of good.

It was the British who put a stop to the practice of sati in India, whereby widows were expected to throw themselves on their husband’s funeral pyre. It was Britain which put a stop to the slave trade, with the Royal Navy patrolling the seas after the 1807 Slave Trade Act. And it is English common law that is the