Why DID we give Salman Rushdie a knighthood — for services to sneering at Britain?

SALMAN Rushdie, the not- muchloved novelist, has once more been sounding off about Britain’s failings.

In particular, he has been sneering at the direction the country has taken with Brexit.

Prophesying death and disaster all around for this presumptuous, democratic decision to re- assert our national sovereignty, protect our borders and make our own laws again, Rushdie says: ‘It’s like a family having a picnic on a railway track . . .“What’s that hooting noise? Owls?” ’

Another coldly sardonic comment on the contemptible stupidity of his former home country, which suggests just how much he loathes Britain.

Perhaps it’s just as well for all concerned that Sir Salman has long since decamped to the U.S. Yes, we made him a knight as well. What for — ‘services to national self-denigration’?

Hysterical

Now resident in a splendid apartment in Manhattan, the multi-millionaire man of letters has taken U.S. citizenship and is feted there as a great literary and cultural figure.

Just the sort of recognition which he feels he so richly deserves, and yet never got enough of back in Britain.

In origin, Rushdie is Indian. He was born into a Muslim family in Bombay in 1947, and like any proud Indian, is delighted that his native land regained her independence from foreign rule in the year of his birth.

According to Rushdie though, when Britain elects to do the same through Brexit, she is following a course so stupid and self-destructive that it is akin to someone virtually committing suicide on a railway track.

Like many Left-wing intellectuals, Rushdie is confused and ill-informed about Brexit.

Many British-Indians voted for it, as the London School of Economics has pointed out. This was particularly the case in areas such as Southall and Hounslow in West London.

And the readiness with which many British-Indians will say how much they love England is in marked contrast to Rushdie’s insulting expat scorn. Yet although intellectuals by their nature are supposed to be independent thinkers, on Brexit they sound more like a herd of hysterical sheep, bleating on about ‘xenophobia . . . Little England . . . backward-looking . . . populism . . .’

Rushdie’s fellow novelist Ian McEwan, another of the ‘golden generation’ of literary young guns who came to prominence in the Eighties, has said similar things. He called Brexit Britain ‘small-minded, mean-spirited, murderous’, and in a suicidal simile like Rushdie’s about a picnic on a rail line, compared it to a depressed teenager cutting his own throat.

The voting process, he said, reminded him of the Third Reich, appealing to ‘the lowest human impulses’, and that now ‘the air in my country is very foul’. Hardly the reasoned argument one might hope to hear from a public intellectual or eminent writer.

More jaw-dropping still was another prize-winning literary novelist, Andrew O’Hagan, who called the Brexit vote ‘the revenge of the Brownshirts, a dictatorship of the illiterate and the opportunistic’.

Again, that note of hysteria and wild exaggeration does nothing to earn respect, does it? The equation of Brexit with Nazism is so absurd, one hardly knows where to begin.

The Nazis had famously little regard for national borders, and wished to lord it over other countries with an iron jackboot. Brexiteers want to protect their national borders, and govern themselves. Sorry, but the parallel eludes me.

Yet at least most Left-wing intellectuals seem to have stuck with the wretched old country, for all that. Not so Rushdie.

His scorn for Britain only confirms one’s sense of his disloyalty and ingratitude.

He enjoyed the best English education money could buy — Rugby, the leading public school, and then Cambridge University. He has been showered with literary prizes — some certainly deserved. He’s been elected to the Royal Society of Literature, and knighted at the instigation of Tony Blair.

During the grim affair of The Satanic Verses, his book which was considered insulting to Islam, he was condemned by Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini who ordered a fatwa (a legal pronouncement by an expert in religious law) on the author and offered a fee of $1 million to anyone who would kill him.

He was given 24-hour protection, paid for by the British taxpayer, so far to the tune of £11 million. Any British citizen deserves no less, when threatened by a foreign power.

But, later, Rushdie rather spoiled things, in the way only he can. In his vain autobiography, Joseph Anton, in which he preposterously writes about himself in the third person, he even appears to sneer at the police and special branch officers who risked their lives to save his and would have taken a bullet for him if need be.

He wrote that he found it distasteful and unpleasant that he, a great writer, should take orders from such types.

‘It was a shaming aspect of his life that policemen felt able to talk to him like this,’ he wrote about himself.

Wicked

Elsewhere, he has never ceased to scorn and denigrate Britain and all things British — so no wonder he loathes this recent, lively, rebellious outbreak of national pride and self-confidence that is Brexit.

What else would you expect from a man who has dismissed four centuries of British imperial history as nothing more than ‘400 years of conquest and looting’? Any decent historian will tell you that the story of the British Empire was a great deal more complex than that, a mix of good and bad, like all human enterprises.

Some, such as Professor Niall Ferguson in his wide-ranging book Empire, have staunchly argued it was on balance overwhelmingly a force for good.

But for Rushdie, it was only ever about the British Being Wicked. He has ridiculed the fact that Britain ‘dares once again to believe itself a great power while in fact its power diminishes every year’.

This verdict is at odds with that of the Henry Jackson Society, a conservative think-tank which recently declared Britain the second most influential world power after the U.S.

In one early novel, Rushdie portrayed his father as a drunk, and then professed surprise when his father objected. Perhaps this is a clue to Rushdie’s habitual ungrateful character.

Vulgarity

Because loyalty to one’s country is much like loyalty to one’s family. You aren’t loyal to your kith and kin because you think they’re better than anyone else’s, but because they’re yours. So it is with love of country: a miraculously strong, binding force in any people, and in a multicultural, diverse country like Britain, essential.

It’s a million miles from ugly, genocidal nationalism.

The failure by Left-wing intellectuals such as Rushdie to be able to distinguish between the two is a serious and worryingly myopic shortcoming.

For these smart- alec internationalists, being anything other than relentlessly critical and derogatory of your own country is a sign of stupidity, vulgarity, or worse.

Of course, to the Rushdies of this world, Brexit is the final manifestation of such stupidity. On the other hand, to grandly depict yourself as a cross- border globalist and world socialist marks you out as a cultural giant, a geopolitical visionary, and a superior sort of person all round.

On the whole though, while acknowledging his talent as a novelist, most of us will probably feel rather differently about Sir Salman Rushdie’s self-styled superiority.

And I don’t expect we’ll allow any British ‘ family picnic’ ( complete with pork pies, samosas and onion bhajis), to be much disturbed by whether or not he approves of our choices.