Shame on the Dame who sneers at Britain
AS SOMEONE who considers herself more than a little Italian, I couldn’t help raise an eyebrow when I read that, in an interview with the roman newspaper La repubblica, dame Hilary Mantel had denounced the ‘ugly face of contemporary Britain’.
She railed against the ‘people on the beaches abusing exhausted refugees even as they scramble to the shore’.
I think most people would agree that humans should not abuse other humans. But if she thinks dover is unwelcoming towards refugees, she should spend some time in Sicily or Calabria, or in the suburbs of Paris or Marseille.
After a few honest conversations, she might just find herself warming to the good people of east Kent.
Truth is, every nation has its ugly side. Ireland, to which dame Hilary wishes to escape the cultural hellhole of Britain, recently mourned the deaths of more than 9,000 children in the country’s motherand-baby homes between 1922 and 1998, a tragedy the Taoiseach, Micheál Martin, called a ‘dark, difficult, shameful chapter of very recent Irish history’.
Perhaps that sort of thing doesn’t bother dame Hilary. either way, she seems determined to signal her disapproval of a certain type of Britishness. The monarchy as an institution baffles her; Brexiteers are ‘callow opportunists, insincere and devious’; and Boris Johnson ‘should not be in public life’.
EVerYTHING here is so utterly ghastly that she can see only one possible course of action: to pack her bags and ‘become a european again’. But what, exactly, does she mean by that?
It’s interesting that Mantel — who like so many people who voted to remain and appear to have been unable to reconcile the reality of the 2016 referendum result with their own overriding sense of entitlement and superiority — makes the same fundamental error as many other prominent remainer intellectuals.
She confuses the EU — a relatively recent concept — with europe itself: that is to say the many disparate nations, traditions and languages that stretch from Portugal to Finland and beyond, and to which, when I last checked the map, the UK still very much belongs.
She cannot ‘become a european again’ for the simple reason that she never stopped being one. She can, of course, adopt the nationality of an EU member state such as Ireland. But even that won’t solve her fundamental problem, which is that her post-referendum frustrations seem to have caused her to develop a deep-seated loathing of everything she, herself, represents.
Mantel is a dame of the British empire who says ‘the popularity of monarchy as an institution is something that baffles me’ and a writer who has made a career out of chronicling the history of these isles, which she believes to be ‘an artificial and precarious construct’.
Maybe it is; but it is arguably a good deal less artificial and precarious than a tenuous political and economic alliance that was formed less than 30 years ago.
Perhaps the solution is not for dame Hilary to move to Ireland, but to the U.S., where the duke and duchess of Sussex seem to see no contradiction in trading off their British royal connections while simultaneously doing their best to bring the institution down. dame Hilary should be right at home.