A COUNTER-REVOLUTION AT THE NYT?

FOR years now, the opinion pages of the New York Times have provided a warm embrace to any writers, British as well as American, who want to condemn this country as hopelessly mired in imperial nostalgia, stuck miserably in a bygone age.

Perhaps this is understandable: the American Revolution was against the British monarchy, and old enmities die hard.

But it was bizarre when one NYT staffer, reporting from Britain in 2018, claimed to find it hard to find any restaurant whose menu extended much beyond the alleged national staples of ‘boiled mutton and porridge’.

When the Queen died, the tone became more insulting: the NYT’s main comment page, the very next day, asserted that Elizabeth II had ‘helped obscure a bloody history of decolonisation’.

Later that week, the same page damned what it called Britain’s ‘madness of depending on imperial nostalgia for self-esteem’.

The NYT even paid a former contributor to the Kremlin’s Russia Today network, operating under the pseudonym Jonathan Pie, to rant that Britain is ‘a nation falling apart at the seams’.

But what’s this? The NY Times has just published its list of the best ‘52 places to travel in 2023’. And which destination came very top of that list? London. And the main reason? Our capital is ‘a buzzing city ready for a Coronation’.

As if to emphasise this sudden enthusiasm for the panoply of royal pomp, the piece was illustrated by a picture of the band of the Household Cavalry outside Buckingham Palace.

Further on, this encomium raved about how the British capital ‘juxtaposes old traditions and new possibilities, offering something for everyone who loves culture, history, art and nightlife’.

Clearly the travel editor of the NYT hadn’t realised that Britain is cursed by its ‘imperial nostalgia’ while the indigenous population sickens on an unvarying diet of porridge and boiled mutton.

Or perhaps there has been a counter-revolutionary putsch on the editorial floor. If a royal crest starts appearing on the paper’s masthead, then we’ll know.