The Queen wisely advises a time to reflect and pray

When I hear the phrase “mounting anger” used on television, my journalistic nose twitches. I sometimes suspect the person using the formulation is anxious that anger should mount.

Covering the Grenfell Tower story, the BBC did everything it could to mount the anger as high as the flames. Contrast this with the way it covered the shootings in Virginia last week. There, a gunman tried to kill several Republican congressmen. He failed, but critically injured one of them, and was himself shot dead. After a bit, the BBC reported, in a low-key way, that the would-be killer, James Hodgkinson, was a keen supporter of Senator Bernie Sanders, the Left-wing candidate for the Democratic nomination last year. After that, no more was said about his political views. Instead, the BBC celebrated the united atmosphere at the inter-party congressional baseball game in which the wounded congressman would have participated.

Suppose Hodgkinson had been a Trump supporter who had shot Democrats. Can anyone doubt that the BBC would have discovered “mounting anger” at Republican “hate speech”? Soon furious marches calling for “love not hate” would have paraded along the wide avenues of Washington, demanding that President Trump apologise for his belligerent tweets.

In the Grenfell Tower case, there is reason enough for anger, goodness knows. But anyone actually concerned for those who suffered would surely put care first. On Radio 4’s Sunday programme, the tone of the local vicar, Alan Everett, was just right. He had opened his church and given breakfast to 150 of the fire victims within hours of the blaze starting, and has continued working with them ever since.

He said he was sorry how, two days after the fire, “the narrative changed”. Instead of bringing out the cooperative spirit of the community and the fulfilment of immediate and practical needs, media emphasis shifted to a blame game. Lotifa Begum, from Islamic Relief, who also appeared on the programme, seemed readier to play that game. The leaders of the mob who descended on Kensington town hall on Friday played it for all it was worth.

To those of us who remember militant protests of the early Eighties, it was unpleasantly familiar. In 1981, for example, another fire – at a house in New Cross where 13 black party-goers died – was turned by extremists, with minimal evidence, into a racist “massacre”. Grief was exploited by politics. An important part of any disaster is finding out who was at fault, but that should come slowly, carefully emerging from the evidence at a public inquiry. Help, on the other hand, should come fast.

So it was interesting that the Queen took the unusual step of issuing a message for her official birthday on Saturday. It suggested not only sympathy for those who had suffered so much, but also anxiety about what she called “a very sombre national mood”. She is surely right. The combination of terrorist attacks, an inconclusive election result producing a lack of leadership and finally the Grenfell Tower inferno has made people very uneasy.

In the Queen’s mind, the great corrective is helping others: she was “profoundly struck”, she said, “by the immediate inclination of people throughout the country to offer comfort and support to those in desperate need”. She made a national point, too: “Put to the test, the United Kingdom has been resolute in the face of adversity.” It will need to be, she may have implied.

Although it avoided any taint of political controversy, the Queen’s message perhaps contains a subliminal but timely rebuke to political leaders – both to Government ministers who have not risen to the occasion, and to Opposition ones who want to turn tragedy to party advantage.

We should “reflect and pray”, said Elizabeth II – good advice when the airwaves are full of people doing neither.

So hectic has been the rush of bad news at home that, sadly, little attention was given to the death of Helmut Kohl on Friday. He was a man whom many underrated because he was fat, bombastic and – in some people’s eyes – provincial. The word “kohl” in German means cabbage: it sometimes seemed to fit the unglamorous Chancellor.

He got on famously badly with Margaret Thatcher. Once, at a party after she had left office, she took me aside, as if to tell me a secret, and said: “You know what’s the matter with Helmut Kohl?” I said that I didn’t. “He’s a German!” To Mrs Thatcher, as to many of her wartime generation, Germanic qualities were off-putting. Kohl had many of them, including his fondness for eating obscure bits of the pig.

Mrs Thatcher was also right to fear that the creation of a single European currency (what later became the euro) would lead to precisely the German domination of Europe which it was supposed to prevent. For all that, however, Kohl’s achievement was astonishing. When others did not see the opportunity, he seized the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 to accomplish the peaceful unification of his country. This brought liberty to about 20 million Germans trapped in the Communist east, and the vindication of the policies so consistently pursued since the defeat of Hitler.

In many ways, Germany today is a model to the nations. All through the Nazi era, the British tried to comfort themselves with the concept of “good Germans”. In the long run, they turned out to be the majority. Helmut Kohl was a very good German and probably a great man.