VE Day inspires us

This Friday marks the anniversary of VE Day – and, 75 years on, the Second World War still dominates the British historical consciousness. During the coronavirus crisis, the Prime Minister has been compared to Churchill, the lockdown to the Blitz and the medical battle to Dunkirk. The search for historical analogy can result in inaccuracy; some historians find it irritating. Other countries ask if the UK is not obsessed with this one period in time.

But the past is the only roadmap we have: we don’t know the future and the present is clouded in fog, so we look backwards at where we’ve come from and draw what lessons we can find. We return again and again to the Second World War because it was not only a formative experience but a moral one. What Britons went through

– and were willing to go through – to defeat fascism humbles and inspires us. When national crises come around, as they always do, each new generation hopes it can live up to the example set by the greatest generation of all.

The popular folk hero of the coronavirus age has been Captain Tom Moore, a 100-year-old veteran who raised millions for the NHS by walking around his garden. If he can get through this while being useful to the community, many of us think, why shouldn’t I? And the fact that Captain (now Colonel) Moore has lived through so much is testament that crises do eventually end and life – complex and reassuringly normal – will return. When the Queen gave her televised speech, she made sure to include the words “We’ll meet again”, quoting Vera Lynn and casting our imaginations back decades to the time when we faced another epochal challenge, and came out the other side changed, but the same old country at heart.