However, as Anthony Barnett observed of the War’s second son after Suez, the Falklands, history doesn’t just repeat as tragedy and farce, but also as spectacle, as media event. And if the War (it is still just about a definite “the”) is our national creation myth, it only became so once we started broadcasting it on repeat, sublimating violence and trauma into a televisual parade of trumpets and valour.

The mythologising started straightaway. Churchill’s words urged us into new conceptions of national prowess, his classical inflections designed to flatter us into thinking we were the Athenians and he our Thucydides. Soon his personal sense of moral destiny became a collective triumph, a pageant to be inspiringly viewed from the cheap seats of austerity Britain. And nowhere was the spectacle more spectacular than in the British war film. Enlisting Steve McQueen, Richard Attenborough and Richard Burton, we turned our parents into hero-warriors — better, into Hollywood stars. For the children of the Fifties and Sixties, Daddy’s war could become theirs too. The testament of a previous generation turned entertainment for the next.

However, to judge from the fate and Zimmer frame of Michael Caine in his new (and possibly last) film The Great Escaper, the war film is dying on its feet. And the Second World War is now very much a grandaddy issue, possibly even just an issue for executors, morticians and undertakers. Caine plays Bernie Jordan, a D-Day veteran who absconds from his care home to attend the 70th anniversary of the landings. If it sounds too twee to make up, it is — the real Bernie became an overnight celebrity after his trip in 2014, before his death six months later. Genuinely unbelievable, though, is the fact that this is one of two films that will retell his story to be released this year, with the second inadequately substituting Sir Michael for Pierce Brosnan. The snout of the British culture industry has evidently sniffed out a winner.

The Great Escaper sparely retells Bernie Jordan’s weekend Odyssey, every detail designed to pull delicately on the heartstrings of the national psyche. There’s Bernie’s wartime romance with Irene (the late Glenda Jackson), consummated in flashback after a shuffle at the local swing night, and still strong after 70 years. There’s Bernie’s reconciliation with some pacified Germans in a café overlooking Sword beach. “What a waste,” he will cry, in a foreign field lined with white graves. But the film need only prod its audience with clichés. We are prepped from early-learning to receive them. The wash of waves and Michael Caine, flat-capped, staring out to sea beneath a commemorative D-Day banner, his glassy eyes blinking, his aged mind remembering. This is what a war hero looks like.

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But Caine’s presence, as well as the film’s title, places The Great Escaper at odds with a very different lineage of war films, one of pluck and daring. Despite all the redcoats and pith helmets, Caine’s first picture Zulu leant directly on the beleaguered British underdog myth of 1940. And he went on to form part of the Shakespearean ensemble behind Battle of Britain, that epic Airfix commercial of 1969. For the other, still vaguely watchable productions from the time, see The Guns of Navarone, Ice Cold in Alex, The Great Escape itself and obviously Where Eagles Dare. (For a refresher, turn on ITV4 at 4pm this Sunday afternoon, or in fact any Sunday afternoon.)

All memoirs of the Sixties recall the intensity of this saturation. “I saw a film today, oh boy,” John Lennon sang in 1967. “The English Army had just won the war.” Geoff Dyer, born 1959, claims that before he was 15 he had only seen Disney cartoons, Alastair Maclean adaptations and a few other war and action movies. “I didn’t know films were made out of anything else,” remembered Christopher Hitchens. And this was part of a more general mania of cultural reproduction that gripped the supposedly Swinging nation, particularly among the young. Just as the war economy wound down, as actual conscription was coming to an end, culture was rearming. Kids read War Picture Library comics, the national equivalent to Marvel. Every boy was accompanied by a portable, idealised Unknown Soldier — at their peak there were four Action Men for every three boys in the country.

While the stories were not always uncomplicated, you never forget who the villains are, and who will and should eventually triumph. This was a Technicolor Second World War, gun-slinging and cocksure. It was what Britain needed. “We won the war… or did we?” went the cynical grumble as imperial pink faded from the map and the Union Jack was lowered East of Suez. But only the most reactionary portions of the British Right actually regretted fighting it. We’d lost our status — but we’d gained a cinematic universe to play heroes in, made all the more believable by being roughly justified. Few of these films mentioned the Holocaust or Nuremberg, but they didn’t have to. You knew the German characters were evil before you knew why — and you knew that your country had done something towards stopping them.

But, much like a child growing to see its father in a different light, our perspective on this past has altered. The war-film industry isn’t dead, but it is changed and chastened from those swashbuckling days. The self-confident silliness we once gorged on is gone. Instead, we’re drawn to the conflict’s murkier corners, background actors such as Turing and Oppenheimer who were as much victims of the War as they were its victors. The best war film of the last two decades, Dunkirk, turned the battle into an aesthetic masterpiece, a ticking set-piece of cold realism, with only a petit four of Churchilliana at the end to sweeten the horror. And, when we return to our wartime leader, the best we can do is turn Churchill into Gary Oldman’s pot-bellied pastiche, just at the very moment that his historical reputation needed intelligent defence, not sentimental reinforcement.

The real Bernie Jordan endured the same sentimentalisation, becoming advertising copy for P&O Ferries and a grinning, geriatric front-page sensation (a dehumanising process that The Great Escaper creditably critiques). The ultimate embarrassment, however, history repeating itself as spectacle and farce, was to come in 2020, when a cabin-feverish media seized upon Captain Tom Moore, a veteran of Burma’s “Forgotten Army” who had started walking across his garden to raise money for NHS charities. Tom became the face of a terrifying convulsion of Second World War parodism in British society, proving beyond doubt that it is still our only serviceable memory of national unity.

But how long until that memory fades? Harry Patch, “the last Fighting Tommy” from the war before, died only five years before Jordan’s great escape — and the death of the last D-Day witness, if not the last Second World War veteran, cannot be far off. Tribute to the obsessive qualities of internet historians everywhere, a Wikipedia page lists dozens of “notable” survivors in various states of decay, many in their second century. Jordan may not be the last to be immortalised in film (a Captain Tom biopic is in production), but the sense of leave-taking in The Great Escaper — bittersweetly conveyed by Caine and Jackson — gestures towards the War’s uncertain legacy as it moves irretrievably beyond living memory.

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No doubt those generic Churchillian emphases — “tears and sweat”, “the beaches” — will kick about the English language for another century, like those moth-eaten scraps of Tennyson that still retain some anonymous poetic charge. Perhaps they will even be reworked into a khaki Henriad by some distant Shakespeare. But the magic of those grand metonyms — “Overlord”, “Alamein” — is already gone for most people. Soon they will seem as antique as Wellington’s rearguards in the Peninsular Campaign.

Clearly, popular feeling is still swayed by memories of the finest hour, by a faith that we’re capable collectively of doing the right thing. But we see it ever more cynically. When Boris Johnson bustled off to Ukraine to tour bomb sites and inspect sandbags, we all knew whose silhouette he was shrouding himself in. Yet at some point in the future, we won’t recognise it at all. We will see only the transparent present, unmoored from the epic past it once aspired to.

The day after Captain Tom died last February, 36-year-old Glaswegian Celtic fan Joseph Kelly substituted “Brit soldier” for “Indian”, in the manner of the IRA, in a tweet. He then clarified his position by adding: “burn auld fella, buuuuurn.” Last week, almost a year on, he was convicted by Sheriff Adrian Cottam of sending a “grossly offensive” message contrary to section 127(1)(a) of the Communications Act 2003. He awaits sentence, and perhaps an appeal.

On the rare occasions when discussion of free speech trials avoids the buffers of perceived partisanship — “You were a Thursday night pot-banger so of course you want to throw the book at him” —  it is usually derailed by flitting between two separate questions: “Was the law correctly applied by the court?” and “Should the law be different?” Such flitting can of course be deliberate as well as careless.

Our answer to the first question almost always depends on the meaning of “grossly offensive”. In 2006 the Judicial Committee of the House of Lords held:

“There can be no yardstick of gross offensiveness otherwise than by the application of reasonably enlightened, but not perfectionist, contemporary standards to the particular message sent in its particular context. The test is whether a message is couched in terms liable to cause gross offence to those to whom it relates.”

As to the mental element of the offence: “the defendant must intend his words to be grossly offensive to those to whom they relate, or be aware that they may be taken to be so”. And in 2017 the High Court seems to have clarified that to mean: “taken to be so by a reasonable member of the public.”

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So, if a message is liable to cause gross offence to a person to whom it relates, and the defendant is aware that a reasonable member of the public might take it to be liable to do so, that is enough for a guilty verdict.

Now, one could argue that there is no prospect of someone taking offence at a tweet posted after they’ve died — the charge, after all, specified “offensive remarks about Captain Sir Tom”, rather than about British soldiers in general. But the appeal courts would likely find a way to close that apparent loophole — perhaps by establishing a very broad interpretation of “to whom it relates”.

Was Section 127 applied correctly then? Probably, yes. My own reaction to the tweet was, I confess, low-key: somewhere between a frown and an eye roll. But it was clearly liable to cause gross offence to Captain Tom’s family, and the defendant would surely have been aware that a reasonable member of the public might see it that way.

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But that doesn’t mean this law is any good. And that’s because it does not rest upon a shared cultural respect for a set of extreme taboos. All manner of commonplace statements are now liable to cause gross offence to those to whom they relate — yet be completely unobjectionable to almost everybody else. Yes, there are interpretative protections about the importance of context and so on, but Section 127 criminalises too much, and too vaguely.

The Indian Supreme Court came to this conclusion several years ago. The relevant parts of Section 66A of their Information Technology Act 2001 were written in near-identical terms to Section 127 of our Communications Act 2003. In striking down the legislation in 2015, the Justices held that “expressions such as ‘grossly offensive’ […] are so vague that there is no manageable standard by which a person can be said to have committed an offence or not”.

Fortunately, we might be about to catch up with the Developing World. In July last year the Law Commission recommended we get rid of Section 127. Its report noted that we lack universally accepted definitions of concepts such as “grossly offensive”; the “spectre of universal standards” should be “rejected”. Arguably, a lack of universal standards does not augur well for society — but we mustn’t deny that this is the state we find ourselves in.

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In place of Section 127, the report recommended a new offence: posting, without reasonable excuse, a communication “likely to cause harm to a likely audience”, and the Crown must prove that the defendant intended harm. Harm is defined as, at a minimum, serious psychological distress. This is, on the face of it, a great improvement. And last Friday, the Government published an interim response expressing their intention to add this offence to the Online Safety Bill.

So unlike Section 127, the new offence would require proof of an intention to cause serious psychological distress. And even when a defendant did hold that intention, he or she could argue that the message wasn’t actually likely to be seen by anyone likely to be seriously distressed by it. This could place heavier responsibility on the bigger Twitter accounts, which is as it should be. And “It was supposed to be a joke”, “I didn’t mean any harm by it”, “I didn’t expect it to be retweeted so much”, and even “in the circumstances it was fair enough” (reasonable excuse) could all, if this law is enacted, become relevant parts of a defence.

But there is a twist. The Law Commission’s original plan, in the consultation paper, was that the Crown need only prove that the defendant was aware of the risk that harm might be caused. This is a much lower threshold than intention. The reason for their change of heart, they repeatedly emphasised, is that the Online Safety Bill imposes a legal duty on social media companies to remove harmful content — including content that is not illegal.

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So a complaint to Twitter about the removal of a perfectly lawful tweet could be met with the response, “Yes, but the only reason tweets like this are not illegal is because we have to delete them”. Of course, the State delegating its natural responsibilities to private companies is nothing new. But to do so to this extent — narrowing the ambit of an important piece of criminal legislation at the heart of our right to Free Speech — is a worrying development, and does not sit well with the Law Commission’s stated aim of “technological neutrality”, or their intention that new offences be “future-proofed”.

If a behaviour is so wrong that it should be criminal, it ought not to slip through the net simply because global tech companies will be told to prevent it. The Law Commission rightly expressed concern about the “inconsistent application” of the Section 127 offence. But if there is one thing all sides can agree on it is that Twitter’s moderation policies are known for little else.

The high bar of intention to cause harm is a welcome development, and a measure of offensive dross in the digital public square is a price worth paying: for freedom, yes, but also for the sense of freedom, particularly among people at the less free end of the socio-economic spectrum. But instead of requiring social media companies to remove non-criminal material, it might be better — safer, even, in the long-run — if they were prevented from doing so. After all, responsibility for deciding what can and cannot be said should rest, perhaps, with any reasonable member of the public. And most of them are not on Twitter.

Where exactly is home for Labour? The answer was decisively revealed this week by the leader’s conference speech: home is an Islington townhouse in the year 1996. What a time to be British! Hugh Grant is shagging Liz Hurley. Princess Diana is sparklingly alive. Football means Skinner and Baddiel, not Heysel and Hillsborough. Damon and Noel are the new Mick and John. Somehow, Ian Hislop is actually quite funny.

Bonkers, barmy, grotesque Tories in pin-stripe suits dusted with dandruff are going mental over Europe. But on the telly, inspiring Tony and pragmatic Gordon are preparing, as smoothly professional as stockbrokers, for power. Things can only get… better.

Starmer did not have to mention Blair on Wednesday. The spirit of Tone was lurking underneath every word, dressed in greasy overalls, wrenching every rhetorical bolt into place. Tough on crime? Absolutely. Education? Say it three times baby.

More important than anything Starmer said was Peter Mandelson’s remark to Seumas Milne: “We’re back in control.”

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Speaking of figures from the past who consistently ruin the breakfasts of Daily Mail readers, Gina Miller is back too. New New Labour was not the only centre party to stagger on to the scene in the last few days.

“The True & Fair Party” is her new political vehicle. Miller said: “This government needs to be held to account. Voters deserve better than the current politics of incompetence and self-interest.”

The party’s policies are yet to be announced, but they will be a homecoming for Miller as well. You have to imagine that they will be Rejoin-ishly pro-EU and described everywhere as “centrist”. Like every middle-aged product of British centrism, whether it is a political party, or a newspaper columnist, True & Fair would be better named: Let Down & Fed Up & Really Quite Tired.

Miller is, at least, about a thousand times more interesting than Sir Keir. In the long 2016 era, when the British middle-class were lost in a prolonged and anxious freak out, she was easily the most charismatic and exciting Remainer personality.

The others were lame. Elsewhere there was only terrible hair (A.C. Grayling), or needling over-familiarity (Alastair Campbell, Andrew Adonis), or sad, sullen machismo (Bob Geldof, James O’Brien, David Aaronovitch), or… Femi.

Miller was their antidote and foil. She intrigued in all senses. She was a cigar-smoking sports racer, and a parachutist. Her background was pure 1980s, pure Thatcherite graft. After her family lost its fortune, she chewed her way back through the class system, from hard-luck indigence to a £7 million Chelsea villa, by way of the City. She was serious and respected. A lawyerly battle axe. Joan of Arc to Remainers; the Terminator to Brexiteers.

She took flak, both of the legitimate and grimly racist sort. Her most intelligent profilers wondered whether her high-wire legal challenges to Brexit were motivated by “an extreme sense of civic duty” or the chance of another adrenaline rush.

The same question hovers over her new party. In a sense though the answer doesn’t matter. Like Starmer’s zombie centrism, True & Fair will fail, because there is no market for this politics anymore. Barely months have passed since the last attempts to rebuild the centre.

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During the Brexit years, centrist fever dreams rolled above the land like rain clouds. In 2017, a Twitter-famous tax lawyer called Jolyon Maugham wanted to launch a new party called “Spring”. His plans were big, massively big. According to the Guardian: “He would hold a 28-day festival at the football stadium in Maidenhead, [Theresa] May’s constituency. Each day would be dedicated to the national dress and cuisine of a different EU member state. For the finale, Maugham planned to announce that he was standing in Maidenhead as a Spring candidate.” That sounds like satire written after a long, drunken seance with the hooting spirit of Auberon Waugh, but apparently it’s true. In the end Maugham “decided he didn’t have enough time to go ahead with it”. A wise choice!

There were smaller, but no less Partridge-into-a-dictaphone visions that year. Former George Osborne aide James Chapman called for an anti-Brexit party called ‘The Democrats’ in a Twitter meltdown, which only ended after he’d demanded — sad machismo again — that Theresa May personally debate him outside parliament. Even PR Week (not exactly Guido Fawkes) was moved to call this “an extraordinary rant”. A few months later, the then Economist writer Jeremy Cliffe proposed setting up a party called “The Radicals” — pro-tech, pro-Europe, social-liberal — and ultimately, anti-ever amounting to anything.

The biggest centrist bubble blown and pricked was Change UK. Or was it The Independent Group for Change? Or the UK’s Independently Grouped Change? Or the UK Group’s Independent Change? Nobody — not even lead member Anna Soubry, who called the party “Change.org” in the Commons — was very sure. (The only Change UK question anybody really wanted to know the answer to was what moisturiser Chuka Umunna used. Sadly, he never told us.)

Formed by 11 MPs fleeing Labour and the Tories, and born in Nando’s, Change UK died in bathos when every single member lost their seat at the last general election. But for me, Change.Independence.UK only really expired for good when its former MEP candidate Gavin Esler was booted off Celebrity Masterchef this summer after serving a dessert condemned as “incomplete” by John Torrode. The judge’s cruel reception of this pudding, which was also compared to “soup”, exactly mirrored the British public’s reaction to Change UK, namely: “WTF is this supposed to be lads.”

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Anyway, by 2019 the public was done with soup. They wanted cake. At least Esler reached the Masterchef quarter finals — Change UK didn’t make it past two elections.

How many centrist parties have to get Hindenburged before this all stops? The strangest thing about Miller, and Starmer-Mandelson is that they can’t locate the centre ground at all. If there is a centre ground today in England, it is enormously unpalatable to those who self-identify as centrists. They would not vote for the “Hang the nonces, fund the NHS party”, but that’s where the centre is now.

The centre wants nationalised railways and birched criminals. It wants its borders closed and its healthcare free at the point of access. It is fear and loathing, and charity and kindliness; a truly mutant hybrid of Paul Dacre and Jeremy Corbyn. Pundits would love the English to be the stout and sensible strivers described in Orwell’s The Lion and The Unicorn; sadly, I fear the reality is that they are more like the suspicious and cruel folk described in Chesterton’s The Secret People.

And they’re getting stranger all the time. England is weirding. David Icke has never been so adored. Football fans descended on Nuneaton to defend a half-forgotten statue of George Eliot from BLM; no, they had not read Middlemarch. Parents style their children as Captain Tom. Sports mascots become ultra-large poppies every November. Jackie Weaver publishes books. There are candlelit vigils or protests on a seemingly daily basis.

The mood is jittery, not only in the petrol queues. The writer Clive Martin calls it “Radical Normal”. Gina Miller and Keir Starmer probably don’t know much about Radical Normal, but it has more to do with the future of British politics than they do.

He swiftly became a strange thing: the darling of the pandemic. He walked around his garden on his Zimmer frame for sponsorship, ten laps of 25 metres a day. Captain Moore’s behaviour was exemplary, of course; but the response to him was more telling about the modern British condition.

He reached £1,000; then £10,000; then £32 million and, as he walked, he was sanctified.  He sang You’ll Never Walk Alone with Michael Ball, and got to No.1. He wrote an autobiography. Artists painted him. His portrait is now in the National Army Museum. He got a nickname: Captain Tom. The Queen emerged from lockdown to knight him, saint to saint.

He was made a colonel. He was granted a gold Blue Peter badge. He became a postmark. Keighley Town Council granted him the freedom of Keighley. A train, a bus, a puppy, two horses and a garden were named for him. A guard of honour from the 1st Battalion of the Yorkshire Regiment watched over him as he finished his walk.

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On his 100th birthday, planes of the Royal Air Force flew past his house. He received 140,000 birthday cards and two Guinness World Records. Now a film will be made of his life from the people who made Fishermen’s Friends, an account of how some shanty-singing fishermen won a million-pound record deal. It will be an addition to a peculiarly British genre: the doughty British, and their heart-warming and improbable success against the odds. A record contract and £32.8 million for the NHS? What more could you want?

I wonder, though, if the tale of Tom Moore, though superficially heart-warming and improbable, has more to do with failure than success: not the failure of a man — he is an exceptional man — but of a state. A functioning state does not need a Tom Moore, and yet the response to him shows we need him badly; we fell on him like cake in a time of agony. But philanthropy, however imaginative and freely given, is not justice or a functioning society: quite the opposite. The existence of the charity is, rather, evidence of the need; and the need is the important thing. If we only emphasise the charity — and you will read far more on the charity than the need from an often gormless British press — are we willing ourselves into blindness, with only Captain Tom to see for us?

Is there a connection between our response to Moore and the appalling mishandling of the pandemic and our seeming tolerance for it: something nostalgic — he fought in the war — sentimental — he fought in the war? — and childlike in its guilelessness? I think there is. I thought the same thing about the national clapping for the NHS. (It exposed something ugly too, towards those who do not wish to clap for the NHS and there are many who do not. But it was considered a societal duty nonetheless.)

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There were rainbows too, for the NHS in pandemic: a flurry of rainbows. Rainbows are fine but, in the end, they are only rainbows. We like to imagine there is something wonderful beyond them but what, really, is over the rainbow? A recession? A depression? Collapsing public services? And, as we made our rainbows, did we really see all the colours — or just the ones we sought? Healthcare workers don’t need rainbows. Rainbows are painted by children. Health and social care workers needed effective PPE, and often they didn’t get it.  The British Medical Association called it, “a national scandal”. Too often they died: the most recent figure is 650 deaths, the third largest in the world. The Doctors’ Association UK asked for a public inquiry. They didn’t get one.

I understand the need for celebration in pain. It is normal. I also understand why the Queen wanted to meet Tom Moore, for she would surely recognise him as something close to herself: an ordinary person onto which we project all our hope so that, in our hope, we can cease thinking.

But does it soothe us from the knowledge that we have the highest number of Covid-19-related deaths in Europe — and a broken, narcissistic Prime Minister — or distract us? I would ask the same question of the Government’s response to the pandemic, which has been, by turns, chaotic, idiotic and corrupt. I want to hear anger: useful and forensic anger. But I don’t. I hear, instead, the insistent thrumming of an old man made into a god.

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There is much to be angry about. Those in persistent poverty were most than twice as likely as the affluent to die from Covid-19; feminism walked backwards into the home as women lost their jobs first and picked up the children first; the attainment gap in education widened grievously. In the future, the fall-out from pandemic will turn entrenched inequalities into an abyss; we will see poverty like we have not seen for decades. And the rich, well, they are sleeping, not dead. Our polity may fracture – for who will believe in it?

And so, there is something despairing about the cult of Tom Moore. It feels unserious, and infantile, another step on a road to a place we should not wish to go: a sort of intellectual torpor to sink into as we ignore our real condition. And what comes now, in the age of salvation-by-individual-heroism? Will we Bake-Off for the NHS? Let Comic Relief fund pensions? Have a lottery for a council house? Are we citizens or heroes?  Increasingly we are neither, though I expect bunting amidst the ruins.

My secondary school years, 1994-2001, seemed to be a busy period for such obituaries. Perhaps this was just my impression, but it was the age when men who had been in the prime of life during the war years were entering their eighties.

Over the course of my life the generation of people who actually fought in the Second World War has been gradually leaving us. I entered the world shortly before Mrs Thatcher’s stonking general election victory in 1983, and VJ Day, the end of the war, was not so very long ago. Factories and officers and schools still contained plenty of people who had served, some of them relatively young and vigorous.

Anyone in their late forties or older was likely to have some clear recollection of the war years. We were still living in a decidedly post-war world; there were four British armoured divisions permanently stationed in Germany, and Rudolf Hess remained a prisoner in Spandau, 42 years after his flight to Scotland.

Public life in 1983 was full of people who had been in uniform between 1939 and 1945. This included two of the previous three Prime Ministers, Ted Heath and James Callaghan, and the Archbishop of Canterbury, Robert Runcie. Runcie, indeed, had won the Military Cross during the advance to the Rhine, a distinction he shared with the popular cricket commentator and broadcaster Brian Johnston and the former Foreign Secretary Lord Carrington, who had honourably resigned the previous year after the Foreign Office failed to foresee the Argentinian invasion of the Falklands. The Chief of the Defence Staff during the Falklands War, Terence Lewin, served with great distinction in the Royal Navy during the Second World War.

Such links are now extremely rare. In 2020, anyone who saw active service against Nazi Germany or Imperial Japan is well over ninety. Almost the only prominent people in public life who served in the war are the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh, who saw some lively service in the Mediterranean as a young naval officer.

This chronological distancing has been accompanied by a curious change in the way that we collectively remember the Second World War. It’s hard to describe this change precisely, or say exactly where it has come from. But if I had to try, I’d say that a folk memory of the Second World War as essentially a war fought for patriotic reasons against other countries to defend the British national interest, as part of a wider ongoing national story, has been substantially replaced by one that regards the war as an idealistic conflict fought in defence of universalist moral values, especially those that nowadays form the bedrock of high-status elite thinking — equality, diversity, non-discrimination, anti-nationalism and so on.

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Now of course there is some truth in this account, and some incompleteness in the older version. As the war went on it was framed increasingly by Allied leaders and populations as a fight for civilisation against barbarism, and of course this was a strong theme in British propaganda from the very early days of the war.

In Churchill’s famous speeches in 1940 he referred to the “odious apparatus of Nazi rule” and the “abyss of a new dark age”. The horrific revelations at the end of the war about the death camps and the atrocities throughout Occupied Europe made it very clear that the war had in some sense truly been a struggle against a diabolical evil.

But this is not the whole story. The Finest Hour speech appealed to a fundamentally patriotic understanding of the war, noting with regard to the Battle of Britain that “upon it depends our own British life, and the long continuity of our institutions and our Empire”. The “Fight Them On The Beaches” speech explicitly situated the danger from Hitler in the context of a long series of threats to British independence from Continental tyrants, and declared the Anglo-French intention to “defend to the death their native soil”.

And Britain had entered the war for old-fashioned strategic reasons; not to defeat a country with a wicked government that was oppressing its population, but to stand up to a continental power that threatened to dominate Europe and so undermine the British national interest.

There is also, of course, the little matter of our alliance with the Soviet Union, a savage tyranny which had killed far more of its own citizens during the 1930s than Nazi Germany had managed. If the war was straightforwardly a crusade against barbarism, it is hard to account for our forging a jewel-covered ceremonial longsword as a present to Joseph Stalin, who had carved up Poland with Hitler in 1939, and whose armies raped and murdered their way across Eastern Europe in 1944-45, shadowed everywhere by battalions of secret policemen ready to shoot local dissidents, and indeed terrified peasant boys who fled the front line.

The Soviet alliance is intelligible and defensible in the context of a war for national survival and the national interest; less so if we conceive of the conflict as a grand battle of good versus evil.

A useful concept here, I think, is the neologism “retcon”, a portmanteau of the words “retroactive” and “continuity”. Retconning is a term originally coined by comic book readers, and it refers to the retrospective revision of completed fictional works, typically with the addition of new information to make us understand previous events in a different way.

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Our decadent society has ground to a halt

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Something similar has been happening to the Second World War over the last few decades. Not only are the events of the war itself being repurposed to tell a simplistic tale about an idealistic war, but additionally the war is treated as an origin story for all that is considered good in the post-war world, from the NHS and the welfare state to our ability to rise above primitive notions like patriotism and national interest to the sunlit uplands of universal benevolence.

This retooling of the popular imagination is necessary partly because of sweeping demographic change complicating conceptions of national history and popular memory, but also because what you might call “old-fashioned” wars, entered into and fought for reasons of national self-interest, are seen as increasingly problematic.

To celebrate a hero because he fought or died for Britain, for King and Country, for the land from which he sprung, makes people uneasy; to celebrate him because he fought for “freedom” or “against Fascism” is much more acceptable. Ironically, this suspicion of national feeling is a result of the terrible events of the war, which have forever tainted patriotic energy with the horrible shadow of genocide and racial bigotry.

The semi-conscious move to the story of the war as a morality tale has surely also contributed to the curious transformation in our attitude to veterans of conflict, and not just the world wars. Across great swathes of public conversation, we seem to have only two cultural templates for those who have served in war; hero, an appellation now applied freely and therefore uselessly to anyone who has spent time in uniform, and victim, the man left emotionally and psychologically scarred by the experience of battle, grappling with addiction or PTSD and unable to function effectively in civilian life.

While it is very good indeed that we now take more seriously the mental health of service personnel, there is little evidence that veterans have worse mental health than the general population, once you have controlled for possible confounding factors.

Thus surviving Second World War veterans — such as Captain Tom Moore, NHS fundraiser extraordinaire — are held in the most exaggerated reverence, treated almost like holy objects rather than normal people who lived through an incredible chapter in our history and have had the good luck to live to a grand old age.

This is in line with the reimagining of the war as a high moral endeavour and the catalyst for the dawning of a new Britain freed from the shackles of an unenlightened past. It doesn’t help that there is no-one left alive who had any kind of senior or strategic role in the conflict, to temper the impressionistic, partial and fragmented recollection of the poor bloody infantry with a wider perspective that makes clear the difficult choices constantly faced by military commanders.

I am fairly sure that this exaggerated reverence is something new. I don’t recall it from the big wave of Second World War remembrance in the early 1990s. Then veterans were still treated with great respect, of course, and their recollections listened to with attention, but the very fact that there were so many of them, and that so many of them were still of an age to be actively engaged in normal life, arguably meant that we had more of a sense of them as normal people, for good or ill, rather than enormously aged relics of another world.

There is another reason for this pivot to extreme deference to Second World War veterans, and it was neatly summed up by an astute Twitter correspondent of mine, who noted that the wartime generation have become less culturally threatening as they have aged. Discussing the recently-discovered footage of Captain Tom Moore on the TV show Blankety Blank in 1983, he suggested that at that time he was the right age (63) to be a resented authority figure, liable to tell you to get a haircut and turn that bloody racket down, rather than in the category of enormously ancient and hence admirable sage from times long past.

This seems like a very plausible dynamic to me. The generations who have grown up since the war have complicated psychological attitudes to those who fought in it. They are compelled to admire their sacrifice and their resilience, especially if the cause for which they fought can be reconfigured as a war for modern liberal shibboleths, but also keenly convinced of the moral backwardness of the world which the wartime generations stood for, and which they still to some extent represent. It is entirely plausible, then, that the younger generations’ attitude to the few remaining survivors of the old world, should become more indulgent when any meaningful political and social threat from them has entirely passed (as it had not done in 1983).

The effect of the various phenomena noted above is to make it increasingly difficult for people to have a nuanced, realistic understanding both of our military history in general, and of how we should think about particular soldiers’ experiences. It’s always a delight, therefore, to see pushback against the sentimentalist or simplistic presentation of such experiences.

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For example, one of the great strengths of Peter Jackson’s They Shall Not Grow Old, released in autumn 2018 to coincide with the centenary of the end of the First World War, was that it avoided a clichéd over-emphasis on what you might call the “muddy futility and tragic poetry” view of that war.

Over the end credits we heard not the usual sad piano music, or a famous actor reading Dulce Et Decorum Est in their special Shakespeare voice, but a jaunty and – it must be said – filthy British Army marching song, Mademoiselle From Armentieres. Jackson, if I remember correctly, included voices noting that we did actually win the Great War. Not alone, certainly; the immortal French heroics at Verdun and the arrival of the Americans in the last year or so cannot be ignored. But the British Army and its imperial allies — and the Royal Navy’s blockade of Germany — played a decisive role in actually defeating the Germans in the field.

Also featured were testaments to an under-discussed aspect of the modern presentation of remembrance and popular history: i.e., that a large proportion of soldiers actually rather enjoy the experience of battle. This insight is fascinatingly explored in Niall Ferguson’s The Pity of War, among other works. However, it struggles to get much discussion time in the modern media environment because it runs so strongly against the grain of our conception of human nature.

It will be intriguing to see how the remembrance of the Second World War develops over the next two decades, as the conflict passes out of living memory altogether. I fear that the trend towards an ahistorical and politicised folk memory will only intensify, and that our collective endeavours to memorialise that great struggle will become ever stranger, as we try ever harder to cling to the mythologised version of the war, one of our few remaining collective reference points for the vanished past.