CLEGG’S REVISED HISTORY OF ENGLAND

“History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake”, we hear from Stephen Dedalus in Ulysses, the very long novel by James Joyce, Ireland’s favourite writer and sexual pervert. The sentiment, however, may be better situated in the mouths and minds of Nick Clegg’s political advisers. Our leaders usually make horrendous mistakes when they attempt to square today’s events with those in history; this is because they – Boris Johnson excepted – have little or no knowledge of the matter.

WHEN I WAS AT SCHOOL one took history and geography lessons, although I believe there has been an attempt to “fuse” these subjects into one, a government policy which I imagine to have been disastrous, and of which I see that Mr Clegg must be a result.

IN STATING THAT DAVID CAMERON’S recent bit of harmless badinage with “Fifi” Sarkozy over the signing or not of some useless bits of paper involving Germans and the lebensraum countries has brought Anglo-French relations to “their lowest point in history”, I am afraid that Mr Clegg more than reveals his educational lacking.

THE LOWEST POINT IN ANGLO-FRENCH history is a tad difficult to point out on a chart. One may start by stating that over the last 1,000 years in which we both have been recognisable as nations we have mainly been at war of one sort or another. For six hundred years after 1066 (and all that) this war was about what was de facto England and de facto France; this medieval discussion continues in the halls of St Pancras Station in London and in every seaside ferry port at this moment.

BUT SURELY CLEGG must know of Waterloo? If only from listening to the ABBA vinyl records that he surely must have in his living room, half a dozen classics nestling against the little table upon which rests his TV “set”, including records by Phil Collins, Pink Floyd, Kate Bush, Julio Iglesias and Shirley Bassey, all standing against the non-offensive, “light cream with flecks of brown” wallpaper which was on offer at the local DIY store.

OR ABOUT AGINCOURT, TRAFALGAR, POITIERS and Calais? La Corunna, Vigo or Grijó. Perhaps, being a victim of the new form of combining geography and history, Clegg only sees the fact that Belgium is linked to Holland, is linked to Germany, is linked to Poland, et caetera, in the same way that the toe-bone is linked to the foot-bone, is linked to the leg bone, is linked to the arse-bone, presumably.