Just after ten this morning, Mayor Johnson arrived in the well of City Hall, accompanied by a small group of mostly elderly black men. Medals were pinned to the suits and military uniforms of latter, who wandered, chatting, with Johnson around a display of photographs and tales of valour and dedication.
The "We Were There" exhibition is a Ministry of Defence project whose patriotic theme enabled The Blond to make a gracious Conservative accommodation with his Black History Season, an institution some readers of his Daily Telegraph columns undoubtedly deride as an example of "political correctness gone mad."
We heard from Laurie Philpot, curator of the West Indian Ex-Servicemen Association, who'd joined the RAF in 1943, and from Frank Eastman, a serving solider with medals from Northern Ireland, Iraq and Afghanistan. He explained that "We Were There" existed partly to "enhance diversity training" in the services and partly to disprove an assertion once made by the late Bernard Manning that no Asians had fought for Britain in the last war.
Then Mayor Johnson spoke. He told a story of attending a primary school play in which his daughter had the role of Queen Victoria. Her one line was to pay tribute to Crimean War nurses Florence Nightingale and Mary Seacole. Mayor Johnson confessed that he hadn't at the time heard of the second of these. "I wondered if she'd been conjured up by politically correct people and just been invented," he explained. "But I went back and I looked at the pages of history and I discovered how completely wrong I was."
There was a moral to this tale. "Mary Seacole, in my childhood, had been lost...either through ignorance or prejudice or whatever. And it was only thanks to the efforts of historians - serious historians, many of them black - that she was rediscovered, and is now properly celebrated by children in primary schools today."
Spoken, I felt, albeit with the wrong sort of accent, like a Marxist multiculturalist and toxic relativist of the type his soon-to-be policy director Anthony Browne seems to regard as a besmircher of national identity and an enemy of social unity. The mayor concluded: "The more we know and understand our history, the better we know and understand our wonderful diverse Britain of today."
A more coherent argument for a trendy, far-left revisionist approach to our great nation's past would be hard to imagine. And now journalists were invited to ask questions. Sadly, but not at all surprisingly, those most fervently tendered did not concern ethnic minority military heroism, but yesterday's resignation by Sir Ian Blair. Why hadn't Mayor Johnson consulted the Home Secretary before acting? Why was he playing party politics with the capital's policing?
As the old soldiers looked on, Sir Ian's nemesis insisted that there'd been "no party political element to this" and finessed that he'd "consulted widely." Then he hurried off, leaving me to reflect on the more ideological of the many hostile reasons offered for Sir Ian to vacate Scotland Yard. Too liberal. Too multiculturalist. Too "politically correct." Well, we wouldn't want that sort of thing round here.
