And so to plot

There’s a theory, no doubt implausible and based on selective evidence, that alone among the peoples of Europe the English are somehow immune from those fits of mass hysteria which break out with murderous effect elsewhere. It must be nonsense, but it’s very easy to find instances in English history where what looks like the beginnings of a general pogrom take place; and for some reason a brief season of mayhem fails to carry on into the murder of thousands or millions.

The nearest thing to observable mass hysteria in this country in recent years, the so-called ‘Diana week’ of September 1997, took many people by surprise and was said, then and more frequently later, to be fundamentally uncharacteristic of the national character. A more subtle reading would show, by comparison, that actually everything about it was characteristic, including the speed with which it sank into a generally felt embarrassment. That sequence of events occurred in the same order, and with the same seemingly natural limits, in episodes of judicial murder and mob passions centuries ago.

In other episodes, for instance the Gordon Riots of the 1780s and the tiny Fascist movement of the 1930s, great passions were worked up over the sense of an unEnglish fifth column at work in the midst of English society. Sometimes it is the Jews; sometimes Roman Catholics. In recent years, people have seriously proposed that there might be a homosexual mafia at work within government, and questions are often heard these days about the real loyalties of British Muslims. Such questions are, in reality, centuries old. Only the object changes, and not the topic. If, to liberal-minded observers at the time, the phenomenon seems frightening, one could reflect that the frenzy usually passes with only a small number of tragedies.