Bien-pensant Britain is abandoning Burma

At first glance, the new footage of Boris being slapped down for reciting a fragment of Kipling in Burma seemed like just another of his gaffes.

Many Burmese people, however, reacted with bafflement. This was an affectionate poem expressing British love for their country through a soldier kissing a Burmese girl. (My great-grandfather, Sir William Carr, as it happens, did more than that. He married her and brought her back to Britain – with their eight half-Burmese children.) What was wrong with that?

It seems that bien pensant Britons are more sensitive about our colonial past than the Burmese, who are understandably rather more preoccupied with dealing with their country’s agonising transition to democracy.

The confected Brit-on-Brit hysteria came after St Hugh’s College, Oxford, in another Rhodes-must-fall moment, removed a portrait of Aung San Suu Kyi from display. In an act of paternalistic micro-aggression by the safe space British establishment, the Lady was reclassified from virgin to whore.