The Left has turned on the Lady of Burma

With all the wrath of a lover slighted, the Left has turned on Aung San Suu Kyi. On Friday, Jeremy Hardy, Marxism’s comedy mouthpiece, lambasted her as a ‘racist, vain narcissist’, while a petulant George Monbiot demanded that the woman be stripped of her Nobel peace prize. ‘To Aung San Suu Kyi we entrusted our hopes,’ he complained in a column last week, lamenting that he and his activist friends now feel ‘cruelly betrayed’. The heart bleeds.

How things have changed. Until recently, Suu was an icon of human rights, enthroned in the pantheon with Mandela, Gandhi and the Dalai Lama. Now, if the bien pensant are to be believed, she’s a racist.

My great-grandmother was Burmese. Although I have never met Suu personally, I know a number of her close friends and extended family. They have always described Suu as a dizzyingly beautiful, charming, headstrong and fiercely independent woman, who was known to have climbed over the wall of her Oxford college when staying out past bedtime, and took that same attitude with her into the monumental challenges of her later life.

They also recall her fondness for the military.