How very nice it must be to be complacent

As the world beetles off to hell in a handcart us stoic Brits are consumed by trivia and complacency

Stop the presses - Meghan has a new jam

At last some really big news has come my way. As ever I am indebted to the Daily Mail for warning me that, as a resident of Hertfordshire, I live in ‘the wokest county in Britain’. Were it not for this alert I would have been blissfully unaware of the awful situation this puts me in.

Apparently a slew of truly dreadful events have occurred on my very doorstep. They include the police questioning a couple who used WhatsApp to criticize teachers at their daughters’ school and the cancelation of a Victory in Europe 80^th anniversary parade on grounds of cost.

Perhaps I should mention that the WhatsApp wielding parents were not arrested for anything at all and it looks as though this parade thing will, after all, be going ahead.

I suppose this intrusion of facts into an impressive cauldron of indignation is beside the point because there is so much going in the world urgently demanding the attention of right thinking people.

Did you know, for example, that Liz Hurley at the age of 59, had the gall to model a tightly fitting bikini? How very dare she!

Or that Prince Harry’s ‘life is at stake’ because the public purse has denied him and his family close police protection on visits to Britain, although, publicly funded protection is not required where he lives in gun-filled America. He’s back in court on that one.

And then there’s the continuation of the long running Wagatha Christie affair. If you have not been following this saga, shame on you and don’t expect me to get you up to date because it’s far too complex and your own fault for not keeping up. As matters stand poor old Rebekah Vardy, wife of footballer Jamie Vardy, has failed in her bid to avoid paying either £1.8 or £1.6 million in legal costs (depending on which newspaper you read) to fellow WAG Coleen Rooney. Honestly, it’s the sort of thing that keeps me up at night.

In other news the world may well be teetering on the edge of a global recession, the killing goes on unabated in the Ukraine-Russian war and the slaughter in Gaza has resumed.

Fortunately none of these things are happening in Hertfordshire which has quite enough on its plate right now. It’s a fair bet that other parts of the home counties also have their own preoccupations, albeit not of Hertfordshire magnitude. Indeed, it’s a fact that while global events thunder, they are far too remote to matter. That, at any rate, seems to be a very widely held opinion.

Sometimes, news reading folk seem to forget this. When push comes to shove most people are more gripped by trivia, nonsense and local events.

In some ways this lack of attention to global affairs makes perfect sense, even though what happens far away has a good chance of affecting us all but that doesn’t mean that the average stiff can do anything about it.

In the meantime, let’s be honest, who doesn’t like a little bit of absurdity, especially when it concerns the rich and famous. Who can honestly say that the controversy surrounding the very, very expensive jam recently launched by Duchess of Sussex, Meghan Markle, is not riveting?

In a mad and bad world the antics of this self-promoting Duchess, expressed without a glimmer of self-awareness, brightens up the dullest of days.

The British are proud of their ability to laugh at themselves (even though we really prefer to laugh at others), to be stoic in the face of adversity (probably excluding train and bus delays) and, of course, we are famous for our toleration (mustn’t grumble is our mantra, grumbling is our game).

So when all the rest of the world is going mad we have wonderful coping mechanisms; it’s a great pity that your average Johnny Foreigner is unlikely to have any idea how to emulate the Brits.

There is also something rather reassuring, or to put it another way, alarming about the complacency of British people who live such placid lives.

British voters have a chance to go to the polls next week to elect local councils and mayors, on past form it is likely that 60 per cent of them will not bother. Only people who take it for granted that democratic elections will always be held and that the outcome will have little impact on their lives could be so indifferent.

In other places where the right to vote in open elections is far from guaranteed another view is taken. In Hong Kong, where I lived most of my adult life, people formed long queues in order to vote, even in local elections, once they were allowed to do so

That right has now been replaced by a ghastly sham in which only handpicked candidates are permitted to stand for election. Those, previously elected, face long periods in jail for having the temerity to organize election campaigns. The victorious pro-democracy candidates who were elected in Hong Kong’s last open local election, back in 2019, have been removed from office, jailed or forced to flee overseas. It is therefore no surprise that one of the first things Hongkongers fleeing the White Terror do on arrival in the UK is to register to vote.

How nice it is to live in a place where elections are free and there are no repercussions for taking part. Those who take it for granted might care to cast their eyes around the world to see how easy it is the crush elective democracy, why even that orange blob in the White House has a plan.

So, go ahead, ignore the big news, stay at home on polling day, what could possibly go wrong?