Beautifully Bound

Appropriately enough in this glorious epoch of patriotic renewal, though with remarkably little rah-rah considering its benevolent impact on the career of the Official Greatest Ever Number One Greatest Briton Ever, the Treaty of Versailles is being displayed for historians at the National Archives. By contrast to the victorious powers at the end of the Napoleonic wars, who did everything they could to reintegrate France into a stable European system, the winners of the War to End War went out of their way to humiliate Germany and pave the way for further conflict. The "post-war peace process" required Germany to accept sole liability for starting the war (the Germans in fact contributed rather less to the outbreak of war than Russia, Serbia and, arguably, Britain), and caused the Allies to break out in an unprecedented rash of respect for the relics of colonised races, provided they hadn't been colonised by Britain, France or the United Latecomers of America. As a monument to the vindictiveness, short-sightedness and stupidity of the British political class, the treaty has had few rivals outside the British Home Office; but on the positive side it is beautifully bound and led directly to the rise of a sort of primitive Teutonic precursor to the Farage Falange, and hence to the blossoming of Winston Churchill's hitherto rather forgettable career: and from there to the modern Conservative Party was, of course, the briefest of goose-steps.