But there are also exceptions. One is the newspaper that used to be called the “paper of record” of the US: the New York Times. Over the past six years, the NYT has developed a strange and intense distaste for Britain. There is no writer so obscure that he cannot be drafted for as long as they are about to hit Britain. In 2018, the paper brought in a writer to claim (based on a brief trip to Lancashire) that Britain was an austerity wasteland in the process of shutting down. It was filled with so many inaccuracies that it should never have been published or, if it had been published, it should have been retracted. But the paper didn’t mind. The author ended up saying that while his facts may be wrong, his “perception” was correct. In the same year, the paper published a culinary review which claimed that the people of Britain had until recently survived on boiled mutton and oatmeal. As of December 2018, the NYT was asking people to submit stories to the paper if they had “experienced petty crime in London”. Considering the crime rates – and especially the murder rates – in New York, it seemed an odd obsession. But the fact is that since 2016 the NYT has seen our country as an enemy of their own brand of liberal internationalism. His understanding of the UK is so nuanced that he linked the Brexit vote to the election of Donald Trump in the same year. In 2019 he enlisted a little-known novelist to write a piece titled “Britain Drowning in Nostalgia”. The author claimed the country was “poisoned” with “colonial arrogance” and “dreamy jingoism”. Another article accused Britain of having a “racist heart”. Earlier this week, he used Liz Truss’s arrival at No 10 to attack both her and Margaret Thatcher. And he also posted a strange new video from a disaffected satirist he had employed whose previous employer was Russia Today. And now, with the Queen dead, how did the NYT choose to respond? Immediately going to a grievance professor to write a piece attacking her. The author – one Maya Jasanov – said: “We should not romanticise her era” and claimed that “the Queen helped to obscure a bloody history of decolonization whose proportions and legacies are still insufficiently recognised”. Because, of course, within hours of the news of the monarch’s death, who doesn’t want to scream about decolonization? Strangely, the NYT and some other poisonous rags show their own ignorance at times like this. The queen did not “prevent” anything. He was a benevolent presence in difficult times. The respect felt for her in former colonies is seen in the warmth of the tributes to her from those countries and around the world. If anyone has wondered what the attitude towards her in former colonies really is, he can see it in the great success of the Commonwealth, an institution which owes its existence to her support. The NYT has animosity against Britain. It seems partly driven by the paper’s decision to hire otherwise unemployed hard-left journalists from Britain. But while it is unable to say anything pleasant about Britain, it says more about the paper than it ever did about the nation. The fact that the NYT can’t help but attack the monarch within hours of her death is proof that hate can really destroy institutions. Just as love and devotion – as the Queen demonstrated throughout her life – is what is required to build them.
