Sam Leith: It could have been you or me making a Nazi salute if we had lived then

Just when you thought the post-war programme to de-Nazify the German people had run its course, another pops out. The Sun has unearthed a home movie showing our future Queen (and the future late Queen Mother, bless her; and her uncle, the future former King Edward VIII) giving straight-armed salutes on the lawn at Balmoral in 1933.

There are three constructions we can put on the footage. One is an innocent exercise in being prepared. “Look here, old girl,” you can imagine the future former King saying, “I know you’re only seven, but in the highly unlikely event I end up abdicating after falling for an American hottie and your papa takes over, he’s not going to be around for ever. Herr Hitler’s talking about a thousand-year Reich, and these German chaps are notorious for being long-term planners, so there may come a time when you’ll be expected to greet the ambassador...” The darker cast of mind, on the other hand, will see this as evidence that the future former King Edward VIII was a sinister fifth-columnist who hoped to turn his niece into a fascist.

Or, if you’re going to be boringly commonsensical about it, you could say: “She was seven, for crying out loud! Have you ever met a seven-year-old? They have little or no grasp of the dangers of extreme nationalist politics, but they sure do like games where you stick your hand in the air in a silly way. She probably spent the rest of the afternoon trying to make farting noises with her armpit.”

Let’s go with option three. This doesn’t embarrass Her Maj one bit, even if the nation as one has risen against The Sun for embarrassing her and a fearful leak-hunt is under way. I’m rather inclined to side with The Sun, actually. The footage is, undoubtedly, of considerable historical interest — and not because it somehow shows that the royal family were Nazi sympathisers (we already know that the former Edward VIII used to visit Oswald Mosley and fantasise wistfully about “how things would have been had they been respectively king and prime minister”).

What it shows, more subtly and more usefully, is how hindsight falsifies the historical record: the real nasties are almost never generally recognised as such until afterwards. From the sunny lawn of Balmoral in 1933, the pomp of the German Reich looked like amusing fodder for a child’s game.

What’s true is that at most times in history most people have only the faintest and most second-hand impressions of what’s going on in the politics of their own, still less other countries. And what’s true is that the media — responsible for those impressions — at that time were more likely to regard Hitlerism as comical or even admirable than as an existential evil. The Daily Mail was saying “Hurrah for the Blackshirts!” a year after the Balmoral footage was shot.

So the Queen’s Nazi salute is not a warning about the Queen: it’s a warning about all of us. De te fabula.

Let’s hear it for Louise Mensch

Louise Mensch gets more than her fair share of online vilification, but credit where credit is due.

She was the driving force behind the campaign to get to the truth about the supposedly sexist remarks Sir Tim Hunt made at a science conference in Korea and — in the face of a blizzard of abuse — Ms Mensch went steelily on, doing some first-rate investigative journalism.

She established that neither the tone nor content of his remarks was correctly reported, and exposed his shabby and cowardly treatment by University College London’s high-ups. Not only Sir Tim, but anyone who cares about the way academic organisations are run or the quality of public discourse online, owes her respect and thanks.

Chewing over meaty matters

A survey finds that two years after the horsemeat scandal, one in 20 samples of packaged meat contains the wrong animal. Mutton kebabs made of beef (sorry Hindus!); steak burgers with pork (sorry Jews and Muslims!); ham pizza made of turkey (sorry, people with taste buds!).