Washington, D.C My local polling station is a Christian Brothers high school set amid football fields and parking lots. On Tuesday a woman who lives on our street was arriving to vote just as I was. She had come from a mandatory ‘active-shooter training session’ at her office. Of course, all shooters are ‘active’. Active shooter is what the TV stations call an armed psychopath during the brief period between the moment he starts gunning people down – say, in a cinema, church, school or office – and the moment he dies in a blaze of police- or self-inflicted gunfire.

Keir Starmer’s early leadership was defined by the expulsion of his predecessor. Jeremy Corbyn is no longer a Labour MP and will not be a Labour candidate at the next election. But now another former party leader is quietly defining Starmer’s leadership. This week Ed Miliband, the shadow climate secretary, caused outrage by suggesting that rich countries should pay reparations to nations worst hit by climate change. Miliband’s influence extends far beyond his brief.

It’s not just America that is in the process of rewriting its history and casting itself as patriarchal and oppressive – a similar process is taking place in Scotland. Giants of the Enlightenment such as David Hume are being reimagined as the architects of slavery and the fathers of modern racism. Scotland’s first black professor, Sir Geoff Palmer, exemplified the new way of thinking in an astonishing talk I heard him give recently at Dundee University.

This Sunday, in my village of Etchingham, East Sussex, we will gather around our war memorial. It is a fine monument, designed by Sir Herbert Baker, with the names of the dead inscribed around an octagonal base. There are no famous names upon it: indeed, there is only one commissioned officer, a Second Lieutenant (who had once been a commercial clerk, working from the age of 14). The rest were mostly young farm labourers: the oldest, aged 44, had been a ‘domestic chauffeur’.