So the Hungarian Prime Minister, a man whose name I shall not dignify by repeating here, threatens to oust his own predecessor's chosen president. One might think this is a domestic squabble, a minor spat in the Carpathian basin. But no: British diplomats are on standby. Our Foreign Office, ever eager to play the white knight in a continent that has long since forgotten the meaning of chivalry, waits with bated breath for the next instalment of the European soap opera.
Let us cast our minds back, shall we? To the Fall of Rome, when the emperors were made and unmade by praetorian guards and barbarian mercenaries. Today, the praetorians wear suits and the barbarians wear EU flag pins. The tussle in Budapest is but a microcosm of a broader intellectual and political decadence. We have traded the glory of nations for the banality of technocratic management. And now, when a strongman threatens to unseat a figurehead, we flutter our hands and call for diplomatic intervention.
What is this crisis really about? It is about the erosion of political conviction. Orbán, for all his faults, understood that nationalism was a force to be harnessed, not suppressed. His successor, by contrast, seems intent on performing a demolition job on that legacy. And the president? A mere ornament, a remnant of a bygone era when the party appointed its courtiers. The PM now wishes to dispose of this ornament. Why? Because it no longer serves his purpose. This is not statesmanship. This is gangland politics, dressed up in the language of parliamentary democracy.
And the British diplomats? Why are they involved? Because we have forgotten how to tend our own garden. We obsess over the tempests in every European teacup, hoping to appear relevant in a world that no longer needs our counsels. The Victorians understood that empire meant responsibility, not meddling. They would have watched the Hungarian imbroglio with the same detached amusement as a naturalist observing a rare species of beetle. They might have written a memorandum, but they would not have dispatched a diplomat to prevent the beetle from eating its own.
We have become a nation of moralisers, quick to condemn but slow to act. We cluck our tongues at the excesses of Budapest while ignoring the rot in our own institutions. The crisis in Hungary is a symptom of a deeper malady: the crisis of faith in national identity itself. The European project, once a noble ideal, has become a machine for suppressing the very energies that made Europe great. And now, when those energies resurface in the form of a power struggle, we call it a crisis.
I say, let the Hungarians sort out their own affairs. Let the PM oust the president. Let the system stagger on, or collapse. The British interest lies not in stabilising every wobbling domino across the Channel, but in rebuilding our own sense of purpose. We have diplomats to spare because we have given up on the arts of governance at home. We have time to monitor Budapest because we have abandoned the difficult work of cultivating our own culture and character.
This is not to say that we should be indifferent to tyranny. But let us not confuse a palace intrigue with a humanitarian emergency. The Hungarian people are not children who need a nurse. They are a proud nation with a history that stretches back to Attila and the Magyars. They will survive this spat, as they have survived centuries of invasion and occupation. And we, the British, would do well to remember that our own crises are far more pressing than the squabbles of Central European politicians.
So let the diplomats stand by. Let them wait for the next crisis, the next summit, the next communiqué. In the meantime, I shall be here, writing about the fall of empires and the rise of mediocrity. And I shall spare a thought for the Hungarians, who, like us, are navigating a world that has lost its moral compass. The difference is, they are still fighting. We, on the other hand, have already surrendered to the tide of intellectual and political decadence.
