Britain deserves a better VE Day than this

Now, maybe I have just spent the past half a year or so down a rabbit hole, or been distracted by other events. After all, plenty has been going on around the world. But I don’t recall any advance rallying of the great British public, or any open invitation to national jollification, for the big anniversary that is upon us. Nor, for that matter, any minute-by-minute programme of events such as there was many months before the royal jubilees, the coronation or other historic occasions. As I say, perhaps I just missed it.

The 80th anniversary of Victory in Europe (VE) Day on 8 May is surely cause for a big national celebration. Yet the first I learned of any national initiative was when, less than a month before the actual day, the UK government said it was rushing through a special provision to extend pub opening hours into the small hours of 9 May.

Days later, there was an announcement – almost more of a disclosure – to the effect that this year’s May bank holiday would kick off a four-day celebration of VE Day. This includes an RAF flypast, a public reading of a Churchill speech, a march from Parliament Square to Buckingham Palace and a royal street party, with everyone invited to throng the Mall in time-honoured fashion.

What did you know about this, and more to the point, when did you find out about it? Because to me, this assemblage of bank-holiday and subsequent events gave the distinct impression of a rather last-minute dash. In fact, it almost came across as a wishful plea to any members of the British public without bank-holiday plans to just please, please, show up to wave a flag or two.

It is safe to say that the preparations to mark this year’s VE Day – surely one of the last in which we can expect to be joined by those who served in the Second World War – seem distinctly muted. Given that the 75th anniversary was blighted by Covid, you might have thought that some special effort would have been made for the 80th anniversary.

It also seems strange to be co-opting the early May bank holiday for VE Day events. Might it not have shown more respect for the actual day to transfer the public holiday to 8 May? Or perhaps to designate a second bank holiday, even at the risk of alarming the Treasury? As it is, this supposed four-day celebration looks suspiciously like a displacement activity – an attempt to disguise the fact that the government was too late in making proper preparations, or too mean to add another holiday, or – worse – did not think the anniversary important enough to be commemorated on the actual day. Did no one learn anything from the furore about Rishi Sunak’s early departure from the Normandy D-Day commemorations less than a year ago?

I also wonder whether the last-minute VE Day announcements might reflect a couple of other considerations. The first would be a desire for Labour to try to reassure Reform-curious voters of the government’s patriotic credentials ahead of the local elections. If so, it clearly hasn’t worked.

A second consideration may be more significant. Since Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, successive UK prime ministers have not only led the Western cheering for Ukraine, but also drawn parallels between its heroic resistance and the way Britain stood alone against the forces of Nazism, before the United States entered the war in late 1941.

But it remains an awkward fact that on VE Day, Britain was allied not just with the US, but with the Soviet Union, too. And in a Soviet-era tradition, revived early in Vladimir Putin’s tenure, Russia has been talking for months about the massive celebrations it has planned for this year’s Victory Day, as it calls it, on 9 May – including positively boasting of the number of foreign dignitaries who have agreed to attend. The twofold purpose hardly needs to be spelled out: to boost patriotic fervour at home and demonstrate that the West’s efforts to isolate Russia have failed.

With the king and queen on display, a ceremonial march through London and the return of the ceramic poppies to the Tower of London, the UK will at least be able to compete visually with any Russian attempt to capture the anniversary for its own political ends. But this is a poor consolation.

Labour’s plans suggest an ill-coordinated jumble of events, cobbled together in haste for want of a better idea. A Churchill speech will be read out by an actor. A young person will pass the ‘Torch for Peace’ to a 100-year-old veteran of the Normandy campaign. There will be two concerts on Thursday evening, one from the Horse Guards Parade and another at Royal Albert Hall, that will clash.

I can’t help feeling that VE Day deserved a bigger, better national celebration for the 80th year. But, hey, at least the pubs will be open until 1am – which is more than we could usually expect from this otherwise joyless government.

Mary Dejevsky is a writer and broadcaster. She was Moscow correspondent for The Times between 1988 and 1992. She has also been a correspondent from Paris, Washington and China.