Gstaad

War and Peace has been in the news lately, so what was it that Leo wrote about all happy families being alike? Tolstoy came to mind last week right here in Gstaad, when I encountered probably the worst-looking family I’ve had the bad luck to run into in the past 79 years. I wonder if Count Tolstoy ever considered writing a saga about how ugly families are all different in their ugliness.

It was early evening and I walked into the Posthotel, where Papa Hemingway once stayed while researching A Farewell to Arms. (He climbed daily on skins and schussed down after fortifying himself with glühwein.) Hemingway, alas, was not around, but a family that was obviously from the Gulf was. To call it a freak show would be too charitable. (Bearded ladies and Siamese midgets have nothing on this bunch.) Obese and Concorde-nosed children wearing leopard-print Versace jumpsuits had six bodyguards with earpieces jumping at their commands. The mother’s corpulence reminded me of a beached sunfish I once plugged out dead off a Florida Key. Her only movement was guiding chips from her plate into her ravenous mouth. She wore Kardashian-like clothes and a winter beanie on her head with a fur bobble on top. The husband was even more absorbed than the wife in his French fries. He looked angry and plebeian, a brutal lump of jelly, except when indulging his children as they screamed abuse at the bodyguards.

I sat as far away as possible with my back turned in order to be able to swallow, but it was hard going. A languorous sorrow for people no longer around engulfed me. How in hell have we come to this, I asked myself. I could hear them slobbering down food and

noisily drinking Coke. I quickly paid my bill and ran out of the place. My depression did not lift until the next morning, when I had to return to the Posthotel where I was giving a lunch for — get this — 16 loyal Spectator readers from South Africa. They are fourth-generation Anglos, and they live in Durban. I met the head of the family and his wife during last summer’s Speccie cruise. The Arnold Taylors and their children and grandchildren drove over from Wengen for a boozy lunch that erased the horrible images of the night before, thank God. Mind you, other unpleasant memories filtered through, despite the wine. How hypocritical Britain sold out loyal whites in Rhodesia to the Mugabe mobs, and the abuse that the British media and the ‘bien pensant’ heaped on tough, white South Africans who had created a great country that a clown like Zuma is now trying to undo.

Arnold Taylor is a businessman who owns a lot of regional airlines all over Africa. He was a Springbok, a family man who believes that education is the best gift one can leave one’s children. These are the kind of people the European so-called elite waged war against throughout the Thatcher years. You know the kind: family-oriented, hardworking, religious and patriotic. The type our media and intelligentsia loathe.

The poor little Greek boy noticed one thing while dodging immigrants last summer in the Aegean. Whenever the odd woman and child would emerge from a boat, the camera lenses would go into overdrive. The fact that more than two thirds of the adult asylum seekers were men did not interest our ‘neutral’ news reporters and photographers. Nor the fact that most of the unaccompanied minors were in the late-teenage category, with nine boys to each girl. If these young men are as fecund as those still at home, these teenagers and young men may one day have six children each, and, as the million-plus migrants who arrived in 2015 become more than three million by the end of the year, you, dear readers, do the maths. The future may be a Europe where whites are an endangered species.

The architect of this crime is Angela Merkel, a woman who will go down in history as one who helped destroy a white Christian Europe, aided and abetted by the bureaucrooks of Brussels. Yet a nice and decent man like David Cameron, one who could shield Britain from this catastrophe, has been — like Odysseus, unable to resist Circe and Calypso — incapable of ditching the EU once and for all and saving Britain from a fate worse than Ebola — a future of perpetual war between races and creeds, a rainy Middle East.

I know, I know, some of you might think the poor little Greek boy is panicking, but I’m not. It is as clear to see as the few liver spots on my hands. I’m only worried about my children and grandchildren’s futures. How is it possible that I see it so clearly and many cabinet members and the prime minister do not? Are they on the take? What is it that makes the governments of Europe willingly commit cultural suicide? Do we hate ourselves as much as that?

Sane people do not disinter heroes, burn records or wreck monuments. We are all guilty of a deranged revolutionary sickness.