BY ALEX STORY

Some things are surprising; others less so.

Lord Peter Mandelson spending an inordinate amount of time with the late Jeffrey Epstein, his “best pal”, raises few eyebrows.

African leaders asking for “reparations” leaves Britons cold.

We have become inured to officialised insanity – dangerously so perhaps.

Where once our politicians’ misdemeanours fuelled conversations in pubs across the country, now, in the few ale houses that survived the never-ending Puritan onslaught on mirth, merriment, cheap booze and smokeries, their appalling behaviour and devastating self-righteous and blind stupidity no longer riles.

We still have the old standards, but we are stunned into contemplative silence.

We know our politicians and bureaucrats are working, whether wittingly or not, towards our country’s dismemberment.

The machinery of state, ideologically driven and running on empty, turned against us in an act of nihilistic internecine retribution. That was in 1997 — year zero of the Common Era.

The upshot: The outsider is hallowed, the Briton cursed.

Why?

Because those feeding off the state lied about their aims.

Though they were, gradually, found out.

The crime is so large and the road so far travelled that they no longer care. They think they are winning.

The sting of shame no longer hurts; guilt is no longer felt.

As a result, too much that ought to surprise, no longer does.

But some things still do.

In fact, the clearer we see, the more surprising certain things become.

Not least that our politicians still expect us to believe them.

They think, to everyone’s surprise, that their words still matter.

While we, in the real world, tend to make the all-important link between words and actions, because, as the good book tells us, it is by the latter that one judges the former, our politicians live in a parallel universe.

In this twilight zone in which they dwell, they believe that words matter and that actions are unrelated to their pronouncements.

In this context, truth is optional.

Everything is true if they so wish it, even as a tidal wave of visibly contradictory evidence crashes about them.

On this detestable stage of constant lies and deception whirls Shabana Mahmood, our freshly minted Home Secretary, nominally in charge of the Police, our borders, immigration policies, the issuance of passports to “citizens” and oversight of MI5.

In character, pumped full of lines, performance ready, there she stood ready for a semi-professional thespian peroration.

The tone defiant, optimistic, purposeful and, inevitably, scripted.

Regarding illegal immigration and more, she would “do whatever it takes” because she is “not the sort of person that hangs around”.

Perhaps, in this she was being more forthright than she knew, as no one really ever “hangs around” at the Home Office.

Nevertheless, she would “come forward with changes” to how the European Convention on Human Rights is implemented, co-ordinate actions with international partners, not least Five Eyes countries (the UK, US, Canada, New Zealand and Australia) and, in that recognisable bathetic drop, look to “possibly” cutting “cutting of visas in the future”.

She ended by saying that deportations would be “imminent”. Mark her words!

Was she serious or having us on?

It depends on which side of the deception you choose to live on.

From the taxpayer’s view, she is disastrously miscast.

She believes neither in her lines nor in the idea of borders, our culture or our heritage.

From the deaf and dumb playwright’s perspective who put the actress there, however, she is perfect, ticking all the boxes of a Rachel Zegler type box office bust.

Indeed, the office she nominally runs shares with her all the modern, divisive tropes of the Culture wars.

Branding opponents as racists and Islamophobes, whatever that might mean, from the top of a pro-Hamas barricade surrounded by the mixed choirs of middle class and Middle Eastern crowds chanting “from the River to the Sea” and “up the Global Intifada” is her world.

Hers is not ours, that is that of Boudica, Alfred the Great, William the Conqueror, Richard the Lionheart, Chaucer, Edward III, Henry V, Wellington, Nelson, Edward Elgar or Winnie Churchill.

Indeed, only last year she said during an interview with British Muslim TV that her Muslim “faith is the most important thing in my life. It is the absolute driver of everything that I do”.

Her choice is, in her own words, her Faith above our flag and country.

That is the shaky, context dependent, patriotism of a Lord Haw Haw.

Further she claimed only a few years ago that “the people you see holding the English Flag most of the time down my neck of the woods” are “white and they are male and they are bad people“.

White, male and bad.

That is an awful lot of innocent people, accused, branded and dehumanised, linked, arbitrarily, to the English Defence League.

But, to our reckoning, the flag waving, home loving, family protecting patriot is the rock on which our Island has been built over millennia.

It is only recently that, gradually at first but with accelerating alacrity, these self-same people, our ancestors — us in other words — have been effaced from existence.

Shabana, in her new role, however will find herself in good company.

In the short two decades in which “White”, “Bad”, “Men”, and their womenfolk, have gradually morphed from the salt of the earth to fair game for hatemongers, the Home Office and the Police themselves have transitioned, at the same pace, from patriotic keepers of the peace to paramilitaries intent on crushing “nativist” dissent.

A source mentioned that his Home Office colleagues “do not believe in borders“, find protests against illegal immigration “disgusting displays of hatred and bigotry” and are “not patriotic”. They are “in fact ashamed of Britain“.

From our perspective, they should be sacked.

That they are not tells you a great deal: our leaders have been taught to loathe their country and countrymen.

Their promotion and the social kudos they garnered in Soho’s dankest side streets have depended fully on implementing their teachings at whatever cost.

Their higher calling is to expunge the shame they feel about Great Britain, one that we, as paying subjects, never (ever) felt.

We are no longer surprised by their aims. We know what they are up to.

We are only surprised that our politicians believe we believe them.

Such is the dissonance between these two irreconcilable positions that something must give.

And remember, before going to bed, that Peter Mandelson and Jeffrey Epstein were “best pals”.

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Alex Story is an Olympian, entrepreneur and writer on economic and social issues.