BY ALEX STORY
“Whose you for?”, asked the rotund lass with a swarm of multi-hued father-less children running around the front porch.
“Cambridge”, I replied.
“Tough luck, chuck. I’m Oxford”.
The colours had a lot to do with it, I discovered, and the fact that the Boat Race, like the Old Queen, had always been around.
The lady and her children watched it every year, as millions like her did across the country.
We spoke for a bit longer before I carried on canvassing on Duke of York Avenue on Portobello Estate, Wakefield.
Spring was in the air and the 156th Boat Race would take place a few weeks hence, on April 3rd, 2010.
Cambridge won that year.
A few weeks later, for me, on May 6th, would see the General Election.
I had been the Conservative candidate for Wakefield since 2007.
By the spring of 2010, I was really looking forward to election day.
I loved the people, the humour and the beer and was nearly sure I would win a seat that hadn’t voted blue since 1932.
I found out later, unfortunately, that the feeling was not fully reciprocated.
Wakefield is a Rugby League, not a rowing, kind of a place.
The city and its council estates are “deprived”.
And yet she was “Oxford”.
It was obvious. The event was quintessentially British. Time and repetition had done their work.
It seeped through the fabric of our country.
From a Portobello Estate perspective and anywhere else in the land, you supported either one side or the other, while nevertheless being “one of us”.
The Race came and went like a tide, bringing with it new stories – about Americans, the weather, crew rebellions, and so much more.
The timeless template never altered.
The Boat Race was there and there it ought to remain, unchanged and unchangeable.
But the “Great and the Good” – the organisers, the TV stations, the corporate sponsors – tinkered, dismantling “Tradition” and replacing it with “Equality”, some, drained of spunk, in a desperate attempt to keep the event alive on official platforms, others to see it belittled and removed over time.
Both submitted to the Woke gods of Nihilism like Churchill’s appeasers, who feed the crocodiles, in the hope they will eat them last.
Early, they accepted the LGBT craze and would have bent the knee to Black Live Matter (BLM) in 2020, had the Race not been cancelled first due to COVID and, subsequently, many of BLM’s organisers not been arrested for fraud.
As night follows day, in 2026, the BBC decided to have no coverage of the Boat Race.
The Director of BBC Sports, Alex Kay-Jelski, thought it elitist.
Unlike our penniless friend and her unwashed children from Portobello Estate, Wakefield, for whom the Boat Race was an immovable part of our history, and therefore to be watched because “it is who we are”, our well-heeled public-school friend from fee-paying University College School terminated nigh on a century of our traditions by removing the Boat Race from the BBC schedule.
In so doing, he imposed his self-righteous political views on the country.
Many of which he displays openly, having posted a “Pride Flag” and noted his preferred gender pronouns (he/him) on his online profile.
Kay-Jelski is doing his bit of deconstruction.
To some, it’s only the Boat Race: another useless tradition being removed from our grasp as we contemplate an empty but ‘progressive’ horizon.
Broadening the lens, though, we notice that British officialdom is relentlessly rewriting our past.
We see it across our many of our institutions.
Our history is being systematically erased.
A few days ago, the Bank of England circulated a press release: Churchill would be removed from the £5 note.
He would be replaced by the picture of an animal, probably not a roaring lion. There is talk of a beaver or a rat.
To which, Nadeem Perera, a member of the Bank of England’s panel on wildlife, said the decision was “overdue”.
It follows last year’s removal of Lord Nelson-inspired art on the parliamentary estate, after a “Black Lives Matter-inspired diversity review”, to be replaced by portraits of Yvette Cooper to “boost gender and ethnic diversity”.
Diversity, not taste, you see, is the new target.
Further, early in this tenure, Keir Starmer had portraits from Queen Elizabeth I and Sir Walter Raleigh taken off 10 Downing Street’s wall for something more modern.
Finally, the British Flag was described as a “tool of hate” in certain circumstances according to the Government’s social cohesion strategy paper, leaked to the press earlier in the month.
What used to be “us” is now politically loaded and to be enjoyed only when allowed.
The top-down revolution keeps gathering pace as the British populus no longer quite knows which way to look or which flag to wave.
The removal of the Boat Race from the BBC is just another brick in the deconstruction of the British cultural wall.
It may be that the Race will find an alternative and perhaps a much better and more lucrative one.
Indeed, much of the worthwhile content has flown away from terrestrial, and politically poisoned, channels to non-official, private ones.
But if our government is openly waging a cultural war against who we were, then, for our sake – you, me and the lady from Portobello Estate – it is high time we acted against it.
Alex Story is an Olympian, entrepreneur and writer on economic and social issues.