Next Thursday we will celebrate VE Day and commemorate the 450,000 British lives lost over the five years of brutal war. That is a huge number but is dwarfed by the unimaginable toll of Russians killed, at least 27 million, while Germany's total was more than seven million. 

But here's the great What If? What if Donald Trump had been US president at the time and not Roosevelt, himself a reluctant late entry into the conflict? I think we can be sure that the increasingly unbalanced Trump, now crowing about his first 100 days in the White House as a triumph when the exact opposite is the case, would have refused to join the UK and Soviets on the grounds that he couldn't see anything in it for him, a committed isolationist, unless there was a personal upside.

Almost certainly we would have been defeated and, by 1942 at the latest, the swastika would have been flying over Buckingham Palace, the Royal Family would have been exiled, the little Duke of Windsor would have been brought back by his friend Hitler as titular head of state and democratic government would have been a distant memory. And Trump would have been busy making deals, 'beautiful deals', with the Nazis. 

Crazy? I don't think so because all wars are a mix of what is right and what is practical. It was clearly right not to do a deal with Adolf Hitler because he would have seen it as a sign of weakness and not worth the paper on which it was written. Ask Neville Chamberlain. When Britain declared war on Germany and its utterly evil ideology it was the right thing to do because it was the only moral choice. Morals are not in Trump's lexicon, just dollars and self-aggrandisement. I suspect he would have admired Hitler's strength and the way he dealt with any opposition. 

We are seeing the evidence from the White House; mass deportations, many to prisons run by his pal Nayib Bukele, the dictator of El Salvador, a war on the Press and unfriendly tv stations, a crackdown on universities regarded as having allowed anti-Israeli protests and other illustrations of free speech, removal of unapproved books from libraries and of critics in high places though, so far, he has failed to remove Jerome Powell, chairman of the Fed. And of-course, just like the Führer, surrounding himself with worshipping cronies. 

Oh, and don't be fooled by any Ukraine peace deal Trump might announce; there will be one only if his pal Putin approves it and the US gets the rights to mine minerals in the east of the country. It's all about the deal stoopid...

Meanwhile the US economy is shrinking and five trillion dollars, that's $5,000 billion or $5,000,000,000,000, has been wiped off the value of shares on Wall Street. Happily, that includes a 40 per cent drop in Tesla's market value.

A triumphant first 100 days as Trump claims? He really is insane.

PS: What have Trump and Hitler's ally Emperor Hirohito got in common? The Japanese onslaught on Pearl Harbor brought America into the war and the moment Trump talked about Canada becoming the 51st state galvanised the Canadians behind Liberal PM Mark Carney, until then trailing in the polls.

*****

If you want to meet a genuinely brave and decent man whose life has been governed by doing the right, the moral, thing, then Harold Good is just that. Good in every respect. He has just turned 88 and I first met him eight years ago when researching my book to mark the 150th anniversary of his and my old school, Methodist College, Belfast. Harold is the polar opposite of Trump; he is modest in the extreme and is a doer, a quiet achiever and has achieved great things. 

He trained as a priest in the Methodist Church, partly in the US, and saw what the racial divide, America's apartheid, was doing to the country. Then to Dublin to the 1960s slums of the Coombe district which reinforced his hatred of injustice. And if that wasn't enough, when ordained it was not to a quiet parish in Wicklow or Kerrybut to the Shankill just as the Troubles broke out in 1969. This was his baptism of fire, literally and metaphorically. 

One afternoon he was signing the certificates of a young couple he had just married when an IRA bomb, placed in a nearby furniture store, rocked his church. Harold rushed to the scene of devastation and helped pull babies from the rubble and get the injured to hospital. On returning to his church he ran into a group carrying the bodies of three young men who had been shot dead by the Army. He brought them into the church hall and later helped scrub the blood-stained floor so it would be ready for Sunday school the following day.    

Later, that church hall was to stay open for two weeks, 24 hours a day, so that local people burned out of their homes could find shelter and food and, that rare thing in Belfast in the Troubles, love. It didn't matter if they were Protestant or Catholic or none of the above. They were his fellow human-beings and they needed help. So did a young Dublin reporter from RTE who was grabbed by a group of so-called ‘loyalists’ simply because he was speaking with an accent from south of the border.

“What's going on here?” “Got lost mister.” At which point the reporter fell to the ground and they started kicking him. Harold threw himself on top of the victim and told the gang that they would have to kick him off first. Both he and the Dubliner were rescued when the Army arrived and arrested the mindless attackers.

Harold Good is a remarkable man; later he oversaw the decommissioning of IRA weapons under the Good Friday peace agreement and with his good friend, the prominent Catholic priest Father Alex Reid, did the same in Spain with the ETA guerillas and in Colombia with the FARC rebels. Throughout the war in the north of Ireland he worked to bring the sides together and became close to Martin McGuinness at whose funeral he spoke, along with Bill Clinton. 

In a world of tyrants and would-be dictators like Donald Trump, he stands out as a beacon of moral decency. Good by name and Good by nature.

*****

The story of Sophie Lloyd, the magician who pretended to be a man because women were not allowed into the Magic Circle, reminded me of a promotional lunch event in the Chiswell Street brewery when I was sitting next to Nigel Dempster. A magician had been hired to do a turn, not Miss Lloyd, but a chap whose name escapes me. What is still firmly planted in my memory is the magician alighting on our table and complimenting Nigel on his suit, particular the silk lining of the jacket.

“My, that's a beautiful suit Mr Dempster, do you mind if I take a look?” Dempster, who had spent a large part of his substantial salary on the suit, proudly agreed. At which point the magic man lit a cigarette and stabbed the lining with the tip. There was an audible frazzle, smoke and a cry of utter rage from Nigel which even here is unprintable. I saw and smelled it at very close quarters.

When the smoke cleared and profuse apologies were made, the jacket was handed back. There wasn't a mark on it. It really was magic.

ALAN FRAME

1 May 2025