THOUGH there might be a high proportion among newspaper readers, there aren’t all that many people left now who remember the end of the Second World War, never mind the conflict itself.

I was a 7-year-old in 1945. I remember a street party in our village, with races for the kids, in which I took part. I also remember the great joy when a neighbour’s son returned home from Burma. He gave me his bush hat and a holster, which remained long among my treasured possessions.

That was a victory event in Normanby, Teesside. One imagines that worldwide there would be a huge collective sigh of relief.

The fighting and killing had stopped.

The world could move towards those “broad sunlit uplands” that Winston Churchill had talked of to the British people as a goal of their struggle.

But look at the world today. The Middle East is in chaos, with fighting in Syria, Israel, Iraq. Russia and the West have slipped back into the cold war, hotter than the original, with perilous friction over Ukraine, another war-racked country. Afghanistan adds to the bloodshed, and amid it all militant Islam wages a new world war, fought from within its adversaries.

This is not what would have been envisaged at those1945 street parties and as our soldiers returned to Welcome Home banners.

But since 1945 there has scarcely been a day without conflict somewhere in the world. The human race has a distressing propensity to fight among itself.

After the Second World War, the poet Cecil Day Lewis feared the new peace would be like the old – “with no heart or mind to it, guttering down to war like a libertine to his grave”. Too true.

Worse is our brilliance at devising new ways of killing each other. Before the First World War, Thomas Hardy lamented that all nations were “striving yet to make red war redder.” The very latest of our manic inventions is the drone – death from the skies without even a pilot put at risk.

All the while politicians talk of seeking peace. Prayers for peace are offered up in probably every church of every denomination every week. Is God listening?

We must hope the answer doesn’t lie in the fact that the place where the Malaysian airliner was brought down by an unspeakable and ghastly act of war, with the loss of 298 innocent lives, is overlooked by a cross, intended to symbolise Christ’s protection for travellers.

WHILE we can’t suppose that the relationship between William Hague and his 86-year-old father, Nigel, is any less fond than all of us would wish, the son can’t have been overly chuffed with his dad’s response to his recent resignation.

William, declared Hague Senior, had been losing money “working with all those goons”.

He went on: “You can’t make a lot of money as foreign secretary. He [William] used to do some work on the speaking circuit, but you can’t do that if you’re on the front bench.”

No, but you can, and William did, if you are merely an MP, even though his constituency is England’s largest. With the workload transferred to the EU, this bolsters the case for a drastic cull of MPs – say about half.