THE 75th anniversary of VE Day was supposed to be a grand affair. Alongside the usual bells and whistles of national celebration — cathedral services, flypasts, the Buckingham Palace balcony — we could look forward to street parties, dancing and a bank holiday to boot.

Then Covid-19 set the pandemic cat among the patriotic pigeons, and Hitler’s downfall must instead be celebrated at a distance: in the home, online and from eerily quiet television studios. Village halls throughout the land will be empty, no crowds shall fill the Mall.

However, as many have been keen to point out, the current crisis lends itself very well to the mythology of the second world war. No better time, surely, to “Keep Calm and (sort of) Carry On,” invoke the “Blitz Spirit” and join a nationwide chorus of “We’ll Meet Again.”

Indeed, when a 99-year-old veteran of that very conflict walked around his garden to raise £1,000 for the NHS before his 100th birthday, he was said to have single-handedly “lifted the nation’s spirits.” And lift them he did, raising over £32 million for NHS Charities Together.

Making a fuss of Captain Tom Moore is, of course, a convenient distraction from the woeful lack of PPE available for carers and healthcare workers, the chronic underfunding of the NHS and the fact that Britain now has the highest Covid-19 death toll in Europe.

In fact, it was another WWII veteran (of Bletchley Park), 97-year-old Elizabeth Diacon, who did what many journalists should have been doing — holding the government to account — when she spoke up for the workers in her Wiltshire nursing home.

“They were called unskilled,” she said to Nick Robinson on the Today programme, “but a couple of weeks ago were promoted to key workers,” before pointing out how little they were paid for the care they provide.

Leaving aside the hideous “patriotism” we can expect from the Sun, the Mail et al over the next few days, it’s important to celebrate Moore, Diacon and others like them.

Because those still able to recall landing on Normandy’s beaches, sailing in Arctic convoys, flying back and forth across the Channel, liberating death camps, cracking codes at Bletchley Park, labouring in munitions factories, fighting fires in the Blitz, tilling the fields, tending to the dying and wounded or somehow participating in that titanic, all-consuming war are now few and far between.

When I worked as a receptionist in a GP’s surgery my favourite patients were always those old enough to know something of the war. Those who in some sense contributed to the emancipation of Europe, Asia and the defeat of nazism. To be, in short, a member of what the Daily Mail calls “Britain’s greatest generation.”

They had to be well into their nineties to qualify for such an accolade; anyone younger, when I asked them about their wartime experiences, would recall air raids, evacuation, rationing and shrapnel hunting. Though interesting, this wasn’t quite what I was after: memories of Bomber Command, the War Office, the siege of Tobruk or the Burma railway.

Similarly, when I met a 98-year-old distant relative a few years ago I was slightly disappointed he didn’t have a regimental tie and a row of medals proudly worn across his chest, nor did he recall a close encounter with a U-boat or Panzer.

He was a conscientious objector, and my absurd reaction to his principled refusal to participate in the industrialised slaughter of conscripted millions was surely a distant echo of his father’s, who’d refused to speak to him ever again.

“Today is Armistice Day,” wrote Alan Bennett in 1968, “I listen to the ceremony on the radio and as I type this I hear the guns rumbling across the park for the start of the Two Minutes’ Silence. I find the ceremony ridiculous and hypocritical, and yet it brings a lump to my throat. Why?”

Why indeed. I certainly don’t consider myself patriotic, and recognise that the conflict has been mythologised to say the least: read backwards, as if it was the sight of emaciated bodies and shoe mountains at Auschwitz that spurred the Allies into action, rather than the outcome of a reluctant ultimatum, delivered after a series of disastrous attempts to mollify that pesky Hitler.

And yet, with each passing obituary, I just can’t help feeling we’re losing a generation the likes of whom we shall not see again.

With the deaths of, inter alia, Tony Benn (88), John Berger (90), Christopher Lee (93), Mary Warnock (94), Harry Leslie Smith (95), Jean Barker (a.k.a Baroness Trumpington) (96), Denis Healey (98), Mary Midgley (99), and Diana Athill (101), public life is pretty much bereft of people who played an active role in the second world war, apart from (at a push) the Queen (94) and (the perhaps immortal) Dame Vera Lynn (103).

There is the Duke of Edinburgh (98) I suppose, but the less said about him the better.

Bizarrely however, this will change. A tiny minority of veterans, attaining a ripe old age and living (by my reckoning) well into the 2030s, will be with us for some time to come.

They will surely achieve, much like Captain — now Colonel — Tom, a singular, latter-day fame: memoirs, documentaries, Number 10 receptions and the Pride of Britain Awards.

With the Queen almost certainly dead and Britain adrift in a brave new world, there’s every chance these celebrity centenarians, wheeled out for great occasions, will become the focus of this nation’s increasingly hysterical obsession with its former, supposedly glorious self. Poor them.