Lucy uncovers biggest f ib of all

HAVING once dressed up in full Bullingdon Club gear for a TV documentary on David Cameron (now lost, not even findable on the wildest shores of YouTube), I can’t really attack historian Lucy Worsley for clambering into period outfits for her documentaries.

Lately she’s been appearing as a cheerleader in a Philadelphia parade and even squeezed into a Scarlett O’Hara Southern Belle ballgown, left, (I’m still not quite sure why) to illustrate her BBC4 series American History’s Biggest Fibs.

And much of it, though conventionally Leftwing, was rather good. My favourite bit was her concentration on the fact that the USA, supposedly the land of the free, was in fact founded by the autocratic King of France, Louis XVI.

I’ve always laughed at those Americans who mocked the French as ‘cheese-eating surrender monkeys’, and the silly joke, at the time of the Iraq War, where you were supposed to search for ‘French military victories’ on the internet and come up with nothing. Oh, really?

The biggest French military victory in all history was the decisive American Revolutionary War battle at Yorktown, where French naval and military might and French money, guns and ammunition defeated us. Without them, there’d have been no USA. Think of that, for a moment.

Lots of people want to forget this fact. We don’t like to remember Yorktown much at all, any more than we like to discuss Singapore in 1942. Americans are embarrassed by it. But good history is often the story of what we don’t want to know, and now the schools teach it so badly, TV is often the only place you’ll find it.