Neither education or money are absolutely necessary to become a businessman. Both of those things do help, however, as an education provides some of the information that can help and money provides capital. There is more passion, more vitality, in someone like Joy Trew, 98, a great-grandmother from Bristol who served as a corporal in the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force, than in your average 18-year-old, sitting in their bedroom watching TikToks or feeling triggered because someone’s misgendered their cat.

The other victims in Laos were 57-year-old American James Huston, reading teachers near me two 19-year-old Australian women Holly Morton-Bowles and Bianca Jones and Danish friends Anne-Sofie Orkild Coyman, 20, and Freja Sorensen, 21. How many of them will play their part in ridding the world of a true evil? How many will stand up for what’s good and right, regardless of their own sacrifice? How many will still rise to their feet, two years shy of their 100th birthdays, to salute the marching band?

They have little or no sense of national identity, ‘nation’ being a dirty word. They are far more interested in identity politics, such as trans issues and questions of race and so-called white privilege. The only thing they really seem to care about is how they come across on social media – a kind of ‘does my virtue look big in this?’ mentality. The lack of self-awareness, the total entitlement, the utter selfishness: when you stop to think about it he’s probably far more representative of modern British attitudes than his (comparatively) hard-working brother or father.

How they ever managed to go on to live anything even resembling a normal existence is a mystery to me. But somehow, they did. They knew the value of life, you see, understood how precious and precarious it is. They had survived: they owed it to those who did not to keep going. But for all the jollity, all the smiles and uplifting stories, I could not escape a nagging sense of sadness. A bitter feeling that it was all just a veneer, a performance rather than a true expression of solidarity.

This, let us not forget, is supposed to be a prince of the realm. A man whose sense of duty and gratitude to the nation that gave him everything – status, a privileged education, gilded opportunity, a lavish wedding, homes, baubles, you name it, was such that he found even performing the most basic royal duties far too onerous and tiring, instead preferring to fabricate a pathetic victim narrative to justify his spectacular dereliction of duty. And don’t get me wrong, it was wonderful to see so many people thronging the Mall, and all those street parties (in defiance of the gloomy weather).

But for me, at any rate, the official celebrations were just tinged with… well, an inescapable sense of melancholy. Yesterday, it finally admitted a ‘lapse’ in what it described as ‘our usual high editorial standards’ for failing to challenge the prince on his claim that he is the victim of a ‘good old-fashioned establishment stitch up’. If only. These days the ‘establishment’ couldn’t be trusted to sew on a bloody button.

It’s not just that the few remaining veterans of the Second World War are very much in the twilight of their years, or that the woman who led that generation through their darkest hours with her parents – Queen Elizabeth II – is gone.