In Terence Rattigan’s 1948 play The Browning Version (filmed in 1951 starring Michael Redgrave), a public-school classics teacher called Arthur Crocker-Harris is appalled to discover that he is known to his pupils as ‘the Himmler of the Fifth’.

According to the Guardian and the BBC, the Reform UK leader Nigel Farage was a fan of Himmler’s boss, Adolf Hitler, when he was a student at Dulwich public school half a century ago. I suspect that those who are enthusiastically mining this story for its anti-Farage political potential did not attend single-sex male boarding schools in the 1970s. Given the war had ended just a few decades before, it was scarcely surprising that it was the common currency of schoolboy playground conversation.

I attended two similar schools to Dulwich in roughly the same era as Farage, and I can testify to the obsessive fascination with the war, the Nazis and all things connected to that hideous event that dominated our parents’ lives. The generation above us had fought against the Nazis, or had endured the Blitz; we studied the Third Reich in our history curriculum; we watched films like The Dambusters and Sink the........

© The Spectator