Curiosity is a sign of kind souls. You don’t fall into a place like SOAS by accident. Notable alumni include Dr Walter Rodney, the Guyanese historian, political disruptor and academic, and Kareem Dennis, aka Lowkey, the rapper and activist. That the institution exists at all is indicative of a city and a country completely at odds with itself. Those who study there today do so witnessing the end of Britain, and the beginning of a new England.

I’ll tell you who did not go to SOAS, Rishi Sunak. An Oxford graduate, Sunak and his heiress wife, Akshata Murty, have an estimated worth of about £529m according to last year’s Sunday Times rich list. To be fair, that fell by £201m in just one year, so it’s not all foie gras and Perrier-Jouët Belle Epoque for the British PM and his missus. They’ve no doubt had to revert to the screw top merlot and crinkle cut crisps like the rest of us.

It’s worth noting the median household income in the UK is £35,000 annually. Just to be clear, the Sunaks, Britain’s first couple, lost 5,714 times the median household income for the UK in just 12 months, and were still left with £529m. In August 2023, London Councils estimated that one in 50 people in Londoners are homeless. And the Sunak’s lost £201million.

Last month, Sunak’s predecessor Liz Truss (still a serving MP), appeared on stage with right-wing populists at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in America. Fellow attendees included Tommy Tuberville, a US senator who once refused to say white nationalists were racist, Hiroaki “Jay” Aeba, a representative of a conservative Japanese cult, and two allies of the Hungarian prime minister, Viktor Orbán. She also cosied up to Steve Bannon, who deigned to describe the far- far-right figure Tommy Robinson a “hero” while speaking alongside Truss. The former PM, ever confused, said nothing.

Her predecessor, lest we forget, was a cheeky chap called Boris Johnson. A “lovable rogue” who once compared Muslim women wearing burqas and niqabs to letter boxes. This is the man who once referred to Africa as “that country.” The man who once wrote of the people of Liverpool: “They see themselves whenever possible as victims and resent their victim status; yet at the same time they wallow in it.”

All of this makes Theresa May, who came before him, look like Winston Churchill. Except that’s not entirely fair on the perennially embattled May, as none of her policies directly contributed to a famine that killed three million people in Bengal, India, as Churchill’s did. The old bulldog was quoted as blaming said famine on the fact Indians were “breeding like rabbits”, and asked how, if the shortages were so bad, Mahatma Gandhi was still alive? What a statesman!

All of which brings us to London, today, and a city within a country that is completely at odds with those leading it, and most of those writing about it.

For weeks, British newspapers have been reporting on the whereabouts of Kate Midleton, who functions — when she shows up — as a very well-paid civil servant. Shaking hands, kissing babies, and talking occasional smack about her sister-in-law.

There’s been much less ink devoted to why hundreds-of-thousands are marching on the streets to end the genocide in Gaza. Unless of course you count the slander of labelling those who march as antisemitic and inciting hatred, as many MPs and newspaper columnists have done. It’s likely there was more violence in the pubs of Cheltenham this week than there was in the five months of protests in England’s capital says all we need to know about the folly of that morsel of misinformation.

No, as Britain slowly dies, England heals from within. Through its comedians and its writers and the brilliant minds at SOAS. Walk down the Kilburn High Road, Edgware Road, through Brixton and down Kentish Town, you will see nothing of Sunak’s version of Britain. You will see plenty of those Churchill despised and Johnson so racistly smeared.

You’ll see a multicoloured England that breaks and bleeds and repairs itself in spite of those who sit on polished benches and argue about the speaking time allowed to the right honourable gentleman from Camborne and Redruth.

The empire is dying, slowly gorging itself to death on the carcass of a world it deigned to strip bare. Those who outlive it —the “victims” in Liverpool, the millions of “letterboxes” celebrating Ramadan, the thousands sitting in university libraries deconstructing the myth of a Britain-once-great — it is for them to build a new England from the rubble.