Dismantle Palmyra and rebuild it outside Padstow. That’ll fox Jihadi John

When Saddam Hussein was running the show in Iraq, we all knew that he was waging a cruel and bloodthirsty war with Iran. We knew too that he was using nerve gas on his own people and allowing his son to feed those who survived to his pet tiger. And let’s be brutally honest, we really weren’t that bothered.

Later, we were told by Mr Blair that Saddam had amassed a huge stockpile of nuclear weapons and that these would definitely be raining down on London in about forty-five minutes. And immediately, a million banner-waving people took to the streets of the capital shouting, with one voice: ‘So what?’

Eventually, we got the Arab Spring, during which a number of despotic leaders were replaced by a bunch of lunatics. In Libya, they cornered Colonel Gaddafi in a storm drain and reportedly pushed a scaffolding pole up his bottom. In Syria, it turned out that one anti-regime commander had started eating government soldiers.

Then came the beheadings and the hangings and the public incinerations. Homosexuals were being thrown from tall buildings, and you could be stoned to death for having the wrong sort of sandals. This was all completely unacceptable and, as a result, we decided to do nothing at all.

But then, last week, we heard that the forces of darkness had captured the Syrian city of Palmyra and were planning to destroy its two thousand-year-old Roman ruins. This sent us all into a state of shock. ‘Nooooo,’ we all cried. ‘They can’t destroy Palmyra. Nigel and Annabel went there on holiday a couple of years ago and said it was lovely.’

The argument is a bit unpalatable. But the truth is there are billions of people in the world so we don’t really care if a complete stranger is pushed off a tall building. But there’s only one Palmyra. There’s only one Angkor Wat temple. There’s only one Highclere Castle. And you won’t like this but, given the choice of losing a stranger who lives on the other side of the world or the house where they film Downton Abbey … well, I’m sorry, but we all know the answer, don’t we?

I’ve been to Palmyra. We filmed part of the Top Gear Middle East special there. You may remember the sequence: Richard Hammond and I dressed in burqas and James May fell over and had to go to hospital, suffering from more madness than usual.

While he was in there I had a couple of days to mooch around and I learned absolutely nothing at all about the mile upon mile of columns or the palacey thing on a nearby hill. I couldn’t tell you who built it all, or why, because I wasn’t that bothered.

But I did think, as I gazed from my hotel window, that it was jolly impressive so much was still standing after such a long time. And as a result, I do think now that something must be done to make sure a bunch of disaffected computer-game enthusiasts from Middlesex don’t run amok out there with the Semtex. But what?

At present we have the United Nations, which lists all sorts of things as ‘important’ but then does absolutely nothing to stop them being destroyed. It didn’t send in ‘peace-keepers’ to protect those buddhas in Afghanistan and they are doing the square root of bugger all to protect what remains in Palmyra. They simply shrug and tell us that what could be moved has already been moved to Damascus. And that the fate of what couldn’t be moved is now in the hands of Jihadi John and his mates.

That won’t do, so I’ve hatched a plan. The UN needs to draw up a list of the things that really are more important than a few lives and then steps must be taken to ensure that no harm can come to them, ever.

Obviously, we can’t use troops because I fear there’d be a bit of a public relations backlash. ‘Why are you sending soldiers to protect a few old stones when you won’t use them to look after all the people?’ That wouldn’t sound good on the evening news.

And there’s more, because it’s hard in this day and age to know where the troops would be needed. Who could have predicted five years ago that Kurdistan, eastern Ukraine and Syria would be no-go areas for Johnny Westerner? So where’s next? Nobody knows. You could put troops in Egypt to protect the pyramids, only for it to kick off in Petra or Athens.

There is, as I see it, only one solution. We cannot hand the responsibility of looking after these things to the Americans because they have a very poor grasp of history and no sense at all of the need for preservation. The Italians, on the other hand, are good at nurturing the past, but I’m not sure I’d want to entrust the world’s most important jewels to Luigi and Pietro. As an Italian colonel once told me, ‘Our soldiers like to make love, not war.’

No. The job must be given to the British. We like the past so much we live in it most of the time. But don’t worry. I’m not suggesting that we ask our troops to risk their limbs and lives to protect the world’s ruins and temples. My solution is way more elegant than that. It’s this: we send engineers out into the world now and bring all the world’s treasures to Britain.

Piece by piece, stone by stone, we dismantle the pyramids, ship them to Britain and build them again in, say, Leicestershire. We then scoop Petra out of the mountain and rehouse it in Cheddar Gorge. Angkor Wat? I see that in Oxfordshire. And who wouldn’t like to see the Great Wall of China separating England from Scotland?

This would not only ensure that these wonderful things are safe for all of time but also it would enable history enthusiasts to see everything that matters in a week, rather than in a lifetime.

So let’s get cracking. Let’s get out to Palmyra and bring the columns to Britain. And if the local historians start to make a fuss, we can simply point out that if Lord Elgin hadn’t brought those marbles back from Greece, they would now be gone for good.

31 May 2015