Queen Liz is in a pickle. Seventy years ago on the night of VE Day, as the new film Girls’ Night Out records in a fictionalised version of their escapade, the teenage Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret slipped out of the palace with chaperones in tow to mix with the ordinary folks dancing their lives away with unbridled exhilaration.

Nazi Germany had been beaten, occupied Europe liberated and perhaps most famously of all the Red Army was flying the hammer and sickle over a near demolished Reichstag in Berlin.

But the Queen won’t be attending the 70th anniversary VE day celebrations today.

The morning after the general election results the night before the fear is a wink here, a smile there, a misplaced handshake caught on camera with messrs Cameron, Miliband and Clegg could be read as what make-up of her government she might favour if the result proves to be the hung parliament most pundits predict.

Yes, 70 years on from the Labour landslide of ’45, famously joined by Communist MPs Willie Gallagher and Phil Piratin, the royal prerogative is as entrenched as it has ever been.

Popularly depicted in the hit West End and Broadway play, The Audience, elected prime ministers are never anything but “hers” to “our” Queen.

VE Day in this anniversary year is as decisively shaped by modern politics as ever with the very obvious aim to serve the interests of those who would seek to control its meaning. But as that royal escape from the confines of palace life illustrated, VE Day in ’45 was a hugely popular moment, a celebration of victory over the most evil of regimes, an internationalism, a common good without borders, a people’s resistance and the hope of a better world as a result of all this.

Yes there were lethal flaws in that moment of victory, perhaps most poignantly the shooting of the Communist-led Greek partisans by Allied powers putting back in control of Greece those who had collaborated with the nazis. Anything was good, or rather bad, enough, to prevent Greece going communist.

But a memory that finds space for critique should not become the means to forget either, to absent ourselves from the remembering. In the popular imagination WWII is as much about all our tomorrows as all our yesterdays.

In a desperate, often unedifying, rush to be modern there is a tendency in sections of the left to ignore the past as something old-fashioned, lacking relevance.

But not only does the right seek to map its version of the present out of traditions it interprets to its own ends, the left makes a serious error in underestimating how any idealism of the present can be informed and strengthened by a sense of where we come from, our own traditions, an identity that in the era of soundbite politics gives us something otherwise lacking, identity and purpose.

From the Labour landslide of ’45 Aneurin Bevan’s words described this superbly: “We have been the dreamers, We have been the sufferers, And now we are the builders.”

Bevan’s dreamers, sufferers and builders of ’45 understood that the joy of VE day 70 years ago was the direct result of the defeat of fascism. A defeat that depended centrally on a popular front that recognised the great evil that was faced and the need to construct the broadest possible opposition to it. None of this was at the expense of politics.

The popular front was a means to an end — the people versus Mosley, Franco, Mussolini and Hitler. The left, including most notably the Communist Party, working to construct a majoritarian politics that would isolate and defeat this most hateful and dangerous of threats to humanity at home and abroad.

Precious little of any of this features in the Establishment VE Day celebrations.

The people’s war becomes sidelined and as a result the depth of solidarity with the epic achievements of the Red Army on the Eastern Front are removed from history — a necessary contemporary consequence of the geopolitics of isolating Putin’s Russia from any credit and influence it may otherwise enjoy.

In ’45 VE Day was celebrated as a common victory. No such victory would have been possible without the enormous sacrifices of the Red Army.

Support for the British Communist Party soared during WWII alongside the broader movement towards common-sense collectivism, a popular internationalism, a gritty determination to rebuild a fairer, more equal Britain out of the widespread destruction and shared sacrifice of war.

No wonder those teenage princesses wanted to join the party.

It was these widely held ambitions that created the basis for Labour’s landslide and the election of two Communist MPs.

Churchill, while recognised by all and sundry as a great war leader, led a Tory party entirely out of touch with these sentiments of hope and change. Don’t expect his calamitous electoral defeat just three months after VE Day to get a mention as the anniversary celebrations gather momentum. But you simply cannot explain the meaning of one without understanding the other.

From VE Day to the Labour landslide in July these were days of hope. The NHS, a public rehousing, comprehensive education, the nationalisation of the railways, full employment. Such was the ambition that turned the tide against Churchill’s Tories.

And internationally a recognition that the defeat of nazi Germany would have been impossible without the role of the Soviet Union helping to legitimise more radical versions of what Britain’s post-war settlement might look like.

The Establishment have their version of the meaning of VE Day, isn’t it time we had ours?

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