CHRISTMAS Quiz time. What links: a roofless ruin in Wroxall; a long-forgotten native American tribe with a tongue-twister name; and a bunch of sore losers trying to turn back the tide of history.

Look away now if you don’t want to know the answer. Or if you’re fond of sore losers.

In 1608, a party of English settlers crossed the James River in what’s now Virginia in search of food. They bartered for corn with a tribe called the Warrosquyoack.

Having got off to a good start with the locals, that was the name the settlement went by for a while. It didn’t last, of course, since the new arrivals were, when all said and done, colonists.

On Good Friday, 1622, about a quarter of the 1,200-odd settlers in Virginia were slaughtered in co-ordinated tribal ambushes; at around the same time, and with the Indians being driven from their lands, the name was changed to Isle of Wight County.

Local tourist guides suggest the unpronouncability of the original name as the main reason. In fact the settlement’s genesis has strong links with our own Island through Sir Richard Worsley, 1st Baronet (1589-1621), of Appuldurcombe, together with other Islanders who made the 1608 expedition.

A young Sir Richard served as one of Newport’s two MPs, and historians are divided over whether he — or simply his considerable wealth — were on board. A retrospective risk-benefit analysis commends the latter; but in any event, thus was modern America born.

Fast forward, then, to present-day Isle of Wight County. The Civil War has been fought and, from slave-state Virginia’s perspective, lost. With the US now a superpower, the first black President has served his two full terms without the sky falling in.

But there are sore losers. Overlooking the public green in the county’s small administrative capital, also called Isle of Wight (like New York, so good they named it twice), towers the ubiquitous Confederate soldier. As with many such monuments across the US, it is jealously guarded by those who hark back to what it represents.

For the last four years those attitudes have enjoyed a revival, courtesy of sore loser-in-chief, Old Orange Face. But the tectonic plates are shifting once more.

Isle of Wight County remains staunchly pro-Trump, by 13,707 votes to 9,399. But Virginia is now a safe-ish Democrat state; and with a Democrat President about to take office, the statue’s future is back on the agenda. Easily found on Change.org is a petition calling for its removal.

The County Board of Supervisors is split several ways — those who want it gone, those who don’t, those who want it put in the cemetery and one member who’s offered to put it on his private land, safe from government interference. Setting up a task force has merely prolonged the agony, making it bread and butter for the local rag, the Smithfield Times.

A self-denying ordinance has kept me away from Trump America; and Virginia, with its fascinating Civil War history, is high on my to-do list when circumstances permit. I may even drop in on that task force.

And my advice from the Mother Island? If they really want to Make America Great Again, a low-level Civil War replay is about the least likely way to succeed.