Porter’s Pensées

When I was eight years old I was sent – alone – to a residential school for children with serious chest complaints, mainly TB and asthma, in Ventnor, Isle of Wight. It was the most miserable three months of my young life. It was run by Anglican nuns, all dressed in black, looking I thought like ravens, and strict to the point of cruelty. Brought up a Methodist, I had never seen nuns before. Parents weren’t supposed to visit. We could write home to them weekly, but only letters copied from the blackboard, telling them how happy we were. We knew these were vetted before posting. I devised a cunning code to counter this, which eventually worked; after those three months my father came to rescue me.

I had blotted this whole experience from my mind, until very recently, when I discovered some of my letters home in my late mother’s effects, and looked up the place – ‘St Catherine’s Open-Air School’ – via Google, where I found a number of reminiscences that sadly mirrored my own. One told of an ‘escape’ attempt by a group of older boys; ‘two of us reached the mainland’. Echoes of Colditz! So it wasn’t ‘just me’.

I’ve never wanted to revisit the Isle of Wight since, or even allowed myself to think of it: a psychological safety-mechanism, no doubt. Last week, however, Kajsa and I went there, as part of our South Coast tour, and looked up St Catherine’s. A kind school secretary showed us around. It has obviously changed enormously since the late ’40s. It now caters for children with other kinds of disabilities, and seems bright and friendly. And we didn’t spot a single nun there. I’m glad I went. It exorcised a ghost.

The episode did nothing at the time for my chronic asthma, which I continued to be afflicted with for years afterwards. I suppose I should be grateful – after all that has been revealed recently – that I wasn’t sexually abused there; unless the nuns’ ‘slippering’ of us on our bare bottoms gave them some erotic satisfaction. If so they were welcome to it. It must be awful being a nun.

And I really don’t think the experience had any lasting psychological effect on me. Unless it was to feed into two of my later prejudices: firstly against Public boarding schools; and secondly against the Catholic and ‘High’ Anglican churches. Those nuns! I still shiver when I see a nun in the street. Or a Muslim woman in full burkah, which reminds me of them. Which is not to say that either prejudice is unreasonable in itself. Just that in my case, they’re personal, too.

MI5 has a record of targeting left-wing MPs and parties in Britain, sometimes via retired agents and third parties. The best known examples are the ‘Zinoviev Letter’ affair of 1924, and the ‘Wilson plot’ (that is, the anti-Wilson plot) of 1974-6. (See my Plots and Paranoia, 1989.) So I wouldn’t reject Len McCluskey’s suspicions out of hand.

http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/jul/22/intelligence-services-using-dark-practices-against-jeremy-corbyn.

What usually happens in these cases is that the charges are dismissed by the authorities at the time as the crazed ravings of ‘conspiracy theorists’. No-one wants to be labelled a conspiracy theorist – and there are, in truth, some real nutters among them, especially on the web – so respectable people are reluctant to countenance such claims. Then, thirty years later, when the archives are opened, the suspicions are shown to have been pretty well justified; by which time, of course, it’s too late.

Just saying.

I doubt if I’ll be blogging much over the next month – everything is too depressing politically, especially vis-à-vis the Labour Party here and the Republicans over the pond, and I can think of no new historical parallels to draw. (I see that as the main purpose of this blog.) The obvious one – the 1930s – has already been flogged to death. Likewise jihadism and terrorism in the past; though it’s worth mentioning the atmospheric new BBC serialisation of Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent, which brings many of the historical resonances out. (I’ve written about the real anarchist plot it was based on: see my Origins of the Vigilant State.)

It’s difficult to think of a precedent for Boris Johnson, in British history at any rate. I’ve seen Caligula’s horse suggested, but I have to admit that Bojo seemed quite sensible, even diplomatic, in his contributions to his joint press conference as our new Foreign Minister with Secretary of State John Kerry this afternoon. That was even when journalists brought up his past insults to Barak Obama and Hilary Clinton, which he met with his by now trademark flaffing about. He was obviously pleased with himself for getting through it without any obvious pratfalls. You could see him grinning inanely as Kerry spoke. Someone should tell him to stop that. It brings memories of the old clown back.

We’re off to seek refuge from all this, in a better past – the Bloomsbury Group’s house in Sussex; and a saner place – the Stockholm Archipelago. Any new posts over the next four weeks will be few and far between, and probably about Sweden. I can’t wait to get there. My application for citizenship has been acknowledged, so I may have to be careful in what I write. (If Migrationsverket is reading this, I promise I’ll be really, really loyal.)

Getting away from the dreadful events in France and Turkey, and from the clown at the FO, this is a reminder of how things used to be. It’s a version of a review article I wrote for the LRB, but which I don’t think they’re going to publish now. It’s based on two recent books: Francis Beckett and Tony Russell, 1956. The Year That Changed Britain; and Simon Hall, 1956. The World in Revolt. Happy days?

*

‘There’s a dreadfully misplaced nostalgia for the ’50s,’ write Beckett and Russell at the start of their book,

mostly to be found among expensively educated children of Thatcherism. They see the ’50s as a glorious Indian summer, before free love and protest and egalitarianism, and 1956 and then 1968, came along to ruin it. Sometimes Thatcher’s children sound as though they want to take us back to it – but they have never been there. If they had, they’d know better.

Well, I was there, and I have to say that I found the 1950s rather exciting. Reading this book, with its accounts of the horrors of the age – snobbery, smog, bigotry, National Service, beatings in schools, awful food, gloomy Sundays, stifling sexual attitudes: all quite true – I started to wonder why. Of course I’m only one person, and a pretty lucky one at that. I’m not a woman, for a start. People of my generation were also unaware then of the joys to come – Chinese takeaways, reality TV, seven-day shopping, the LRB – which make the 1950s seem duller in retrospect. But this isn’t the only reason. That is hinted at in these books, both of them centred on the events of 1956, or thereabouts. (Beckett and Russell cover just Britain, Hall ranges more widely.) There’s a good case to be made that it was then – far more than in 1968, for example – that many things began to change quite fundamentally. And the start of a period of change is always more exhilarating than its – usually disappointing – end.

On the international front 1956 really was momentous. In Britain it is mainly remembered for the Suez Crisis, often taken as the defining moment in the fall of her empire; but overall the most significant event was probably Khrushchev’s supposedly ‘secret’ speech to the 20^th Congress of the Soviet Communist Party in Moscow in the early hours of 25 February, criticising in retrospect the ‘cult of personality’ that had grown up in the party recently, and in particular the personality of the late Josef Stalin. That, when it got out, released an ‘orgy of public criticism’ of the Soviet Union in her oppressed eastern European satellites, beginning in Poland, and of genuine hope that things might change for them: not, it should be noted, away from communism, but towards a more liberal and – the optimists claimed – ‘genuine’ kind. There were huge demonstrations in Poland and Hungary, prompting Tony Benn to write in his Diary: ‘Everyone in the world is breathless with hope that this may lead to a rebirth of freedom throughout the whole of Eastern Europe.’ But not their Soviet masters, who regarded them as having got out of hand: ‘it begins with a demand for freedom of the press’, claimed the Czech deputy premier, ‘and ends with freedom for capitalism’. This turned out to be prescient, of course, to the regret, no doubt, of those of the original brave dissidents who survived until 1989. The Soviets were also nervous of their satellites’ leaving the Warsaw pact; and suspicious of ‘foreign imperialist agents’ and indigenous Fascists: neither of which fear was entirely paranoid, Hall maintains, in the light of ‘Radio Free Europe’, and the strong showing of Hungary’s explicitly fascist Arrow Cross Party in the 1940s. Anyway, the Soviets weren’t having any of it, and brutally crushed both uprisings in the course of the year. ‘All youth is rising and being mowed down’, wrote Violet Bonham Cater. She blamed Eden’s ‘folly’ – the Suez aggression – for having ‘distracted the attention of the world from this tragedy. I cannot forgive it.’ One happy result, for Britain, was the asylum she gave to 21,000 Hungarian refugees in the aftermath, greeted with enormous goodwill by their hosts, and repaying the country handsomely. Apparently it wasn’t quite so happy for the refugees, who were ‘dreadfully disappointed to find a poorer and dingier nation than the one they had left.’ And that, write Beckett & Russell, ‘was before they had tasted the food.’

One way or another these events affected all the other ‘big’ happenings of that year. The Soviet Union, and by association communism itself, of whatever type, were largely discredited almost everywhere as automatic foci for left-wingers, leaving young British idealists, Beckett and Russell suggest, without a natural ‘home’ ever after: only a sterile choice between the squabbling splinters that remained, of which the CPGB was now only one. ‘The Hungarians,’ proclaimed the New York Times in November, ‘have put a brand upon communism as a philosophy of life and government from which it can never recover.’ From now on the main vigour of dissident youth was channelled instead into single-issue politics, like CND (founded the following year) and later the Vietnam movement, with the less vigorous opting for John Osborne-like cynicism – ‘there are no good causes left to die for’ – or for the new musical culture – ‘rock’n’roll’ – as a diversion. In America it obviously stiffened the resolve of Red-baiters – Senator McCarthy had only very recently been dethroned – some of whom saw a communist conspiracy lurking behind the Civil Rights movement of the period, which was peaking just then with the Montgomery bus boycott; but also of liberals aware that racial segregation in the South was making it difficult for the USA to occupy the moral high ground in response to events in eastern Europe. Martin Luther King was canny here, with impeccable anti-Communist credentials and his insistence that desegregation was the patriotic American thing to do. The Cold War and this recent alarming ratcheting up of it hung over almost everything.

To a great extent the crisis was inter-generational. Both these books emphasize this. It was the young (preponderantly) reacting against the conventions of the past: bureaucratic communist in the east, capitalist and racist in America, aristocratic in Britain, imperialist in northern Africa, killjoy everywhere; all of which were supposed by the mid-fifties to have outlived their relevance, especially so long after the end of the war which had seemed to – as is the usual pattern with great wars in history – shake things up. In Eastern Europe the specific targets were shortages and Russian tyranny; in the USA Jim Crow; in Britain the hold that the Old Etonians still exerted over their supposedly democratic country; and in Egypt and other colonies or partial colonies a system of rule – formal imperialism – which most enlightened people could plainly see was already on its last legs. Beckett and Russell have coined a choice expression for those who could not read the signs: ‘the harrumph tendency’, they call them; which, ridiculous as these people seem in retrospect – and were made to appear even at the time, for example in the character of ‘Major Bloodnok’ on The Goon Show – could be frustratingly effective in blocking, even if it was only for a while, the abolition of hanging and homosexual law reform. Both of these reforms were seriously mooted in Britain in 1956, with abolition of the death penalty passed in the House of Commons but then rejected in the Lords, at that time ‘composed of hitherto unknown rustics, who thought, perhaps, that abolition was in some way a threat to blood sports.’ (This is one of Beckett & Russell’s best jokes.) Eden’s quite mad Suez adventure was also kept going by these men and women. Without them, and their fellow old reactionaries and procrastinators in Washington and Moscow, the modern age might have come sooner than it did.

On the other hand that still left – pace Osborne – plenty of ‘good causes’ to fight for, or at the very least bad causes to fight against, which is what made it such a stimulating time for many young men (or, in my case, boys) of that generation. Less so, I have to admit, for young women, who scarcely feature in these books, apart from Hall’s short chapter on the women’s march on Pretoria in August 1956 to protest against the extension to them of the hated pass laws. Feminism seems to have been slumbering then, though I may be wrong. For us young and progressive males, however, the Day appeared to have arrived. (Actually I wasn’t at all progressive at that time, supporting Eden over Suez, I remember; but I was only 15. And we had just switched from the good old News Chronicle to the Daily Telegraph at home.) We had our welfare state well set up; the new National Health Service was ‘in its best shape in its history’, according to Beckett and Russell; there was full employment (an astonishing 98.8% in 1955, though one imagines the relative lack of women in the labour market partly accounted for that); decolonization nicely on track, with two more colonies (Sudan and Ghana) liberated that year, though there was still much to be done on that front (Cyprus, for a start); and a pretty healthy Labour party, with some heroic recent achievements behind it, for non-doctrinal socialists to become enthusiastic about and active in. The abolition of the death penalty, easier divorce and the legalization of homosexuality were there for the grabbing.

Resistance to ‘progress’ was crumbling, but still vociferous enough to be worth taking on. Simon Hall makes much of the savage backlash against school integration in the American South, by whites worried that ‘the social fabric of our community’ was about to ‘be destroyed by a group of Negro radicals who have split asunder the fine relationships which have existed between the Negro and white people for generations’ (sic). Even President Eisenhower could understand white parents’ concern ‘to see that their sweet little white girls are not required to sit… alongside some big overgrown Negroes’. In Britain there was the noisy but ridiculous League of Empire Loyalists, who enjoyed a brief notoriety at this time. There was resistance too in North Africa (the violently intransigent pieds noirs), Cyprus (EOKA), South Africa, and of course by the Soviet puppet rulers and their secret police forces in eastern Europe. But all these causes seemed to be good and winnable, which made the struggle worthwhile; while simultaneously providing the protesters with a rich seam of satirical comedy (like Major Bloodnock, and five years later Private Eye) to cheer them on. The marching and demonstrating were fun as well: out of doors, social, serious. (I got into that a couple of years later, with CND.) ‘Progress’ seemed to be the dominant and irreversible trend of the time. Martin Luther King spoke encouragingly of ‘the rushing waters of historical necessity’. Hence all the harrumphing; a desperate, defensive cry if ever there was one, like a dying elephant.

The music was fun too. 1956 was the year when Bill Haley and His Comets and Elvis Presley first made it into the British charts with Rock around the Clock and Hound Dog respectively, competing rather powerfully with How Much is that Doggie in the Window, sung by Patti Page; and Liberace, or ‘the biggest sentimental vomit of all time’, as ‘Cassandra’ of the Daily Mirror described him, for which Liberace sued the Mirror – and won. It’s a sign of the times – the present time, that is, rather than the 1950s – that so much is made of this in these books, especially Beckett’s and Russell’s. By contrast, there’s not a word in either of them about the ‘classical’ music being composed then – Britten, Shostakovich, Martinu, Messiaen, Vaughan Williams, Bernstein, Poulenc, Kabalevsky’s Song of the Party Membership Card…. – which surely merits a footnote at least.

What popular culture’s relationship to the other developments taking place in 1956 was, however, is not explored here, apart from the obvious: that it expressed a vague spirit of revolt. The Montgomery bus boycott that started in December 1955 and the Budapest Rising of October 1956 were also expressions of revolt, but the connections between the music and the political activism here are not clear. These were very rarely ‘protest songs’. Likewise there were few if any explicitly ‘political’ novels or plays in 1956, at any rate in Britain; the critic DJ Taylor surmised that this was because ‘young writers seemed too committed to a sceptical and empirical attitude to be roused by political causes.’ (Again, I stand to be corrected on this.) But of course politics doesn’t need to be explicit. Just as contemporary American rednecks liked to claim that rock’n’roll was a cunning communist plot to demoralize American youth, ready for the Soviet tanks to move in, so Peter Fleming, elder brother of Ian, and a terrific harrumpher, thought he espied a Soviet ‘sixth column’ behind the trivialization of popular culture generally in his day. (This was in a novel published in 1952. The plot’s main agent was a figure spookily reminiscent of the late Terry Wogan, although the latter wasn’t to come on to our TV screens until the 1970s.) The Soviet gerontocracy harboured similar suspicions – this time with the capitalists as the plotters – about jazz and rock’n’roll. Fears like this may have lain behind the more strictly musical criticisms of this genre that were voiced in the 1950s: Frank Sinatra’s characterization of it, for example, as ‘phony’ music, ‘sung, played and written for the most part by cretins (There was a lot of this.) But it required a very conspiratorial frame of mind to believe that subverting the moral fabric of the nation was the deliberate motive behind rock’n’roll. Still, that could have been a side effect. More likely, however, is that it was a means of escape for the young from the world the oldies had imposed on them. There’s probably little more serious to say about it than that. (PS. I’ve nothing against it. I was hooked on it too.)

Beckett and Russell, in a nice conceit, begin their book by imagining ‘a tourist from the twenty-first century’ visiting 1950s Britain, and the shocks that he or she would encounter there. I guess that the greatest shocks would be for the women: essentially unliberated in 1956, second-class citizens, objectified, bound to the home, the only carers of small children, excluded from most responsible public jobs, demeaned in so many ways (if not idealized soppily), liable to be beaten and raped within marriage with little recourse except to hit back, as Ruth Ellis did – and she had just (in July 1955) been hanged for it: all in all not something I imagine most modern women would want to go back to. On the other hand, for Beryl Hinde of Enfield – born in 1933, so hardly one of ‘Thatcher’s children’ – ‘the ’50s were wonderful years. There was plenty of work and plenty of employment. People were happy.’ I couldn’t imagine being unemployed after school, either. And there were other compensations. One that Beckett and Russell lay great emphasis on is ‘the erosion of automatic respect for politicians, for ministers of religion or teachers, [and] for those who are richer or older than we are’ that was a feature of the mid-fifties. Yes, that was probably an important legacy, certainly in the field of popular culture, although it is worth mentioning that this was a charge that had been leveled against ‘the young’ periodically for centuries past. Another legacy, of Suez in particular, was the confirmation that Britain’s imperial time was up, though few of us outside the League of Empire Loyalists and the Daily Mail (just as choleric then as it is today: our twenty-first century tourist would not notice much difference there) bothered much about that; and the realization that we could no longer do anything as a nation if America didn’t want us to, which of course was the reason Eden had to pull out of Suez. That has bugged us ever since.

For me, however, the big thing about 1956 is the survival – from wartime – of a sense of hope, at least for men; of the idea that things could and probably would get better, for us individually, as a society, and as a world, if we went on as we were doing then: knitting the country together, becoming more social-liberal, and conceding to our colonies the freedoms we claimed for ourselves. Harold Macmillan, who succeeded Eden after the latter’s well-deserved fall after Suez (despite his own pro-Suez stance), proved expert in directing this, managing, as Beckett and Russell put it, ‘to make great change at headlong pace feel like a gentle amble over a grouse moor.’ That was the main thing distinguishing their world from ours, and feeding my emphatically non-Thatcherite nostalgia. There hasn’t been much hope around since her.

Well, one good thing – the public schoolboys have gone. (From the new Cabinet, that is.) Apart from Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson, who is there, I presume, to clean up the international mess he’s made. Or as a punishment, for the ‘cad’ he is: like Tom Brown being roasted by the school bullies in front of a fire. (Except that Boris would deserve it.) We’ll see how that goes.

Public schoolboys really are a menace in public office. Eton seems to regard it as a mark of distinction that it has provided so many British prime ministers in history – Cameron was the 19^th – but that’s hardly to its credit, for two reasons. The first is that it’s not the school that got them there, but the privileges and connections they brought with them to the school, and the not-necessarily-deserved kudos the name of the school bestowed on them. The second is that Eton’s prime ministers ought surely to be judged on how they perform in that role; and so many of them, up to and including Cameron, have been duds. The earlier ones included some goodies, including Walpole, Pitt, Canning, Gladstone and Salisbury; but it was easier when they were only expected to rule for their class, and keep the plebs under control. Then came democracy, and the quality immediately declined: Rosebery, Balfour, Douglas-Home and Cameron – with only Macmillan, in my opinion, leavening the dough. I imagine that’s because they were so out of touch with the mass of the people they were governing, apart from as servants and tenants. Osborne’s (St Paul’s) whole incumbency at the Exchequer, and his extraordinary belief that the ‘threat’ of lowering house prices would turn the general populace against Brexit, illustrate that. Quite apart from Bullingdon, and the dead pig-fucking thing.

I’ve no idea what they teach them at Eton nowadays – or, more to the point, in Cameron’s time. It all used to be Greek and Latin bolstered by ‘character forming’ team games and buggery, but I’m sure it’s changed now. I’ve given talks on History at a number of Public schools in the past (though not Eton), and have been impressed by their pupils’ reception of them, but without gaining much insight into what sort of History was on their everyday syllabuses – any social history, say? (I was there to talk about imperial history. They seemed at home with that.) The right sort of History can broaden boys’ and girls’ empathy, and compensate to a degree for their limited social upbringings. All I can say is that there’s little sign of this in the Public school products we see in Government today. Any exceptions in the past have usually picked up their social ‘empathy’ elsewhere: Attlee (Haileybury) through his work in the East End ‘settlement’ movement; and he, Churchill (Harrow) and Macmillan (Eton) from their wartime experiences with the ‘ordinary’ troops. Not from their schools.

So, well done Theresa. (Apart from Boris.) And well done, too, for the great Corbynite speech you gave on your succession, which, if you can do all those things – reduce inequality, curb the banks, ensure the economy works for all the people – will probably leave Corbyn with not a leg to stand on. Of course I’m still worried by a lot of her past baggage, dragged along from her stint as Home Secretary: especially her positions on surveillance and human rights. But again, let’s see.

Getting rid of the toffs is a great thing. But of course it doesn’t solve our problems on its own. For a start, it’s not the toffs who have been the original source of our oppression, but the bankers and other assorted capitalists, using the upper-upper classes for their own purposes. Secondly, based on my experience at Cambridge, you don’t need to be a genuine toff to be toffish. On my college ‘high table’ were a few Fellows of ‘lower’ birth and education, most of whom, however, aspired to be upper class, and for that reason adopted upper-class attitudes more zealously than those who were born to them. The latter could relax, and be quite reasonable and radical at times; the ‘grammar school oiks’ however needed to prove their Tory credentials. They were the worst. (Not me!) Some of them may be in Theresa May’s cabinet.

Meeting Kajsa at Gatwick Airport. I thought I’d need to fill her in on events here in Britain. Not a bit of it. The Swedish papers are full of it. They of course are gobsmacked. ‘Clearly’, one of Kajsa’s friends tells her, ‘the English are not like us.’ That’s typical Swedish politeness: she really meant ‘mad’. Indeed. Journalists there are comparing our recent party leadership battles with Shakespeare plays – which the Swedes know well. Having watched a recording of the BBC’s superb Henry VI Part III last night – the one where the Yorkists and Lancastrians all stab each other, usually in the back; the Bard’s other ‘Lady Macbeth’ features (Queen Margaret); and Dick III hobbles in – I’m inclined to agree. (Which is Theresa May – Margaret or Richard?) In Shakespeare’s case, of course, his art was reflecting life. Today it looks like life reflecting art. Do our leaders get too much Shakespeare at school? Or are we still the Terrible Tudors at heart?

Theresa May seems to have sorted it for the Conservative Party. She’s the best outcome for them, and a potential winner, I predict, so long as she can keep her Brexit wolves at bay. Some of those are already growling behind the lines, but they would be stupid to try to bring her down – yet. In the meantime May is in the process of stealing all Labour’s best lines (see my last post but one), so queering the latter’s pitch. And Labour – not being as clever as the Tories at this kind of thing – are tearing themselves apart over their leadership; making them unelectable in the short term, whoever’s fault we think that is.

Luckily, however, the Left has longer than the ‘short term’ to get its house in order. That’s the only comfort I can draw from May’s pronouncements yesterday: that she isn’t inclined to call an early election. That gives Labour a possible four years to sort itself out. And if a week – or even a day, as we saw yesterday – is a ‘long time in politics’, just think what we could do with 200 weeks!

When Corbyn was elected Labour leader last year I always saw the possibility of his being a temporary appointment, but a strong and reforming one, to make the party more democratic, kinder, more honest and less austerian than it had become under Blair. I also hoped that the electorate’s experience of this, with just a little bit of favourable media coverage, might persuade the electorate, too, that this ‘new’ kind of politics had a lot to be said for it. In other words, he could shift the ‘political discourse’. Then might be the time to hand the tiller over to someone with a more conventionally impressive leadership ‘style’, but still preserving Corbyn’s reforms, in time for the next election.

But it was clear to me then that this would require time. The threat of a ‘snap’ election that was opened up by the Referendum result seemed to put paid to that. Lots of people were saying that Cameron’s successor would need a direct electoral mandate. That may be one of the reasons for this sudden rush on the Labour benches to get rid of Corbyn straightaway, on the grounds that there was no time to be lost. Now, if May keeps her word, or is able to (you never know, her enemies in the Tory party might see Labour’s present troubles as the perfect opportunity to trigger another vote soon), Labour has been given a breathing spell.

They should use it. Changing a political climate takes time. Call the dogs off Corbyn, especially as there’s no credible alternative to him in the offing just now, certainly not Angela Eagle; let him stay and his reforms bed in; until a more generally acceptable Left-wing saviour can be found to take over. By that time several relatively junior MPs – including my own, Diana Johnson – could have grown into the role. Right now I’d go for Hilary Benn: I know he has some baggage, including warmongering over Syria and plotting against Corbyn; but he’s an intelligent guy and must have some of his Dad’s DNA still in him.

I suppose there’s no hope of finding Barbara Castle still alive somewhere? My greatest political disappointment was that she didn’t become our first woman prime minister, rather than the Witch of Grantham. What a difference that would have made!

Could it all be a cunning Establishment plot? We know they didn’t want Brexit, but they’ve got it. So, how to get out of it?

Well, there are those 1,000 lawyers telling us that pulling out of treaties is the responsibility of Parliament, not ‘the people’, and that referenda can only be ‘advisory’; so we could legally disregard this one. That’s certainly true, in strict constitutional law; we’re a parliamentary not a plebiscitary democracy. A majority of MPs are in favour of Britain’s membership of the EU, so they could, if they dared, vote to disregard the ‘advice’ of the referendum and block the withdrawal. Now that we have all had a glimpse of what Brexit really means to us, and have seen through the sugar-coated lies peddled to us by Brexit, you might get a majority the other way if you decided to re-run the vote. But, with the people in as discontented and fractious mood as they are now – nothing to do with Europe, but that was what they chose to vent their anger on – to go against the ‘popular will’, as originally expressed, might, as they say, ‘start a riot’. It certainly wouldn’t do anything to repair the schism in the Conservative party. So, it’s too risky, even for our lords and masters.

So, what to do? Everybody thought that a Brexit win would result in a Brexit-led government: Boris as PM, Michael Gove as Chancellor, Farage haunting the corridors. That was why some of us voted the other way. But then Boris and Gove stabbed each other, dropping them both out of the race for Tory leader, and Farage withdrew to ‘get his life back’, leaving very few other viable candidates for a Brexit PM. Andrea Leadsom was the best the Brexiteers could come up with, to stand against Theresa May; but then she dropped out as she – or her minders – realized how toxic her brand of Toryism would feel. Which left May standing alone: a Remainer, but promising to respect the ‘people’s will’ over Europe, and unopposed, now, which means that her candidacy won’t need to be tested in the blimpish Tory shires. (So we won’t have a Corbyn situation, with members and MPs at odds.) Whether this will satisfy the Tory backwoodspeople is yet to be seen. But then Tories are far more obsequious when it comes to ‘party discipline’. I can’t see them mounting a ‘Momentum’ to get Andrea back.

In the circumstances, it’s hard to see how it could have gone any better for the Establishment; or worse for Labour, as I hinted in my previous post. Theresa, who will be in charge of the negotiations with the EU, obviously doesn’t have her heart in ‘independence’, and could well succeed in watering it down. She might also appeal to a wide swathe of voters as a relative ‘moderate’, and a ‘safe pair of hands’, by contrast both with her three former rivals for leader of her party, and with the bickering Labourites on the other side. I wouldn’t be surprised if in some way the Establishment and its secret agencies were found to have engineered this whole thing. They’re clever chaps, these Public school-educated nobs. And they’ve got plenty of form.

We should keep an eye on Theresa May. (For foreign readers, or any Brit who’s just come out of a coma, she’s one of the two runners in the current Conservative party leadership contest, and consequently our likeliest next prime minister.) She delivered a remarkable speech today – remarkable, that is, for a Tory. Most press interest was concentrated on its references to Europe, still today’s hot topic, where May’s problem is that she was a ‘Remainer’ during the referendum, but will need – if she wins – to negotiate Britain’s way out of the EU. But what she says on domestic policy is probably more significant in the longer term. Here it is.

She promises to govern ‘for everyone, not just the privileged few’, which must be a stab at Cameron and Osborne. She vows to put her party ‘at the service of working people’. She advocates regulation of big business to put workers on boards, and curb excessive executive pay. She makes a big thing of ‘equality’, in terms of class, gender and race.

Right now, if you’re born poor, you will die on average nine years earlier than others. If you’re black, you’re treated more harshly by the criminal justice system than if you’re white. If you’re a white, working-class boy, you’re less likely than anybody else to go to university. If you’re at a state school, you’re less likely to reach the top professions than if you’re educated privately. If you’re a woman, you still earn less than a man. If you suffer from mental health problems, there’s too often not enough help to hand. If you’re young, you’ll find it harder than ever before to own your own home.

All terrific – if she means it. And this from a woman who a few years ago drew hostility from other Conservatives by describing them as ‘the nasty party’, in popular perception at least. Since then she’s not vouchsafed many new ideas, save on domestic security, where they appear somewhat alarming to liberals – the ‘Snoopers’ Charter’, complaining about the European Convention on Human Rights, and all that; holed up as she has been for seven years in the Home Office, and restricting her stated opinions to that narrow area of policy. But the ‘nasty party’ charge is likely to do her some good now, in convincing those ordinary Conservative members (who are the ones who will decide the new leader) who want something softer, in order to appeal to the wider electorate, than her rival, Andrea Leadsom, the neo-Thatcherite, evangelical Christian, family values, anti-gay marriage, anti-workers’ rights – and all the rest of the baggage that comes along with these ideas – is offering.

Of course the old Tory harrumphers in the shires – there are only 150,000 of them, average age about 65 – may well prefer Andrea’s stronger tipple. If she promised the return of flogging in schools in addition, that would probably do the trick. (Watch out for that.) In which case we’d get Thatcher Mark II as our new Prime Minister; and everything would be ghastly for the country; – but OK for Labour, perhaps.

OK, because it would give a genuinely left-wing opposition party – Labour, or a ‘People’s Front’, or whatever emerges from the current chaos on the Left – something to gets its teeth into at the next general election. As it is, May might seem to offer reasonable ‘progressives’ a viable alternative to current Conservatism, which takes on board many people’s concerns about the way things are going just now. It could bring the Tories back.

And then we would have the problem of knowing whether to trust her on issues like equality and bonuses; any more than we should have trusted Cameron – ‘we’re all in this together’ – last time, or any Conservative before him who has seduced us with similar honeyed promises. (Remember Thatcher’s ‘those words of St Francis….’?) Plus, there are some ambiguities in May’s statement – who exactly are ‘working people’, for example? – and a lot of things her rhetoric doesn’t cover: ‘snooping’ for a start, and Trident, and austerity, and TTIP, and foreign adventures – which we might still get along with the honey. So personally I’d prefer these reforms at a genuine egalitarian’s hands, thank you very much.

In effect, what May has done is what Disraeli accused the Tory Sir Robert Peel of doing in 1845: ‘caught the Whigs bathing, and walked away with their clothes.’ (For ‘Whigs’, read ‘socialists’.) Labour has been splashing around irresponsibly, throwing water (and worse) over each other, at the very time it ought to be coming together and mounting an attack on this desperately wounded government. Meanwhile May is, unobserved, up on the beach stealing their best policies, in a bid to trump them next time. It’s farcical, as is most of the rest of British politics just now. (I can’t wait for when I get back to Sweden, and sanity.) I hope the Labour MPs responsible for this will feel ashamed of themselves, if and when May becomes PM, and then trounces them at the next election. As May just Might.

*

PS. 11.30 am, breaking news. Leadsom has just dropped out. Does that mean May is the only one left in? Won’t that make the Brexiters cross? Couldn’t they draft Gove (always a Brexiter) in? We’ll see.

After all that has gone on these last two weeks, it feels like the End.  Not of the world, exactly, although if the people who back Brexit are the same as those who deny man-made climate change, that may not be long a-coming. Nor, necessarily, of ‘life as we know it’, though if Brexit upsets my relationship with Kajsa in Sweden it might put a dent in my life. (I’m applying for Swedish citizenship, just in case.) It certainly has the potential to mark the end of Great Britain, quite literally: the ‘Great’ there, of course, originally intended not to express any vainglory, as some foreigners appear to think, but simply that the country comprised more than just England. If Scotland scurries back, independently, to the comfort of the EU, that will be the end of that. (One wag has suggested calling the rump ‘the Former United Kingdom’, as in ‘the Former Yugoslavia’; or ‘FUK’.)

More than this, however, the past fortnight – Brexit, plus the Chilcot Report, plus the drubbing in football by Iceland, and all against the background of a capitalist crisis – could be said to mark the symbolic end of the old British Empire. That will be a boon for us imperial historians, who have never quite been able before now to decide when we should stop. (Or start, for that matter; but that’s another question.) My own The Lion’s Share. A History of British Imperialism (1975) had to have a chapter added to each of its four subsequent editions, as the life or afterlife of the old Empire meandered on. The latest one (2012) covered the Iraq War. This last couple of weeks have finally brought ‘closure’ to that.

There are several other dates and events one could choose for the end of the Empire – or at least, for the beginning of the end. Favourite ones are the two World Wars, Indian self-government, the Suez crisis, Macmillan’s ‘winds of change’ speech, the cession of Hong Kong, and even – going back further – the Boer War (1899-1902). Or earlier still, if you want to argue, as I do, that the Empire carried the seeds of its destruction within it from the start. But whenever we think it’s all over, something else pops up to remind us that it isn’t quite done with yet: a war in a piece of the Empire that was somehow left over, like the Falklands; a long-term repercussion of our past misadventures in various parts of the world; all those island tax havens in our ‘dependent territories’; or – more generally and probably permanently – the further spread of the old Imperial language throughout the world. And, of course, the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq in 2003.

Chilcot has brought this particular manifestation of British imperialism to a close; although not of course for its victims, either in the Middle East or among the families of British soldiers killed there. It has been denied; but of course the Iraq War was a manifestation of British imperialism, or one type of imperialism: the ‘Liberal’ kind that was invented around the turn of the twentieth century, to divert criticism from its more acquisitive sort, and boasting more altruistic motives than had been associated with ‘imperialism’ before then. Under Blair it was re-named ‘liberal’ or ‘humanitarian interventionism’, but it was essentially the same: taking over countries, temporarily or permanently, in order to liberate them from evil – slavery, civil war, indigenous tyrants, the Germans, Saddam, or whatever. I’m personally convinced that this was Blair’s genuine motivation in Iraq, although I’m not so certain about his oil-greedy American allies. And of course this doesn’t excuse Blair for his – possibly criminal – misjudgements. Poor judgment has been at least as dangerous in history as wickedness. A study of the chequered history of earlier British imperial exploits – Gladstone in Egypt, for example – might have taught him that. (He could have got it from The Lion’s Share.) Nonetheless, the Chilcot Report has surely put an end for good to this kind of liberal imperialism on Britain’s part. And the recent drama of it all has ensured that – surely – the lesson won’t be forgotten.

For a historian it’s a happy coincidence that this came in the wake of these two other quite cathartic events: Brexit, which interrupted the continuity of British international history in just as dramatic a way, as well as potentially breaking up the Kingdom; and ‘England 1, little Iceland 2’. The latter struck me because it reminded me of a fictional incident I once read in a speculative novel by Peter Fleming, the brother of Ian and a bit of a right-wing nutter (The Sixth Column, 1966), which had the English cricket team being humiliated by a West African XI, as I remember, as the country finally ‘went to the dogs’. OK, the Iceland débacle wasn’t all that significant; but coming as it did in combination with Chilcot and Brexit it could be said to dramatise the crisis amusingly. (Kajsa was amused, at any rate.)

So, if I write any more British Imperial history books, I’ll now know when to finish: those two weeks from 23 June to 6 July 2016. That’s when, after years of slow Decline, the British Empire suddenly and finally Fell. Full stop. – This really is a great historical moment that we Brits are living through. Savour it! As a citizen I’m worried. As an imperial historian, however, I’m thrilled. It means I can now pen the final page, and retire.