Porter’s Pensées

Is privacy a particularly British obsession? Walking round our snowy Stockholm suburb the other night, well after dark, I was struck by how every ground-floor room was open to view from the outside, lights full on, no curtains in any of the windows, inhabitants getting on with their eating, drinking, talking, watching TV – or whatever – in full view of every passer-by; in a way that would be virtually inconceivable in England. Kajsa tells me she is just as shocked by all the closed curtains in Hull at night as I am by the lack of them in Enskede.

This must indicate an important difference between our (my) two nations. Swedes don’t mind if people know what they’re up to. Within limits, of course; but those limits extend much further than lighted windows. Even their tax returns can – as I understand it – be accessed by members of the public. Just imagine a Brit being confronted with that; or, to take a recent and controversial example, an American ex-President. It would be regarded as an attack on one of their fundamental human rights. Every man – and woman – is – pace Donne – ‘an island, entire unto himself’; and neither the State nor anyone else has the right to pry into his or her affairs.

This would help explain Britain’s historical objection to ‘espionage’, in principle, in the 19^th and much of the 20^th centuries, about which I’ve written in Plots and Paranoia. It was considered to be almost the worst of all political crimes, even if employed to discover murderers and terrorists. ‘I would rather a hundred people had their throats cut in Radcliffe Highway’, said a member of the House of Lords in 1830 (I think), after a particularly horrible murder spree, ‘than to be subjected to these French methods of policing.’ (I may have the quotation slightly wrong; but the correct version is in Plots and Paranoia.) Yes, I know: Sherlock Holmes used disguises. But this was part of his essential un-Britishness, which the good Dr Watson was there to counter-balance.

I used to share some of that distaste myself, instinctively – probably inherited from my own Britishness. For years I resiled against surveillance cameras in the streets, secret services, and even identity cards. Privacy was an essential pillar of our liberties, I thought, saving us from oppression from any agency that might have more than the most essential access to our affairs. Now, after 25 years (off and on) in Sweden, I feel slightly differently.

In a way it comes down to our understanding of democracy. If everyone in a democratic community has an equal share in saying how that community is run, then surely he or she ought to know how the other members of that community are affected by how it is run presently. That applies to the poorest and most disadvantaged ones, but also to those in the middle, and at the ‘top’. Democracy requires transparency; which ‘privacy’ is the enemy of. So, draw back the curtains, Brits, and let us all gaze in.

As an 81-year old I’ve never known a bunch of leading politicians as sheerly incompetent, corrupt and stupid, even laughably so, as our present British lot; and as a historian I’ve never read of one – at any rate since the days of the Roman Emperor Caligula. Caligula is supposed to have made his horse a senator; the modern-day equivalent of that is probably David Cameron’s elevation of the lingerie-entrepreneur Michelle Mone  – ‘Baroness Bra’ – to the House of Lords. And just look at the rest of them: Boris Johnson, Nigel Farage, Priti Patel, Rishi Sunak, Suella Braverman, Jacob Rees-Mogg, Michael Gove… pantomime villains and clowns all of them. All we need now is a cross-dressing ‘Dame’, and they could open in time for Christmas at the New Theatre Hull.

Just recently I’ve been writing the Autobiography that I thought I never would; making it into a kind of chronicle of the last eighty years as they appeared to my kind, so that it won’t only be about boring old me. I’ve written three chapters so far, taking me up to 1968; but with decreasing enthusiasm. So I’m taking a rest from it now to prepare for our Swedish Christmas; and then for a genuine Christmas dinner a couple of days afterwards.

One of the things that make life bearable here for Anglos at Christmas is ‘Taylor and Jones’ British butchers in Hantverkargatan, Stockholm, where we’ll be getting our turkey and all the trimmings. Every Swede I’ve talked to admits that he or she prefers our Christmas dinners to the Swedish herring and cold ham. So why don’t they take it on? Or would that be ‘cultural appropriation’; or submitting to British ‘informal imperialism’?

Anyway: plenty of snow here to make it look Christmassy. Temperatures down to minus 20. We’ll be returning to Blighty on January 10^th; to meet ‘our’ Ukrainian family and get them settled in to life in Hull. I wonder if they’ll take to fish and chips and Rugby League? But if they don’t, a Ukrainian restaurant has just opened up locally. There seems in fact to be plenty of support for them in Hull. Expect further reports in this blog on this whole new experience; for the Ukrainans of course, but also for us.

Until then: Веселого Різдва. (I think.)

In Britain they make conditions so dreadful for refugees that – or so Suella Braverman hopes – they’ll all be deterred from applying. So we get asylum seekers locked up in disease-ridden camps, or run-down B&Bs, or dumped in London railway termini, or flown off to an unsafe African country – if those Lefty lawyers will allow it – or left to themselves and the elements in flimsy rubber boats to drown in the English Channel.

Here in Sweden – which I believe has admitted far more foreign refugees per head of population than Britain – they do things differently; erecting new temporary homes with all mod cons, and state support, for them to live in while their asylum applications are being processed. Here’s a couple of a long row of them I photographed five years ago, out in the countryside, but only a short walk from a supermarket and other amenities. They’re now erecting some more on an old sports field across the road from where we live in Stockholm, with a children’s playpark attached to them. OK, so they’re not palaces, but are comfortable enough, and evidence of a degree of compassion that is unimaginable in our awful British Home Secretary.

I’m thinking once again of writing something semi-autobiographical. Have I mentioned this before? Anyway, here’s my new first draft of a Preface. Whether it will go much further I can’t tell. But it’s something to do, during the cold Swedish winter.

My ‘Ukes’, by the way – the Ukrainian refugee family I’m ‘hosting’ in Hull – will arrive in mid-January. Kajsa and I will be meeting them at Manchester Airport and taking them over by train – if our appalling Northern rail company (private, of course) obliges. I may follow up here with an account of our experiences with them.

A HISTORY OF MY TIME

And from my perspective

Bernard Porter

Foreword

Every history book is written from a perspective, however much its author seeks to allow and compensate for the distortions this will give rise to. In fact historians are generally better at that – at compensating – than other kinds of authors, aware as we are through our researches of the subjectivity of positions taken in the past. One easy way of compensating is for them to try to be open about our own biases and prejudices, often in ‘Introductions’ or ‘Prefaces’ to our books, describing ‘where we come from’, so that readers can be aware of our particular ‘slants’ and discount them if they wish. I’ve done this in my most recent books. One drawback to this approach is that very often we simply aren’t aware of the deepest influences on us – just as our historical subjects were not; but again, it helps to be aware of that. A second drawback is that readers might fall into the opposite error, of assuming that everything we write is totally conditioned by our early experiences. (‘Oh, so that’s why he’s a Tory’ – or a Leftie, or whatever.) I believe – or want to believe – that in my case at least, most of my published views have been formed by research, some degree of objective reasoning, and thought.

However, this book is rather different. It doesn’t claim or pretend to be absolutely objective, although it is not deliberately deceptive. It’s an account of how the world genuinely appeared to me, from the moment of my birth in February 1941, through the next eighty years; which I hope won’t be quite my last. Or rather: it’s an account of how I remember the world appearing to me, which adds another layer of subjectivity to it. Obviously my first few years appear somewhat hazy to me, and so I’ll have to fill in with what I’ve been told. (There’s the third layer.) Thereafter I’ll be describing what I recall of the impressions and concerns of a boy, a young man, a middle-aged man and an elderly man, in different places, different social contexts, and at different stages of my mental development. Most of it will relate to events outside of me, especially political, and my reactions to them. It will not be a personal autobiography, which for someone as boring as me would not be very interesting, might turn out to be embarrassing if it were complete and honest (my early sexual fumblings, for example, though they will be mentioned, decorously), and the whole idea of which strikes me as rather self-indulgent. The personal will come into it – indeed it will need to, in order to provide the account with a structure – but only if I think I can make points of wider relevance thereby. ‘Sexual fumblings’, for example, might serve to illustrate the general innocence of the time and class I grew up in. For the whole purpose of this book is to describe the history of the last 80 years, but from a particular standpoint.

I began writing it in unusual circumstances; although they may become more usual in the future, if occurrences of the pandemic we were suffering from then become a recurring feature of our future history. As a member of a ‘vulnerable group’, due to my age and an ‘underlying condition’, I was living with my partner Kajsa in quarantine on ‘our’ island in the Stockholm Archipelago, unable to return to Britain even if I wanted to – and there were reasons, which will appear later, why I chose to spend most of my time in Sweden – and so cut off from the papers and diaries that could have added flesh to the very bare bones of the personal story that appears here. Which of course was no great loss if I wanted to avoid autobiography, and focus on the general history that I could retrieve from the internet. Our island stuga may look primitive, but it has wi-fi; and it furnishes an ideal writing environment, without the distractions – social gatherings, and the like – that more ‘civilised’ settings inevitably impose. And during two ice-bound Swedish winters, a wood-burning stove and a newly-purchased luftvärmepump kept it comfortably warm.

Thinking back now, as I’ve not really done before the idea of writing this account occurred to me (I’m not a great one for nostalgia), I’m no longer so certain that my life and experiences have been quite as ‘boring’ as I’ve always assumed. I’ve lived through a momentous period in British history, from the depths of war to the collapse of the post-war consensus; taking in the loss of a world-wide empire, entry into and then exit from the post-war European Union, the creation and later dismantling of a welfare state, the social emancipation (to an extent) of women, foreign immigration and its repercussions, a revolution in popular music, sexual liberation following the spread of efficient means of contraception, a ‘cold war’ that threatened to become hotter under the shadow of ‘The Bomb’, the establishment of television as people’s main source of information and entertainment, the whole computer/internet thing, men on the moon, huge changes in the character of the popular Press, even greater changes in eating habits, several frightening pandemics even before Covid, the commercialisation of ‘the People’s Game’ (football), the entire reign of Britain’s longest-living monarch… and much more.

My own place in this history has never been a leading or even a particularly active one, but it is one that has enabled me to observe it from a number of different points of view. That is because of my anomalous and shifting position in the all-important class structure of Britain – or of England, anyway – giving me what I think is an unusual insight into the situations, and especially the prejudices, of them all. My immediate family were aspirant lower-middle class; my paternal grandparents working class; at school I mixed with middle-middle class boys; and at university with the upper and public school-educated classes and even a few aristocrats. I got on pretty well with all of them. (The aristos were very kind.) In university vacations I worked in a factory, and in theatres. My profession has been as an academic, at various different types of university and in three or four countries; specialising in British imperial history, for which I was sometimes mistaken to be an imperialist. I was brought up a Methodist, but enjoyed Anglican church services, and their architecture even more. I was a member of the Labour party for a long period, but no longer. (The ‘no longer’ may give a hint as to my political proclivities today.) I’ve experienced marriage with a Scots-Irish wife, fatherhood, divorce, and a new relationship, this time with a Swede. I’ve lived in both the south and the north of England. I travelled extensively in Europe as a young man, and more later, when I also lived for fairly long periods in the USA and Australia. The only substantial gap in this catalogue of life-experiences is women and girls, whom I scarcely got to know as a boy, or even at university, in my single-sex college; which will explain – I’m sure – those ‘fumblings’. If all these life-experiences have affected my research, teaching and writing in my adult years, they are at least various enough to have likely influenced them in divergent ways. And there are still my attempts at scholarly ‘objectivity’ to set against all of them.

So, on to the substance: the last eighty years of British – and world – history, as seen through the eyes of someone like me; biases and all.

By the Swedish satirical artist and writer Max Gustafson. (My thanks to Kajsa, who found it!)

Why is it that so many of the leading and most right-wing members of our present British government are former subjects, or the children of subjects, of the old British Empire? Not a majority of them, of course. And not all ex-colonial subjects are right-wing Conservatives – there are probably more of them sitting on the Labour benches; plus of course the current mayor of London. But it is surprising to find so many of them on the Tory side – prime minister Sunak (India), Patel (India, Uganda), Braverman (India, Kenya, Mauritius), Kwarteng (Ghana), Cleverly (mother from Sierra Leone), to name only the most prominent of them – if we bear in mind their family origins in what are conventionally supposed to have been countries oppressed and exploited by the British in the past, and especially by the forebears of the reactionaries they’re now siding with. One would have thought that Amritsar, or the Kenyan death camps, or – failing these – the reputation of most British colonial rulers as arrogant racists, would have put them off. But no.

Does this make them traitors to their kinds, or to their ‘races’, or ethnic groups; or make them into – as it used to be called – ‘Uncle Toms’? Surely this does them a disservice. Ideally one’s views and allegiances should not depend at all on one’s background, and certainly not on one’s ethnic, national or even class ‘origins’. My own grandparents, as it happens, were exploited and oppressed factory and domestic workers – two ‘races’ usually forgotten in the current concern for the colonial victims of capitalism – but I wouldn’t let that stop me from supporting their oppressors’ Tory or Liberal successors today; especially if I were convinced of the latters’ change of mind since. Among today’s Tories there are several who clearly hanker for the old imperial days, and a few who have floated ideas of reviving them in a more ‘internationalist’ guise – ‘global Britain’, as Boris Johnson would have it; but none – so far as I know – who have wanted to run formal colonies again: ‘heaven forfend’. (That’s Johnson once more.) They’ve got beyond this, perforce. So there’s nothing wrong, and indeed rather the reverse, about supporting causes and political parties solely with reference to the issues of the day, and without this kind of personal-historical baggage poisoning or in other ways affecting your views. Sunak and the rest are to be complimented on taking this road.

This doesn’t however mean that they are necessarily free from other influences in their backgrounds. Very few people are. The most obvious one is their riches, which are vast in several of their cases, especially Rishi Sunak’s if you lump his wife’s inherited millions in with his. That puts them in a category which far outranks in importance their ethnic or national origins; and gives them a tribal allegiance or ‘identity’ which sets them apart from others at least as much as their brown skins do. I’m not sure that the genuine and literal ‘racists’ in our present society think this way – what do they make of Sunak? – but most present-day Tories seem to. For them money (as I’ve said before) trumps everything. – A second ‘identifying’ factor for most of them (not all) is their Public School education, which seems intentionally designed to mould them into a separate and superior ‘caste’ from the rest of us. Now that our ex-colonial Tories have fully integrated into this section of British society – a tribute, perhaps, to British racial tolerance, although it’s not often credited – they can choose, or assume, their identities from among the indigenous ones. It may be worth noting in this connexion that all of them are second-generation immigrants from the old empire, not first. That eases the process of integration, and the shedding of their original skins. So we shouldn’t make too much of their brownness.

Otherwise, what relevance might these people’s remarkable rise to the top of the Conservative Party have for the historian (me) of the institution – the tail-end of the British Empire – they have risen from? One effect the Empire might have contributed in this regard was to protect or inoculate their parents, and consequently them, from the liberal and democratic traditions that infused British society – or much of it – in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but were scarcely allowed to touch the colonies until the era of formal decolonisation, by which time it was too late. This might have surprised many contemporary Brits, who were brought up regarding their empire – if they regarded it at all; see my The Absent-minded Imperialists – as an essentially liberal enterprise (don’t laugh), devoted to spreading British liberal values among the benighted ‘natives’, who would eventually be grateful to the Brits for bequeathing those values to them. It was called ‘liberal imperialism’, and it – the myth, or deception, if you like, although much of it was genuine – was a major reason why so many liberal-minded Britons went along with the Empire; that, rather than because of the ‘power’ it represented.

But it rarely reached down to Britain’s imperial subjects themselves. They after all had to be ruled, before being let free to exercise their new liberal ideals and skills; and being ruled doesn’t give one much insight into those ideals. (An exception was probably economic liberalism, which they all seem well-schooled in, and which the British Empire allowed.) That was probably the political environment in which Rishi Sunak’s parents and the rest were brought up, before colonial peoples discovered ‘freedom’ for themselves. And Rishi’s and Kwasi’s peculiar English schooling (Winchester, Eton), will not of course have helped. Public schools are hardly liberal or democratic institutions, either.

This might explain the authoritarian tendencies we can see very clearly in the policies of Britain’s two recent ex-colonial Home Secretaries, which seem far distant from dominant British liberal traditions, but much closer to the Empire’s divergent ways (including British Ireland’s) in its final days. Could this be one of the major ‘legacies’ of empire, currently?

Villagers near where I live in the UK are objecting to asylum seekers being accommodated in a local hotel. They even took it to the High Court in order to get it stopped, but lost. ‘If you’re so keen on foreign refugees, why don’t you put them up yourselves?’ as I heard one shouting.

Well, I’m doing just that. I applied a few months ago, and my chosen Ukrainians – four of them: father, mother and two teenaged daughters – now tell me that they’ve been given permission to live in the UK for three years. The house is ready for them, and Kajsa and I have both been through the police checks to make sure we’re not murderers, white slave traders or child rapists. (We passed them all.) Exactly when our new guests are coming we’re not sure yet, but we’ll be back in Hull to meet them and sort things out for them. I’ve already learned the Ukrainian for ‘Hello’ (привіт).

I’m surprised to find out how very many Brits are doing what we’re doing, and the range of both official and voluntary services there are, even in Hull, to help the Ukrainians, and also us, their ‘hosts’. Is it just because they’re victims of the hated Putin (as the ‘boat people’ generally aren’t)? Even so, it exemplifies a level of generosity towards persecuted foreigners that might surprise those North Ferriby protestors.

And it relates back to an old ‘patriotic’ tradition in Britain, about which I wrote in my The Refugee Question in Mid-Victorian Politics (1979-ish). Providing a safe haven for foreign refugees was one of Britain’s proudest traditions in the nineteenth century; cherished at least as much as her empire was. ‘Every civilized people on the face of the earth,’ thundered The Times in 1853, ‘must be fully aware that this country is the asylum of nations, and that it will defend that asylum to the last source of its treasure, and the last drop of its blood. There is no point whatever on which we are prouder and more resolute’. Of course things were different then…

Anyway, I’m looking forward to welcoming ‘my’ Ukrainians, and introducing them to fish patties and Rugby League.

At the age of 81 (82 if you count it from conception) I realise that I have very little time left to me for writing. Which may be just as well, in view of the abject failure of my latest book, Britain’s Contested History, to be even noticed by reviewers; partly because its argument has been superseded by events, but also – no doubt – because it isn’t very good. My powers are failing, together with my memory and my arthritic joints. So I shall have to rely on my past efforts to sustain any academic reputation I may carry with me from the grave. How do those efforts measure up? (I’m thinking here only in terms of my publications; I’m not well placed to assess my record as a teacher, father and all the rest, and far too nervous to attempt it.)

My major textbook, The Lion’s Share, the first objective and balanced history, I think, of British imperialism, is still doing extraordinarily well, going through six editions from 1975 to 2021. Better still, I was told it was banned by one American State school system for appearing to suggest that Christianity was a ‘superstition’. I regard that as an accolade. But a number of my subsequent books have failed just as abjectly as Contested History. The two major flops were Britain, Europe and the World: Delusions of Grandeur (1983), and Britannia’s Burden (1994), both ‘general’ interpretive histories. I still think they were good – I don’t write rubbish deliberately – but they obviously didn’t suit the market, which is overstocked in this area anyway. My books about nineteenth-century refugees and secret political policing fulfilled their purpose as scholarly works, adding to our knowledge. My little diversion into Victorian architecture, The Battle of the Styles (2011), was pretty well ignored, except by an architectural historian who objected to the fact that I didn’t keep to the accepted architectural history conventions, but instead sought to set the subject in a broader historical context; which was in fact the whole purpose of the book, and the way I think most art history ought to be written. My more recent works on the British empire – one of them, Empire and Superempire (2006), comparing it to the American – seem to have been pretty well noticed over there. I’ve no idea how well my recent collections of essays – mainly reprinted from the London Review of Books, which has now given up on me – have done. Or my more occasional pieces on Europhobia, national identity, Norway and Sweden, Elgar, and Brexit.

Clearly I’ve published too much. But what impact has it all had on readers’ thinking about – in particular – the British Empire? One of The Lion’s Share’s overarching themes was that the Empire was not the great powerful entity it was supposed to be at the time, and indeed could be seen as a product of national weakness in a number of ways, rather than of strength. I’m not sure that this has significantly infiltrated into present-day popular ideas about the old Empire, either on the neo-imperial Right, which wants something to celebrate, or among the anti-imperialist Left, which needs a powerful bogey to combat; but there it is. My two most obviously influential works were Critics of Empire (1968, new edition 2011), establishing that anti-imperialism was as important a tradition in British national life as were any of the pro-imperial ideologies that were around in the high imperial age; and indeed that anti-imperialism could be said to have been invented in Britain, which imperialism of course was not; and secondly The Absent-Minded Imperialists (2004), using new methodology to undermine – as I reckoned – the idea that the Empire and imperialism dominated British culture and society to the extent claimed by one influential school of history, and assumed by many others. That latter theme is still hotly debated today, which would indicate that the book had some impact.

It’s not however the impact I would have ideally liked; and I hope it’s not the only one. Throughout my writing career I’ve wanted to convey the complexity of history, and in particular of historical causation; with – in effect  – motives, and therefore individual people, not necessarily playing as large a part in the way things worked out as did ‘broad impersonal currents’, and a myriad of other factors, including even ‘accident’. With regard to ‘imperialism’ this is particularly important, with the word itself covering and muddling very different phenomena, which if they are not disaggregated can confuse and distort the picture. The old adage – define your terms – is an essential part of this.

I once suggested at a conference that we imperial historians place a moratorium on the very use of the ‘I’-word for – say – five years, in order to force us to find other terms to describe the particular phenomena we were alluding to; in the interests of clarity, and even – if this is ever a realisable objective – of truth. No-one seems to have taken me up on it. ‘Imperialism’ is still bandied about indiscriminately. So that lesson hasn’t struck home. And at 81 (or 82) it’s too late now for me to do anything about it.

Back now in sensible Sweden; whose newspapers report British politics pretty accurately – Dagens Nyheter’s UK correspondent lives in London and is married to, or partnered by, an Engelsman – but hardly flatteringly. From over here the goings-on in my country of birth appear almost unbelievable, and inconceivable to the ever-rational Swedes; although with politics pretty fluid here currently, and crazy Trumpian opinions just beginning to emerge, that may not last.

Of course the Swedes are right as regards Britain: ‘O wad some Power the giftie gie us, to see oursels as others see us!’ (Burns, of course. Trust the Scots.) British government is indeed descending into what seems to be very much like farce just now; not merely error and stupidity (Brexit), but something far crazier. Boris started it, and was admired by those who appreciated the fun he injected into politics. Then we had, briefly, the inordinately stupid Liz Truss, who in just a few weeks brought the British economy to its knees. Now we’ve got the already disgraced Matt Hancock MP, putting the ‘fun’ before everything, including proper politics and his own constituents, by appearing in a popular TV ‘reality’ programme, I’m a Celebrity: Get me out of here; where he has to sleep rough in an Australian jungle and endure crawling among rats and poisonous spiders in the dark, and with shit poured on him, before eating ostrich anuses (ani?) and raw kangaroo penises (penes?), in full camera view. (That’s as reported. I’ve not watched it myself.) Hancock claims he’s doing this in order to bring politics to the people; but it’s hard to avoid the suspicion that his £400,000 fee didn’t have something to do with it. And then there’s Gavin Williamson (with his bullying and his pet tarantula), Nadine Dorries (another anus-eating I’m a Celebrity contestant); and always, of course, those two pre-eminent clowns Nigel Farage and Jacob Rees-Mogg, to keep the farcical side of this whole theatrical event, a.k.a. a ‘Tory Government’, in full public view. Would Sweden, or any other country on earth, tolerate this kind of thing? Although they might recognise it in Britain’s case from Monty Python – ever popular in Sweden – and, if they go back that far, the Goon Show. But those weren’t meant to be real. They are now.

Programmes like this however may have been partly responsible for diluting the seriousness of British politics. That’s what many of the political clowns I’ve just referenced seem to lack any appreciation of. Many people – Tories especially – seem to go into politics not in order to further great causes (or even minor ones), but simply as a career opportunity, and as a kind of game, there for the ‘winning’, by fair means or foul. Other TV programmes, not intended to be comedic, contribute to this. House of Cards, West Wing, The Thick of It, and even the excellent Danish Borgen, concentrated almost exclusively on individual character, machinations, plots and personalities, to the detriment of what Tony Benn used to call ‘the ishoos’; as they are probably bound to, as dramas involving actors, and so requiring their audiences to empathise – or otherwise – with them as people. This of course goes back a long way. Shakespeare’s political plays – Julius Caesar, King Lear, the English ‘Histories’, Macbeth, Anthony and Cleopatra – oh, most of them – are exactly the same. That’s how (educated) Britons learn their politics. (And it’s probably how Boris Johnson will frame his study of Shakespeare – if he ever gets back to writing it, in between his luxurious holidays in Mustique.) Most people only appreciate politics as personal drama. Look at all the coverage of it in the tabloid press today.

Has it ever been better? I remember its being at least a little less trivial from the 1950s through to the 1970s – maybe a little longer – before the popular press became quite as ‘down’ on politics and politicians as it is today. But the press is just another branch of ‘entertainment’, after all. And for many of its readers farce is the most appealing genre of entertainment; including the Whitehall sort.

I’m so depressed these days that I find it hard to understand how everybody else in Britain isn’t depressed too. Apart of course for those who are selfishly profiting from the present situation; and I should have thought that even some of them might feel a few shivers of apprehension about whither this may be leading us all.

Personally, I have no substantial reason to be depressed, apart from the usual old-age infirmities, and the fact that my latest book seems to have been superseded by events and sunk like a lead balloon. (I pleaded with the publishers to bring it out earlier, but publishing has a dynamic of its own.) Both of those setbacks I’m pretty well reconciled to. I’m not yet seriously affected by rising prices or the demolition of the welfare state, apart from not being able to see a doctor any more (vide supra). I long ago lost my libido, which was a tremendous relief. (No more lusting after women. I could appreciate them for who they were.) I have the love of a good woman, of a dog (it loves everyone), and of my children (I like to think). I have a bolt-hole to escape to, in the much more politically congenial environment of Sweden, although from what Kajsa tells me that congeniality may be under threat from the Swedish Right soon. (They’re aping Priti and Suella over the immigration of refugees, of which I consider myself to be one – a refugee from Brexit. If I hadn’t got my Swedish citizenship three years ago, I might not be granted it now.) I can always move there for good, and leave the toxic UK behind. So, there’s very little to depress me in my personal life. I’m one of a uniquely fortunate generation, country and class, with just enough money to get by on, and no wars that I’ve needed to get involved in: except to protest against. That’s half the trouble: I feel guilty for feeling like this when I have nothing to feel like this about. And that makes me even more depressed.

Concerned friends ply me with cures for my depression: medicines (currently I’m on Fluoxetine – it doesn’t seem to be helping), or healthier food, or more exercise, and in one case ‘magic mushrooms’. (I gave that a miss.) I’ve even tried psycho-analysis – for about a week. No relief.

But I’m beginning to feel anyway that this is entirely the wrong approach. It’s predicated on the assumption that depression is an illness, a malfunction, something that has gone wrong in my body or my psyche; whereas I think it may be normal. It’s the happy and untroubled people who are ill. I get irritated by pictures of people looking cheerful, and by anyone joking merrily on TV. The fools! Don’t they know?

We currently have a crazy, malevolent and incompetent government. The popular Press are lying to us. The Russians are coming. Capitalism is about to implode. Britain is in danger of going full-on Fascist, before the earth roasts to a frazzle, and (eventually) plunges into the sun. The Left is powerless, in the face of vested interests, rich capitalist propagandists, and public ignorance. And all folk can do is obsess about royalty (who don’t really matter), football, soap opera stars, and ‘reality’ TV. Or about gender, racism and ‘wokeness’ generally, for the rather more serious.  – But just look around you. We’re doomed!!  Isn’t that enough to make depression the normal and only rational way of reacting to our situation? From which it follows that cheerfulness and apathy are the real ‘illnesses’ of society.

Or is this just for now, when the American mid-terms look ominous, Cop-27 seems bound to fail, the British government is packed with proto-fascists, even Sweden is sliding into reaction, the weather (in Hull) is cold and damp; and I’ve simply got out of bed the wrong side?

As an oldie, I look back fondly nowadays to the 1950s and ’60s, when – whatever our privations, and the threat of ‘The Bomb’ – we at least had hope. (I wrote a piece on this for the Times Literary Supplement, 23 December 2016; republished in my Britain Before Brexit, 2021, chapter 11.) That was under the Labour governments of Attlee and Wilson, and the only slightly less progressive Tory government of Macmillan. Capitalism was tamed. Colonies were winning their freedom. We were about to enter a partnership with our new European friends. Gays were about to be liberated. Things were getting better, for everyone: even workers and women. A sunny future for all beckoned, under social democracy.

It’s this – the loss of hope – that I think is getting me down these days. There seems to be no cure for that. Hence the Black Dog. I hope this post doesn’t spread it to others. That would make me even more depressed.