Amazon.se is up and running, rather to my surprise – I hope its employment practices meet Swedish trade union standards – and is the only supplier I can find here that can provide me with a particular item I want: a 23 year-old book co-authored by Jacob Rees Mogg’s father, which Alastair Campbell claims explains the deep-laid strategy of today’s leading Brexiteers. 

Now that Johnson has ‘got Brexit done’, we can see whether the book’s prediction comes true. It’s called The Sovereign Individual, and broadly speaking appears to be a template for a ‘New’ anarcho-liberal non-State. That figures. Could it be called a ‘conspiracy’, too? Here’s Campbell’s summary: https://www.tortoisemedia.com/2020/12/15/alastair-campbell-the-23-year-old-book-that-explains-brexit-and-beyond/.

If Amazon.se is to be trusted, the book should reach our island tomorrow. Interestingly, when I ordered it, Amazon.se already had all my details from my Amazon.uk account.

We’ve got the champagne in; so at midnight CET tomorrow we can celebrate both the New Year, and Britain’s liberation from the Beast of Brussels. It will be good to do it from 915 miles away.

I thought we could do with some cheerful thoughts, as we approach the end of this dreadful year. So here goes.

In about 7.5 billion years’ time our earth – or the shrivelled, scorched remnant of it – will fall into the sun, and disappear. Long before then, in just a few million years, life on it – ‘as we know it, Jim’ – will have become impossible. With present rates of climate change, it might get pretty unbearable far sooner. Fires and floods will sweep over the earth; the continents will shrink; and most living things will starve. – Feeling better now?

In fact that’s what comforts me at night when I contemplate the world today, and my own tiny contribution to it; all the opportunities I’ve missed – the books I haven’t written, good deeds I haven’t done – in my nearly eighty years of life. In the long, indeed the ultimate, term none of this matters. Everything will go black; just as it will for me personally. So there’ll be nothing to regret.

But it’s not my death or my reputation or my undelivered work that I’m concerned about, or even the future of the human race, per se. It’s Mozart. I can accept the prospect of the end of me, of the world, and even of the known universe; but I can’t bear the thought of a future – anybody’s future – in which Mozart’s music hasn’t survived, in one form or another, but instead has been swallowed up by the same blackness that will consume me. By Mozart I don’t mean only him, of course; I’m using his name as a shorthand term for all the great cultural creations of humanity during its brief existence on this earth: Shakespeare, French cathedrals, Italian Renaissance painters, German music, English romantic poetry, the game of cricket… and those are only some of the European ones. Our creativity is the thing that justifies us as a species, makes us part of the Godhead (however you want to conceive of that), and so cannot – please! – just disappear. But it will do, if it’s dependent on the continued existence of our planet to survive.

Which is why it’s essential (a) to keep the earth going as long as we can: here I’m at one with Greta and the environmentalists; and (b) in the meantime to redouble our efforts to search for an alternative home for our species if all that comes to nought. If just a few of us managed to escape to Alpha Centauri, bringing Mozart’s Requiem with them, I’d feel more relaxed about our ‘end’. Which is why I’m also very supportive of Elon Musk and those others who are spending their ill-gotten capitalist gains trying, at any rate, to reach for the stars. Mozart’s immortality may depend on it. 

This should be all our governments’ top priority. Every other issue – even Brexit – is trivial. (Which makes me feel better about Brexit too.)

So, Boris has outwitted Johnny Foreigner to bring us – just in time for Christmas – a terrific new ‘deal’ with the EU.  Just as I predicted: https://bernardjporter.com/2020/12/06/a-prediction/; and with the Tory press puffing it up in the way I predicted, too.  What a man!  What a glorious prospect lies ahead of us, reclaiming our ‘sovereignty’, unfettered by the chains of Brussels and free to pursue – or resume – our great national and historical destiny in the wider world!

I’ve not, of course, read the ?2,000-page agreement, and wouldn’t be able to understand all its details and nuances if I had. And it’s probably too early to pronounce on their practical ramifications in any case. In common with most ‘Remainers’ – and even some Brexiteers, who believe that relative poverty is an acceptable price to pay for ‘sovereignty’ – I doubt whether Britain’s new situation in the world will be as comfortable and profitable as her old one within the EU, and can’t think of many material advantages to her ‘splendid isolation’: just as there weren’t, incidentally, when that phrase was coined. But I don’t know; and so prefer to leave that aspect of the recent negotiation – the economic one – aside. In any case, even if we do come an economic cropper after Brexit, the Brexiters will still be able to blame someone or something else for it. The coronavirus is the obvious scapegoat. Failing that, it will be the ‘Remoaners’, still, not wanting us to succeed, and so holding us back; or Boris for not protecting our fishermen; or the perfidious French for wanting their revenge. So, it will never be universally accepted that we sceptics were right. Brexit was always a creature mainly of prejudice rather than reason: as are most other popular movements, admittedly, but not to quite the same degree. And I have to admit that it’s my own prejudices – pro-European rather than narrowly nationalist – that put me on the other side; together, I like to think, with my historical studies. (Look out for my essay collection, Britain Before Brexit, to be published by Bloomsbury early next year.)

It’s those prejudices that will make me regret one particular effect of Brexit, which is the drastic curtailing of our ‘freedom of movement’ it will involve. (Brexiters only seemed to think about freedom of movement into Britain – ‘all those Poles, mending stuff’. But of course it’s about our movement out too.) For me personally it won’t matter so much, having acquired a second citizenship which allows me to wander unfettered all over the EU; but what of those who don’t have Continental partners, or Irish grandmothers, and so will have to stand for hours in the ‘foreign’ queues at airports? And won’t be able to claim free health treatment in France or Italy if they fall ill? And whose knowledge of our wonderful neighbours, and consequently their xenophilia, will suffer as a result? In particular, as an ex-university teacher, I feel sorry for those students who will no longer be able to profit from the Erasmus foreign study programme that has been such a success over the past 33 years. All these are obvious losses arising out of Brexit. No new cheap markets in Patagonia or Wallachia – or even Australia and the USA – can possibly compensate for them. We can see this straightaway.

We can also see, pretty plainly, the damage that the controversy over Brexit has done to our national life over the past four miserable years, and which is likely to continue for years to come. Others have chronicled this at length: the anger and literal violence that it has provoked; the underlying racism it has revealed; the near-destruction of what had once been fondly thought to be some of the bed-rocks of our ‘national identity’, like tolerance and liberalism; exile for some – applications for citizenship of even freezing Sweden rocketed after the Brexit vote; and, last but maybe not least, the near-universal scorn and obloquy it has drawn from kind foreigners who used to admire us so much; or else their patronising sympathy for ‘Brexit refugees’ like me, which is almost as hard to take. Will this ever end? Will Britain ever recover the national esteem that politicians like Johnson, Farage and Rees-Mogg – as well-known and ridiculed on the Continent as they are in Britain – have divested the whole country of so cavalierly? Or is this the reputational end for us, as a supposedly ‘once-proud’ nation?

What may not be so plain is the deeper damage that may come in Brexit’s train. This derives from the way it was forced through originally, by means that were highly destructive of democracy (‘populism’ is not the same), and likely to inflict further harm on our politics – and hence on us – over the next few years. We’ve already seen the beginnings of it: with Johnson’s illegal prorogation of Parliament last year, misleading the Crown along the way; his brutal culling of moderates and elder statesmen from his Conservative party; his attacks on a neutral Speaker; the Right-wing press’s labelling of judges and Lords as ‘Traitors’ and ‘Enemies of the People’ (and remember how close the ties are between the Government front bench and the most rabid of the newspapers: Mr and Mrs Gove are perhaps the prime examples; plus of course the hold that Rupert Murdoch has over all of them); the culture of straight lying that now seems endemic in public life, at least on the Right, and sheer corruption – Covid contracts for friends and backers; new freedoms – even to murder – for the secret services; and behind all this – despite his departure from No. 10 a few months ago – the ominous shadow of Dominic Cummings, working to make government more ‘efficient’, which to my mind in this case equates with ‘authoritarian’ or even ‘Fascist’….. all producing a ruling class which, with all its ‘popular’ pretensions, doesn’t reflect the ‘people’, or the ‘democracy’ at all, but rather a cabal of interests that have been cleverer than the true democrats at playing ‘the political game’ in confusing times. As I’ve argued before, and argue again in the concluding chapter of my Britain Before Brexit, it’s clear that these people have no real interest in British ‘sovereignty’, except insofar as it will enable them to keep their ill-gotten gains away from the Europeans who would like to tax them. Other leading Brexiters might still retain ‘imperial’ illusions sown in their Public Schools. All the rest – certainly so far as ordinary voters are concerned – is propaganda.

So, whatever Boris’s achievement, or otherwise, in last week’s negotiations, the whole process of this extraordinary and in many ways accidental moment in British politics is clearly changing the country. We’re no longer what we were. We may turn out better, or worse. I rather liked what I take to be our old ‘national identity’, or identities. (Again, see my new book.) But then I’m a European, a traitor: a ‘snowflake’ in the modern terminology. And, of course, I’m also an ‘elitist’, one of those derided ‘experts’ (on Britain’s earlier history), and old.

I can’t tell whether we’ll ever return to the EU – even if it wanted us back in. (I wouldn’t.) More urgent for us Brits, however, is to overhaul our democratic system – voting, political education, the power of the ‘Fourth Estate’ – so that nothing as undemocratic – a Right-wing coup under the cover of xenophobia – can afflict us again.

‘Ah yes, but wouldn’t Corbyn have been worse?’ This from people who have begun to acknowledge the incompetence, corruption and sheer malevolence (viz. Rees-Mogg – attacking Unicef for feeding starving children!) of the present government’s record with respect to both of the great existential crises of our times, and who can only find this way of excusing their having voted for it. Here’s an answer to that, from the London Economic: a ‘liberal and pro-business’ online newspaper (so hardly particularly Leftie).

https://www.thelondoneconomic.com/opinion/imagine-if-jeremy-corbyn-was-in-charge/05/05/?fbclid=IwAR3VLd1XxS3q1P0kaO4ZQEFOYiJ-o43UK45KWvZM1tWzPrmqlnIoPUw5AuA.

So, a Corbyn government would probably have handled the pandemic better; and would certainly have been more successful when it came to Brexit. Corbyn, remember, favoured a compromise between pro-Europeans and Brexiters, whereby Britain left the political Union but remained within the single market; which would have satisfied reasonable people in both camps, and given rise to none of the problems that the Conservatives’ ‘harder’ Brexit is currently creating over the Irish border. For that he was vilified for ‘sitting on the fence’. But we can see now, in retrospect, that he was right.

The sting, however, is in the tail of that London Economic piece. The fact is that the press wouldn’t have let him get away with this; and indeed would probably have found fault with most of the measures Johnson’s government has taken in response to the pandemic, if these had been done in Corbyn’s name. In that case they would have been taken as proof of Corbyn’s ‘communist’ leanings, and might even provoked a right-wing coup in response: as nearly happened during Harold Wilson’s time. (We’ve just been watching The Crown’s take on that. For a fuller account, see Ramsay and Dorril’s Smear, 1992.) The Right doesn’t need the Left to be very left in order to demonise and try to destroy it. Social democracy is threat enough. 

From which it follows that a Corbyn government probably would have failed, or at least have been seen to have failed; but not because there was anything wrong with its policies. Look at Gordon Brown’s ill-fated government. Corbyn’s would have failed because the Right wanted to present it as a failure; and to bring down any progressive politics in its train. 

Which could be said to make it fortunate, from a Left perspective, that Corbyn lost the last election, leaving the Tories to sort out the mess and display their  incompetence. The further that incompetence goes, the less credible will it become that anyone could have done worse; and the more people may remember Jeremy’s wisdom in the past. Then, together with the material inconvenience and damage that will come to light as a result of the Tories’ ‘hard’ Brexit, and of their reactionary policies in other fields, folk might turn against cuddly Boris, and towards Labour – or whoever is the front progressive runner by then. That’s the light at the end of my own very dark tunnel just now; but a flickering one, I must admit.

In truth I can’t really see this coming about without electoral and press reform. Murdoch and the other controllers of opinion in Britain are far too powerful to allow sweet reason to shine through; and FPTP – with all its advantages – wouldn’t reflect that reason in any case.

This may seem insensitive or even cruel to those who are suffering grievously from the virus and its social effects – lockdowns, social distancing, ‘bubbles’ – but I have to say that I’m rather enjoying it all.

On the ‘social distancing’ thing, I’ve never been a very social person, especially since I became rather deaf, which makes certain kinds of socialising almost impossible: for example, in noisy pubs. I prefer small group meetings, just two or three ideally; and don’t mind my own company, poor company as it is, most of the time. A lockdown enables one to spurn company without offending anyone, and to stay in one spot without the inconvenience of air, rail or road travel, or even walking. There one can immerse oneself in one’s own black thoughts – and mine are pretty black just now, what with Brexit and this appalling government – without the risk of depressing others, or having to ‘fake’ cheerfulness in order to protect them. If you’re in England, and unwelcome guests arrive, I understand that you can summon the police to evict them if they make up more than six. Or is it eight? I don’t know, as I’m not in England currently. But it sounds a great service.

Indeed, I’m hugely privileged in having an idyllic bolthole of my own to quarantine myself in. I also have continuous company of my own choosing, my beloved Kajsa, who shares my ‘bubble’ with me; we own the ‘sommarhus’ jointly, on an island – almost the definition of ‘isolation’! – in the Stockholm Archipelago. We’ve just installed ‘winter water’ – insulated pipes which won’t freeze – so we can spend the coming winter here for as long as the pandemic lasts. (It’s pretty virulent in the city. Whose fault that is I don’t know. ‘Socialist’ Sweden’s unexpectedly liberal approach to things like face masks, which you hardly see, is widely blamed; but I’m no expert.)

And the whole experience has scarcely affected our life- and leisure-style at all. We’re both Zooming like crazy: me with family, societies and friends, and Kajsa with her teaching and politicking. We have a shop on the island that provides all essentials, including fresh turkey (or we may downsize to a chicken), and incorporates a post office that takes in parcels (brought by boat) from home and abroad. I’m impressed by how many shops and other suppliers have adapted to the lockdowns by upping their delivery arrangements; not only Amazon – which it’s difficult to avoid just now – but also the ‘Little Britain’ shop in the city (for Xmas puds, crackers, mince pies, goose fat and rum butter: we got that order today); a wonderful master chef called Lena actually on the island, who makes most of our Swedish meals; and, back in Blighty, the ‘British Corner Shop Ltd.’ in Bristol, which specialises in sending English grub to homesick ex-pats everywhere. My order was ‘packed with love by Saffron’. Isn’t that nice?

Fortunately the Swedish and British Christmas dinners don’t clash: we’ll have Lena’s on Julaften and my roast on Juldagen. I’m also expecting a delivery – a surprise present for Kajsa (she’ll never guess it) – from the British Museum shop, and another from ‘Radical Teatowels’, which should be winging its way here soon. The kids are also sending things over, and I to them. We really are well set up here. If we need more warmth, all we have to do is chop down a tree. Most of them are firs, which means we have Christmas trees all around the house, so there’s no need to bring one in. Booze comes by boat from Systembolaget, including my new favourite lakrits vodka from Finland. The only thing I’ll miss will be the British Christmas TV Specials; but I imagine someone can teach me how to ‘stream’ them (is that the word?) on my computer. 

I’m sure all this has been made even better for us old anti-social grumps by the pandemic. Shops, especially, have adapted to the situation enterprisingly by doing more of their business on the internet and by post. I’m sure it wasn’t like this last year. Delivery services of all kinds must have profited greatly; albeit at a possible cost to the health of their delivery drivers, who form the front line troops between us and the disease. And we, the lucky ones, who don’t need to go out in public – or even out of our beds – can have the laziest Christmas ever. 

Could this carry on after the virus has been tamed? For me that’s quite an attractive prospect. But I’m reminded of the fat woman in EM Forster’s short Sci-Fi novel The Machine Stops (1909), who lives in much the same way; until….  Well, if you haven’t yet read it, get it for Christmas. It might be cautionary.

You’ll have seen this before. But it’s my favourite. Thank God for our eccentric aristos!!

Everyone seems to be saying that Boris Johnson is doing a shocking job, and predicting that nearly all of us in Britain will lose as a result of Brexit. All I’m reading on the internet is ridicule of ‘BoJo’ and his team, which must surely be getting through to them? Unless, that is, I’m only getting messages that pander to my anti-Brexit prejudice. As I understand it that’s perfectly possible, because of the way these computer geniuses (or robots) edit and distribute the news that comes to us. In which case there will be a whole other half of the British population who will be getting entirely contrary messages, leading them to believe that Boris is right and that a negotiated or even a ‘no deal’ Brexit can put us firmly on the road to a glorious future of ‘sovereignty’ and ultimately the ‘greatness’ we abandoned by allowing ourselves to be seduced by the sirens of Brussels, and deprived of our proud blue passports. Well, maybe so; although as an educated citizen I know that the colour of our passports had little to do with the EU (we could always have stuck with blue if we’d wanted), and – much more importantly – I know as a historian that ‘sovereignty’ is a good deal more complicated than the Brexiters like to pretend. In short, even ‘sovereign’ nations need to make alliances with other countries, and if Britain’s isn’t with the EU, it will have to be with somebody else. This will hit the Little Englanders eventually, probably as they’re chewing on their chlorinated chicken courtesy of Uncle Sam. By then it will be too late.

This will be the likely impact of the present crisis on the majority of people in Britain, after the more immediate repercussions – lorry jams on the approaches to Dover, shortages of medicines and of certain foods, higher duties and so higher prices, loss of freedom of travel by Brits (as well as for those pesky foreigners ‘coming over ‘ere and doing our plumbing and picking our fruit’: https://www.facebook.com/veryBrexitproblems/videos/1044077395979528), airport delays, jobs going as employers flee across the channel, and all the rest of the material effects of Brexit, have been sorted out. Those material effects could last for ages; even the Brexiter Jacob Rees-Mogg has predicted a wait of fifty years (https://www.theguardian.com/politics/shortcuts/2018/jul/24/two-50-or-100-years-when-do-leavers-think-brexit-will-pay-off). Accompanying them will probably be a deepening of the popular xenophobia that partly fuelled the Brexit movement; culminating in the death of the sort of Britain – tolerant, internationalist, multicultural – that the liberals amongst us had always taken patriotic pride in, and aspired towards if never quite achieved. By that time the UK may well have been reduced to an English – possibly even a southern English – rump, with its other nations and regions hiving off, back into the arms of the EU; heralding the final destruction of the ‘old country’, brought about by Brexit, its foolish followers, and its more knowing and cunning leaders. 

If this spells crisis for the country generally, it also creates problems, at the very least, for a small portion of its population: thinking people, that is; ‘intellectuals’ if you like, for whom Brexit – as it is currently turning out – must undermine many of their fondest assumptions. The first is that great events must have reasons,if only they could discover them, and (in the case of historians) trace them back. 

On the surface, Brexit appears utterly unreasonable. It wasn’t meant to happen. Very few people put the EU at the front of their thinking before 2016, and wanted Britain out. It was only when they were asked to vote on it that they gave it any thought at all, with their votes then mainly motivated by grievances of other kinds, which they used their votes – ones that would directly affect the outcome, for a change – to express their displeasure about. (See https://bernardjporter.com/2016/06/16/is-it-really-about-the-eu/.) Right-wing press propaganda – especially Boris Johnson’s lying despatches from Brussels about ‘bendy bananas’ and the like – played a part in this. The result of the referendum was significantly influenced by new propaganda techniques (Cambridge Analytica), and foreign interference. 

Even then the vote was not supposed to be decisive, but only ‘advisory’; except that the Prime Minister of the time, David Cameron, the first of arguably the three worst premiers Britain has had in her history, had promised voters otherwise. No-one in that referendum was told or was allowed to specify what he or she was voting for. It could well have been for Britain’s remaining in the common market but exiting the other parts of the EU’s structure. That was the wise and very practical suggestion of Labour’s Jeremy Corbyn, but it was turned down, partly because of the personal monstering that Corbyn was subjected to at the hands of the – tax-dodging billionaire-owned – right-wing press; which also cost Labour the next General Election, in December 2019. In the meantime the facile and lying but apparently personable Boris Johnson had taken over the reins of the Government party, and kicked most of the experienced and reasonable Conservative MPs out. That left him with only relative new boys to form a government with, whose only qualification was their loyalty to Brexit and to Johnson, and whose incompetence (and indeed corruption) was soon revealed by their abject response to the Coronavirus pandemic that hit them – and all of us – in January 2020. 

It was also revealed in the negotiations that went on afterwards with the EU to try to come to some kind of trade arrangement, to at least partly save the day. Johnson himself is almost ludicrously poor at diplomacy, as had been revealed during a mercifully brief earlier spell as Foreign Secretary, and apparently – we’re told anonymously – spent most of his crucial last-minute talks with the European Commission President, Ursula von der Leyen, cracking public school anti-French jokes. While all this was going on the British public had swung significantly away from its original pro-Brexit opinion, to favour a return to the EU, if that had been possible. (That may have been as a result of elderly Brexiteers dying off and being replaced by higher-educated younger people, who had always been predominantly pro-EU.) In other words, the vote in 2016 is unlikely to have reflected the ‘people’s will’ in 2020. But by now that was too late; and in view of the violence continually threatened by Right-wing zealots a U-turn at this point might have been dangerous in any case. So here we are: hoist by a petard skilfully fashioned by clever Rightists and wielded by angry populists, with no visible means of escape. 

The point I’m making here is that chance, conspiracy and sheer idiocy appear to have played a far greater part in this whole story than has been usual in Britain’s history, which makes it difficult to analyse rationally, in the way we ‘intellectuals’ like to do. Of course there are perfectly rational aspects to it: the self-interest of the finance capitalists who helped fund Brexit, for example (afraid for the security of their tax havens, directly threatened by the EU); the unfitness-for-purpose of the the British electoral system; the understandable – if irrelevant – grievances of the people; the real mis-steps of the EU; the continuing influence of old-fashioned institutions like Eton College; the power of propaganda; perhaps the self-destruction of late-stage capitalism that Marxists would understand as a ‘rational’ – indeed a ‘natural’ – cause’.… 

All these can be isolated and analysed intellectually. But it’s the mix of them all that makes the whole event appear more ‘accidental’, stupid and confusingly messy than we’re used to, and so difficult to understand – and, more to the point, to combat – as a whole. It’s a bit like suddenly realising that the ‘laws’ of Physics don’t work everywhere; that there are universes where gravity goes up instead of down, for example (a poor one, I realise!), or that time can be bent. Or that everything is really chaos. That’s how the political world is beginning to appear to me now. So why even try to analyse it? And in which case: what’s the point of my job?

Perhaps quantum theory or post-modernism could provide the answers. But I’m too old, and too conventionally rational, to want any truck with that.

Stockholm hasn’t seen the sun for a month – even during the short hours of so-called ‘daylight’. It’s grey, wet and muddy outside, worse even than an English winter, especially here in the sticks. But when the snow comes it will be better – lighter, for a start – and snow brings a different kind of cold. 

In the meantime we have our little wooden hut to snuggle up in (below), right through Christmas, in order to avoid the virus; with a traditional Swedish Xmas meal on Julafton, and a proper British one on the day itself, courtesy of me (the cook) and deliveries from the ‘Little Britain’ shop in Gamla Stan (https://www.facebook.com/littlebritainshop/). The usual family pleasantries will have to be exchanged via Zoom. 

What a blessing that is! How on earth did the Vikings get through their winters without it? Probably sitting around open fires telling each other sagas (‘here’s one you won’t have heard’), and dreaming (the men) about the Anglo-Saxon maidens they planned to ravish in the summer. Zoom is not really an adequate substitute for that.

Serious blogging should resume shortly. It will mainly be Covid and Brexit, I’m afraid. And about what we (the British half of me, that is) can possibly do to remove the worst and most auto-destructive government in modern British history.

A repost from 2 years ago. It still resonates.

We’re getting through The Crown, one (old) episode an evening. Last night’s was the one about the Profumo scandal: its inclusion justified, no doubt, by Prince Philip’s association with Stephen Ward. (Otherwise what did it have to do with ‘The Crown’?) According to this version, Anthony Blunt persuaded MI5 to keep his treachery quiet by threatening to reveal pictures of Philip drawn by Ward. That must be it. It was also a way of completing the series’ deeply unflattering picture of Macmillan, for dramatic effect.

In fact that’s what the whole of The Crown has been about: using incidents in the lives of the royal family to make dramas out of – one per episode. The continuity is very thin; and spoiled last night by the re-casting of all the main characters – Dr Who-like – in order to keep up with their ageing. In this episode that was rather crudely signalled by the early scene in which the ‘new’ Queen remarks on her image on a new set of postage stamps. Well, it had to be done, I suppose, with a story spanning 90 years; and both the actresses (actors?) playing Elizabeth have got her peculiar enunciation off to a T.

Of course to a serious historian it must appear all wrong: seeing public lives portrayed in self-contained episodes, the history of Britain presented only through public lives, and the most dramatic moments in those lives at that; most of the dialogue obviously made up, and some of it rather unconvincingly (if only because it’s too good); and key characters almost entirely left out because – we assume – they’re not colourful enough (Attlee): all this quite apart from questions relating to its factual accuracy, or otherwise. This may be OK as drama. In fact Kajsa and I are thoroughly enjoying it, although Kajsa was (rightly) shocked by the Gordonstoun episode. And it’s by no means an unusual way of presenting ‘history’. Look at Shakespeare! 

But it does get you wondering about where non-historians get their history from. Ronald Reagan is said to have got his from Hollywood movies. I wonder if Boris got his from films and TV? He appears not to have studied any history later than the ancient Romans at school. (I’ve written to Eton asking about their syllabus, but they’ve not replied. Probably wise.) These can illuminate aspects of history, ‘bring them alive’, as they say; but ideally they should not comprise the whole sum of people’s historical knowledge. 

That of course is where we ‘serious’ historians come in: to leaven the personal dramas with the deeper but more boring context that alone can make sense of that knowledge. Macmillan is not fairly or adequately portrayed as a foppish and cuckolded aristo (as it happens he wasn’t an echt aristocrat at all); or Clem Attlee as the nonentity he was made to appear by contrast with Churchill. It’s these men’s wider relationship with the country, the world and the grand tides of history that explains their ‘place’ in that history, which may be more important in the cases of the bores or the fops than of the eccentrics. But TV viewers clearly prefer personalities and drama: as don’t we all? Which is why The Crown gets immeasurably more viewers than my books get readers. (No hard feelings on that account!)

And it probably explains Boris Johnson’s romantic but very false view of his country’s history, and of his own hoped-for place in it. We are governed by a patina of myths, overlying and obscuring the – I would say – material imperatives lying underneath. There’s probably no way of getting away from this. I think I’ve always known that.

(Incidentally: I’m waiting nervously to see if my own encounter with Her Maj – https://bernardjporter.com/2020/12/01/the-crown/ – will be covered. I’m hoping to be played by George Clooney.)