Porter’s Pensées

The Swedish media is full of Boris today. (I’m back there now.) Most of the reportage is pretty accurate, and less opinionated than ours.

Dagens Nyheter’s London correspondent claims that Johnson’s right-wing nationalism has less in common with Continental and American varieties, than with old-fashioned British liberal imperialism. That’s a theme I’ll be examining shortly; ultimately for the new concluding chapter of the sixth edition of my Lion’s Share, but I may share it here first.

A few weeks ago I wrote to the Head of History at Eton College, to find out what kind of British imperial history Boris could have been exposed to there. (If any. The public schools, as I understand it, have always been keener on the Greeks and Romans.) Was he – quite incidentally – recommended any of my books? They might have pricked a few illusions. I’m still waiting for an answer.

The irony of the situation for anyone with imperial ambitions, of course, is that Brexit is much more likely to reduce Britain to the status of a colony  herself; and a colony of a former colony – the USA – at that.

It looked so unlikely to rational-minded commentators a few months ago as to make one wonder whether the entire historical process might, in fact, be governed by mere irrational chance. That, of course, would be anathema to most academic historians, who like to think that they can perceive order in events where ordinary folks can’t. Boris’s elevation to the position of ‘world king’ he has always aspired to – well, not quite ‘world’, yet, but there’s still time – suggests that anything can happen. A clown, a proven liar, a ‘nasty piece of work’ as one of his TV interviewers called him, lazy, instinctively racist, without any other real convictions, with only a brief disastrous ministerial record as Foreign Secretary, whose only political advantage seems to be that he can get the juices going in the knickers of his elderly Tory women constituents, should have had no chance at all of becoming the prime minister of any sensible country; but nonetheless rises to the frothy top of the Conservative party in 2019, and hence becomes – at 3 o’clock this afternoon – Leader of the nation. If we didn’t already have the similar example of Donald Trump in our minds – Trump himself describes Boris as ‘Britain’s Trump’ – it would have seemed impossible, even laughable. Even those old Tories must be pinching themselves to make sure it’s not just a wet dream.

The accidental factors contributing to this astonishing outcome are obvious. That it should have come down in the end to a vote among just 190,000 of the most reactionary people in Britain – the rump of the Conservative party – is the most egregious one. Countries with Presidential systems must be nonplussed. The UK’s answer is that he still has to be confirmed by MPs in Parliament and by the wider public in a General Election; but when that will come no-one can know, and in the meantime Boris is lord of all he surveys. Behind that is the utter chaos that has been caused by the dropping of Farage’s UKIP bomb both in the centre and at the edges of British politics, sending fragments of the two main English political parties – already grievously divided – flying everywhere. Theresa May’s incompetence and obstinacy, and Corbyn’s failure to mollify his critics (not all his fault) while at the same time terrifying the Tories into a hard shell of resistance, both played their part. Britain’s flawed electoral system didn’t help; as neither did the deep resentments among her people, mainly caused by ‘austerity’, which had caused the popular rising exemplified in the Brexit vote in the first place. Chaos can produce unanticipated results. Boris’s coronation is one.

In this sense there is no necessary alterity between what are often posed as opposite explanations of events: ‘conspiracy’ and ‘cock-up’. Conspiracies can be cocked up – indeed, very often are. (Look at most revolutions.) And cock-ups – or chance events, or accidents, or chaos – can be exploited by long-term conspirators in order to further their designs. In the present case the ‘conspirators’ are the neo-liberal zealots, with help from their neo-Con allies in the USA, who have for some time been plotting to unshackle capitalism from the restrictions placed on it by domestic welfareism and international agreements and alliances, of which the EU is essentially one, in order – they say, and maybe believe – to encourage freedom and growth. Because this is controversial, you won’t find it stated openly and obviously by Boris and his leading supporters; but dig a little deeper and you’ll find that it underlies most of their attitudes and policies. Brexit and Boris are just the best tools currently to hand to achieve their pure capitalist utopia. Boris especially is perfect; for who could imagine that such a cuddly clown could be the vehicle for such a hard-nosed purpose? (But isn’t that how the upper classes have always survived in Britain: by adopting the personae of upper-class twits who couldn’t harm anyone?)

We’ll see how Bojo gets on. Every commentator is pointing out the difficulties of the task ahead of him. His only fuel seems to be a confected ‘optimism’. How far that will get him, in the face of the ridicule of most Britons and foreign leaders, and of the more widespread pessimism that would seem to be a more rational response to the present crisis of late capitalism, we’ll soon find out. We live in interesting, if unpredictable, times. (Remember the old Chinese curse…)

Whether Islam has obstructed ‘modernity’ is a question worth asking, and not to be immediately condemned as ‘Islamophobic’, as Boris Johnson’s raising of it in an old book of his has been (https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/boris-johnson-islam-muslim-comments-democracy-tory-leadership-contest-a9006211.html). I’m pretty sure that Boris is an Islamophobe, but not on these grounds.

Religion of all kinds has long been recognised by scholars as an obstacle to the kind of rational thinking that is required for objective scientific enquiry, as well as to certain social and economic practices which lie behind the emergence and growth of capitalism, which Johnson seems in this instance to equate with ‘progress’. Exactly the same has been said of Catholic Christianity, from which – according to Weber and Tawney – only the Protestant form of that religion rescued it. The argument relates to dogmatic religion, not to Islam specifically; and should not be censored simply because it seems to demean Moslems. In the cases of both Islam and Catholicism it is possible to question certain details of it, with reference for example to the huge contributions made to scientific knowledge by early  Moslems and Christians, as well as by modern scholars with Moslem backgrounds (one – an emeritus Cambridge Professor of Engineering – is a particular friend of mine); and in any case the argument needs to be refined, and shorn of the Eurocentricism that clearly informs Johnson’s view of ‘modernity’, if we are to elicit from it any valuable truths. But merely mentioning the apparent difference in this regard between Islam and the ‘West’ should not be ruled off-limits because it might give rise to ‘hostility’ towards the former. That would rule out any kind of intellectual enquiry into what is, objectively, a valid and interesting hypothesis

The current hunt for Islamophobia seems to have taken on much of the character of the slightly longer pursuit of Antisemitism in the Labour Party, which in a similar way is using very peripheral ‘evidence’ to make its case. Both Ken Livingstone and Jeremy Corbyn are being lynched (metaphorically) on the basis of statements that might raise uncomfortable questions for the Jewish community, but which ought to be asked nonetheless; and cannot possibly regarded as ‘antisemitic’ in themselves. The elision between criticism of the government of Israel’s colonialism on the West Bank on the one side and Judenhetze on the other is the clearest example of this: disowned and condemned by many American, British and even Israeli Jews as well as by Gentiles. That’s because the anti-antisemites cannot produce any more direct and convincing evidence of an institutional racial antipathy towards Jews in the Labour Party; or none, at any rate, that they’re prepared to share with the rest of us. Which is what, incidentally, makes some people grasp at ‘conspiracy theories’ in order to explain this new phenomenon – it’s a Mossad or capitalist or Conservative or neo-Con plot to prevent a socialist and a critic of the state of Israel from getting into No. 10 – which the Jewish community really should be wary of provoking, in view of their past history. For what it’s worth, I don’t believe it, as a deliberately organised plot, that is; but it would be the tragic depth of irony if the campaign against antisemitism itself gave rise to a new anti-semitism of this kind.

But it’s pointless saying this. Islamophobia and anti-semitism are used simply as weapons  in the current political debate in Britain. Very little thought is put into either of them. Cynical politicians know that mud sticks. Electors are not thinking people, more’s the pity. And thinking people are not taken much notice of.

From the Berlioz Museum in Cote Saint Andre.

Yes, it was exciting, wasn’t it; but not really ‘cricket’. The method of deciding a winner after a tie was farcical. Why do you have to have a single ‘winner’ when both teams have performed equally well? It reminds me of when I first went to the USA and the Americans couldn’t understand the beauty of ‘drawn’ matches. Everything had to be measured in terms of ‘winners’ and ‘losers’. You see that, of course, in Trump. The idea of a ‘loser’ who can nevertheless be adjudged a ‘success’ in every other way seems to be anathema. Personally, I’d rather be seen as a successful ‘loser’ than as a failed ‘winner’. Trump is the latter.

The fairest result would have been a tie, with both teams sharing the trophy. Then New Zealand would have shared the credit with England, and rightly, not only for their cricketing performance but for the generous and sporting spirit in which they played the game. That’s the best accolade one can give them: that they’re not Australia. (Sorry, my Aussie friends.)

Just back from our trip to France. Theme: French revolutionary Art 1780-1848. (Pretentious – moi?) High points: the Berlioz Museum in Cote St-Andre and the French Revolutionary Museum in Vizille. Both terrific, as were the small Clochemerle-like towns they were in. I’d never seen this side of France before. We also took in the Orangerie and the Sainte-Chapelle in Paris, a couple of gastronomic restaurants, and quite a bit of local wine. My love of France was confirmed; Kajsa’s was elevated. And that was despite the horrendous heatwave that hit us, which had me fainting in the Rue de Rivoli, and having to be helped to my feet by some lovely young French people.

I’ve long wished I was French – mainly for the culture. It’s Berlioz’s orchestration of La Marseillaise that does it for me every time (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u7zQ57J8PSY).  It’s a shame our two countries separated after long periods of togetherness in the Middle Ages; cruelly cemented, of course, by Norman and then English conquests, each of the other. France is England’s other half, the civilised part of what should be a single Franco-British entity. Whatever our people’s overt historical antagonism, we each envy the other for what we miss in our own societies.

My 24-year relationship with Kajsa allowed me to secure (dual) Swedish citizenship earlier this year. I was wondering whether a three-month dalliance with a French girlfriend when I was a student, nearly sixty years ago, would persuade the French authorities to grant me a third nationality?

Regular blogging will resume, when I can think of anything original to say about the appalling Boris, and the elderly blue-rinsed Tory women who seem to be set on foisting him on us. (That’s probably sexist, as well as ageist and hairist; but there you go.) How I wonder would Boris go down in France?

Jeremy Hunt’s latest wheeze, in his bid to become Britain’s new Prime Minister, is to refund university tuition fees for students who go on to become ‘entrepreneurs’. In fact he’s also making a big thing of his own early career as an ‘entrepreneur’, in order, clearly, to impress his elderly and moneyed Tory electorate. Wondering what his entrepreneurial activity actually consisted of, I looked him up. This is from Wikipedia:

‘After university Hunt worked for two years as a management consultant at OC&C Strategy Consultants, and then became an English language teacher in Japan.

‘On his return to Britain he tried his hand at a number of different entrepreneurial business ventures, with three failed start-ups including an attempt to export marmalade to Japan. In 1991, Hunt co-founded a public relations agency named Profile PR specialising in IT with Mike Elms, a childhood friend. Hunt and Elms later sold their interest in Profile PR to concentrate on directory publishing.’

Quite frankly, that doesn’t impress me, and doesn’t lead me to think that ‘entrepreneurship’ should be rewarded with special favours. Almost by definition, entrepreneurs don’t actually make  things; and don’t serve the public directly, as do inventors, manufacturers, nurses, doctors, teachers (even university professors), and marmalade makers. What they do is to exploit  the achievements of others, for their own profit. Letting them off their student fees is unnecessary at best – they’re likely to be able to afford the money themselves if they’re any good at entrepreneuring, as Hunt clearly wasn’t – and a grave insult to all those whose post-university contributions to the public good are arguably more direct and beneficial.

The definition of an ‘entrepreneur’ might also cause some difficulties. I’ve produced and sold (via  publishers) several books and articles. Might that have qualified me as an entrepreneur, if – say – I had set myself up as a ‘company’? I’ve heard of others who have done this, for tax purposes.

Too much is made of ‘entrepreneurs’, and too little of the creators of what they market, and those who create social wealth. That could be one reason for Britain’s long industrial decline, since the 19th century, when entrepreneurs were more often represented – in literature, for example – as shysters and rogues.

Before I go:

I recently came across an article on the web – I’ve lost it now, but that doesn’t matter – about Hanslope Park, an ultra-secret archive in the depth of the Buckinghamshire countryside, where the British government used to stash some of its more embarrassing documents relating to decolonisation. It was first discovered by a couple of historians looking into the Kenya internment camp atrocities of the 1950s. Later on Ian Cobain published a book featuring it, entitled The History Thieves. Secrets, Lies and the Shaping of a Modern Nation (Portobello books), which I was commissioned by the LRB to write a review of; together with TJ Coles’s Britain’s Secret Wars. How and Why the United Kingdom sponsors Conflict around the World (Clairview Books. Isn’t it interesting that neither of these books could find – I presume – top-notch publishers?). I believe, though I can’t be certain, that the LRB didn’t in the end publish my piece; which I’m intending nonetheless to include in a new book of my occasional essays, which is still under consideration by a publisher – has been for some time, so I’m getting rather disheartened – but which I thought might be worth giving a preliminary airing to here. Here it is (minus the references). It’s 3000 words long I’m afraid; but I think it’s quite important. If any reader has connexions with the print media world, they’re welcome to pass it on to them (for free. And so long as I’m told).

*

History is clearly important to people, though not always in a very reliable form. We professional historians, most of us, do our best, but by the time our versions of history have percolated ‘down’ to the laity they have usually become encrusted in myth. This is partly our own fault – we’re not persuasive or populist enough – but it’s also because myths are often more acceptable than ‘the truth’, which is generally more complex and ambivalent, so that people tend to prefer the mythical versions. One of the latent functions of the American Republic’s founding myth, for example, is to comfort and reassure. Wouldn’t Americans be just slightly discombobulated if they believed that, rather than their Revolution’s having been a war of independence from colonial tyranny, it was essentially a rebellion to enable white Americans to tyrannise over others – Native Americans, black slaves, the industrial proletariat? (A good case can be made out for the first of these.) Most national ‘histories’ are like that. Britain’s is no exception.

Ian Cobain’s second book – his first, Cruel Britannia (2013), was about Britain’s secret involvement in torture – seeks to spread some of the blame for this on to the shoulders of successive British governments. The main myth he sets out to discredit is the one that prime minister David Cameron expressed in September 2014, on his way to planning renewed military action against ISIS in Syria: that ‘we’ (the British)  ‘are a peaceful people’. In response to this Cobain lists the wars that ‘we’ have been involved in since 1945: one a year at least, most of them through choice. ‘The British,’ Cobain writes, ‘are unique in this respect… Only the British are perpetually at war.’ That should shake up most people’s views of their recent history, including, probably, Cameron’s. (I’m assuming he believed what he said.) If any more evidence is needed it can be found in TJ Coles’s Britain’s Secret Wars. How and Why the United Kingdom sponsors Conflict around the World, which goes further than Cobain in attributing these wars and their accompanying atrocities to capitalist-imperialist greed. That’s the ‘Why’ part of the subtitle, and may seem too conspiratorial for some. But the facts alone are telling. They obviously discombobulated the Daily Mail’s reviewer of The History Thieves, Peter Oborne, which can’t be a bad thing. But it isn’t Cobain’s main point. His emphasis is on the way in which most of this, and a lot else that is rather nasty, have been deliberately hidden from the British people, in order to buttress their ‘peace-loving’ and other comfortable liberal myths. Hence his title, The History Thieves; who are, of course, governments and government agencies, and to a lesser extent the British press and Parliament, who have connived in it.

One example is the way the messy business of dismantling Britain’s empire was deliberately sanitised for posterity by destroying and hiding the historical record. Historians of decolonisation were often frustrated by gaps in the written evidence; now we know what happened to a lot of it. Stuff that wasn’t burned, but was thought to be too sensitive to let anyone know about, even, was spirited away; not to the Public Record Office (now the National Archive), the usual repository of government papers, but to a seventeenth-century country house in Buckinghamshire called Hanslope Park, once the scene of a famous murder – the squire shot by his gamekeeper in 1912 – but since 1941 the property of the government, and now an annex of GCHQ. I had no idea of that when I used to work on imperial history. It was only revealed when a couple of my fellow historians, David Anderson and Caroline Elkins, together with lawyers working on behalf of some of the victims of the Kenya ‘Emergency’ of the 1950s, began digging into that most ghastly of colonial events; the lawyers armed with court orders compelling the Government to reveal all relevant papers. (Historians don’t have that sort of pull.) It was found that Hanslope was housing many of them, together with thousands of incriminating documents covering the whole period after World War II. Most of them haven’t been scrutinised and released yet, with the authorities still dragging their feet. The excuses offered are that people’s lives may be placed in danger, or delicate diplomatic negotiations compromised. But the true reason is given away by the name that departing British colonial governments gave to these papers, which was the ‘Legacy Files’. Britain was concerned for her national reputation after she pulled out. She wanted to give the impression that her decolonisation, by contrast with other European colonial powers’, had been peaceful, civilised, and voluntary on her part; reflecting a uniquely beneficent imperialism that had always been directed to this end. It was the old Empire’s final legacy to us, its inheritors, making us feel better about our national past. If that isn’t a deliberate ‘theft’ of history, I don’t know what is.

This was deeply unsettling for historians, though thankfully most of us, professional sceptics that we are, had allowed for the possibility that important facts might be being kept from us. Personally I never trusted the authorities since they led me a merry dance some years ago over some Metropolitan Police papers I was seeking in connexion with my research into the very early Special Branch, which they eventually claimed had been destroyed by a bomb in World War II, obviously in order to get rid of me; only for the file to turn up later when a serving Special Branch officer asked for it in connexion with a PhD thesis he was writing on the same topic. I also had my phone tapped over this (very crudely), which added to my mistrust. It was obvious from corresponding and talking with Home Office officials that they had absolutely no concept of ‘openness’, or of any duty the State might have to reveal its secrets, even those, like the ones I was interested in, that were more than a hundred years old. Documents performed functions, and when those functions no longer had a practical purpose they had better be destroyed. That’s why legal papers were often not, but were preserved in case anyone wanted to re-open a case in the future on the basis of them. (It’s why the richest documentary source that has survived from the Middle Ages is deeds and wills.) They had no sense of history, these people. I truly believe that this was one of the main reasons they were so obstructive; that, and the time they told me it would take to vet old files in case they contained anything practical. Junior civil servants had better things to do. It may not have been nefarious. Though obviously it was, when one set of previously ‘open’ legal opinions was suddenly withdrawn from the National Archive in 1982. They related to Britain’s title – or not – over the Falkland Islands (Malvinas). That was part of the on-going plot.

Most of these deceptions related to Britain’s treatment of her foreign subjects, enemies and allies. But they didn’t stop there. The bulk of Cobain’s book deals with the secrecy that has always surrounded Britain’s secret intelligence services: justifiably, one might think, and indeed obviously, but to an extent that far outruns any possible argument from ‘national interest’, or even privacy, however far the authorities tried to stretch those – perfectly reasonable – concerns. This is a fairly familiar story to us professional historians – viz. my experience with the Met – but may not be known more generally. In the nineteenth century secrecy was maintained informally by a code of honour amongst those who dealt with state secrets, who nearly always came from the same – upper-middle, public school-educated – classes. Even then governments could have problems with Members of Parliament, who weren’t always upper-middles, and whose constitutional right to demand sight of diplomatic and other despatches was cunningly circumvented in the 1840s by instructing ministers to send private letters along with the official despatches, which filled in any gaps, but weren’t ‘official’, and so weren’t even known about by MPs. Cobain doesn’t mention this, but it backs up his point. Today, if they still survive, historians have to hunt for these papers in private collections, not in the National Archive.

As the sheer amount of government paperwork increased towards the end of the nineteenth century, with the pool of dependable toffs diminishing relative to the new demand for people to process it, lower-class clerks had to be engaged, without the same inbred sense of honour, it was believed, and usually at poor pay, which could encourage them to sell secrets: to newspapers, for example, or even foreign powers. That provoked the first Official Secrets Act in 1889, outlawing the unauthorised disclosure of Government papers. It must have been sad for the upper-middles that they could no longer rely on the decency of chaps: a bit like having to provide referees for football matches when the proles took to the game. A Corinthian could be trusted to own up when he committed a foul. Now they needed to be policed. The 1889 Act was followed by others in 1911, 1920, 1939 and 1989, all of them strengthening the previous ones in one way or another, although the 1989 Act also made it less ridiculous (a ‘secret’ had to be an important one, not just an order for paper clips); usually with MPs being deliberately misled about their motives and extent. The 1911 bill was rushed through the Commons – all its readings – in just an hour, in the eye of a diplomatic storm. There was ‘nothing novel’ in it, claimed the Attorney-General, which was a blatant lie. As well as the Official Secrets Acts, governments also had their notorious ‘D-Notice’ system, by which they persuaded newspaper proprietors – usually chums of theirs – to cover things up. That worked pretty well, from the authorities’ point of view. Both these measures were occasionally flouted, but in most cases the flouters were dealt with severely; until a couple of occasions during the ultra-secretive Thatcher years, when juries of good and disloyal Britons threw the more oppressive cases against ‘whistle-blowers’ out. (Thank God, or rather our Anglo-Saxon forebears, for juries.) The most famous acquittal was Clive Ponting’s, against the judge’s directions, for revealing government duplicity over the movements of the Argentinian battleship Belgrano in the Falklands War. Another dent in Britain’s official secrecy came when Peter Wright’s unauthorised memoir Spycatcher made some embarrassing revelations about his time in MI5. (But what more could you expect of a grammar school oik?) That laid the Secret Services open to ridicule, which was another reason to cover them up.

But it wasn’t only their incompetencies, which were many, that the secret services feared being revealed. For several years it was their very existence. This is another aspect of their history that Britons have been routinely lied about. The Special Branch was kept secret at the beginning, because Britons liked to believe that ‘political’ policing was a thing that only foreigners did. MI5 and MI6 were kept officially hidden until the late 1980s. That meant that questions couldn’t be asked about them in Parliament. This wasn’t in order to stop the Russians or the IRA from knowing about them – they did – but people at home. The reason for this was to sustain another British historical ‘myth’: that Britain was above such ‘Continental’ practices as spying on people; certainly her own people, and in peacetime. It derived from old-fashioned values like (again) ‘honour’, on the upper-class side, and ‘solidarity’, among the working classes: the idea that betraying the trust of the people you moved intimately amongst was the ultimate social sin. Even a policeman hiding behind a tree to observe a crime was not allowed. (One was cashiered for this in 1852.) This was an essential part of Britons’ national self-identity in the nineteenth century, and for some time into the twentieth. It can’t be any longer, of course, in what may well be the most surveilled country in Europe – police spies, CCTV cameras, hacking, GCHQ, Amazon passing on your literary preferences to all and sundry – which may be the reason why people have forgotten this vital ‘Victorian value’ now. Earlier, however, it was a major reason for keeping all these activities under wraps. Again, it served to bolster a myth.

This had its downside from a liberal point of view, because unacknowledged agencies couldn’t, of course, be held to account. Another disadvantage was that it furnished a fertile soil for ‘conspiracy theories’ to sprout. MI5 and MI6 weren’t supposed to exist, but there were always rumours flying around. It was to counter these, I guess, that the Government first formally acknowledged the existence and then commissioned a series of official histories of the intelligence services, by academic historians they felt they could trust. (I’m quite proud of the fact that I wasn’t one of them.) These were subject to vetting, which meant that we had to rely on the assurances of their authors that nothing important was left out. Even the ‘trusties’ occasionally baulked at this. The Preface to Christopher Andrew’s volume on MI5, for example, complains of one particular bit of censorship which Andrew believes is ‘hard to justify’. We don’t know what it was, exactly, but it comes in the chapter on the ‘Wilson Plot’ – the alleged Secret Service plot to get rid of Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson in the early ’70s – which is one of those events around which conspiracy theories have clustered particularly. As it happens, I believe in a watered-down version of it. (It was retired spooks; and they didn’t succeed.) But we can never know for sure, until the blanket of indiscriminate secrecy is lifted from this, and from so many of the crucial events of the fairly recent past. Until then the conspiracy nutters will thrive, and the more sensible sceptics amongst us will never be quite satisfied. Plus: distrust may run so deep as to poison our view of British history more generally. Scepticism can slide into cynicism. Personally, I don’t think that the British Empire was always as awful as it was in Kenya in the 1950s. But after all these damaging revelations, and with so much more still hidden, it’s difficult to persuade anyone – even oneself – of this.

Richard Crossman once described secrecy – rather than strikes, or homosexuality, the usual candidates up until then – as ‘the British disease.’ Cobain claims that it’s more prevalent here than in any other democratic country. He gives numerous examples of this over the past half century: the continued ban on those ingenious and heroic Bletchley Park boys and girls revealing anything of their work there for thirty years after the end of the War; espionage trials held in secret, or with crucial evidence kept back; the activities and the scope of the activities of GCHQ, and its secret collusion with the (American) NSA; the names of the heads of all these intelligence agencies; all those late- and post-colonial wars Britain was involved in, behind the scenes; and the fact – and this may be the most ludicrous example – that Jonathan Evans, who rose to be Director General of MI5, wasn’t told that he was working for them until he’d been there a few days. I can believe that; MI6 once attempted to recruit me without letting on who they were. (I recounted this in an old article in the LRB: (http://www.lrb.co.uk/v21/n14/bernard-porter/boarder-or-day-boy). All this obfuscation is bound to affect the histories of these times that are written in years to come. Unless we can reveal the secrets of the 1950s-onwards pretty smartish, before the record is completely destroyed.

This is partly what all the parliamentary and judicial enquiries we are seeing these days into some of the most dreadful things that happened during that period can do for us – ensure that our history isn’t stolen from us; even though that might not be their immediate purpose. (Reparations for victims are more in the inquisitors’ minds.) Future historians will know more about the Iraq War, the Falklands war, the Miners’ strike (but not apparently Orgreave), policing, the British press, historical paedophile abuse (though the inquiry into that appears to be running into the sand), Black Friday, and dozens of other contemporary issues that will soon become historical ones, because of these inquiries, than they would have done otherwise. Cobain’s book, together with a number of other recent ones, will help the process immeasurably. My guess is that if all this evidence were put together, it would require a substantial, if not wholesale, revision of the generally-accepted liberal narrative of recent British history. Perhaps a younger historian than I am could make a start on this now.

If, that is, anyone is really interested. Secrecy does not seem to be a very vital issue in Britain – and possibly America – just now. Assange and Snowden, for example, are not great popular causes here. It may be the ‘post-Truth’ culture we’re in just now – ‘£350 millions a week to the EU’ and all that. No-one cares. Deception is expected, and shrugged away. In Halle in Germany a few years ago I witnessed large demonstrations in support of the whistle-blower Edward Snowden, pressing the German government to grant him asylum; I’ve never witnessed anything like that in Britain, where there appears to be general apathy. But then, of course, Halle – in the old DDR – has been subject to two highly oppressive secret police forces in modern times. We haven’t. So trust us, says William Hague, referring to Snowden’s revelations of mass electronic surveillance; ‘if you are a law-abiding citizen of this country going about your business and your personal life you have nothing to fear about the British state or the intelligence services listening to your phone calls or anything like that.’ Well, that’s reassuring, isn’t it? Hague seems a friendly little chap. But would you trust Theresa May, the authoress of Britain’s ‘Snoopers’ Charter’ when she was Home Secretary, quite so much? Or, if you are an American, Donald Trump? I rest my case.

And – reverting to history – mustn’t it be a good thing to have a true, or true-ish, understanding of that in order to help you understand it, rather than your comfortable old myths? Remember what Winston Smith’s job was in Orwell’s 1984: rewriting old newspaper articles to bring them in line with Big Brother’s version of the past. Cobain’s charge is not quite as serious as that; but it could be that what British governments have been doing recently – for example with those files in Hanslope Park – is on much the same lines. ‘Theft’ is a good word. This is an important book, if it can persuade even the Daily Mail of that.

Just to say that I’ll be on my hols shortly – in SE France, to visit La Cote Saint-André (birthplace of my favourite composer), and one or two other places. Grenoble has a Musée de la Revolution, which Kajsa is keen to see. And I’m sure they must have some old poets, novelists, artists and philosophers buried around there. Everywhere else in France has. (Any advice?) We may also imbibe some vin. Gosh I love France, with all its faults. I’m sure that many English people, like me, wish they were French. But we don’t dare admit it.

I probably won’t be blogging much, therefore, over the next few weeks. In my mind I’m working on a piece on Boris and History for when I return. I’ve bought his Churchill, and written to the Head of History at Eton. With all the damaging revelations about Johnson coming out just now – most of them well-known already – he wouldn’t stand a chance in any other historical era; but the old Tory blimps and blimpesses who will be choosing our next prime minister don’t seem to care. ‘What a card!’, ‘boys will be boys’, and so on. Imagine an Etonian Trump, if you can. Apparently they’re mutual admirers. Not for the first time in recent years the word ‘farce’ seems to fit our British politics exactly.

In the meantime, and to take our minds off it, here’s Berlioz at his most soothing, sung by the inestimable Anne-Sophie, now a compatriot of mine:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wmUtwR7W9DM. I’ll be humming it all the way down.

On the plus side of my ‘good and bad effects of the British Empire list’, I always used to put the spread of cricket. (Sometimes it was there alone.) It must have been the Empire that spread cricket, unlike football, because there are virtually no non-British ex-colonies that took it up.

That I always think is a shame. Cricket isn’t just a game. It’s an art-form and a civilising influence. It could almost be said to justify the British Empire, on its own. ‘Forget Amritsar; we gave you the LBW rule.’ If continental Europe could learn to play it, the Empire’s divine purpose in history would have been accomplished.

Which is why I always get a thrill when I espy cricket being played in Sweden; and then am disappointed when I get closer to it, and see who  is playing. It is always south Asians, usually the Bangladeshis who run the ‘Indian’ restaurants there; all in perfect whites, and with all the necessary equipment. They even had sight-screens for one game I happened on near Gripsholm. Today I discovered that, as well as the main Cricket World Cup going on now in England, there’s a sort of mini-World Cup of all the national ‘B’ teams, with Sweden, Norway and Denmark taking part. But then I looked at the scorecards. All the players had Indian or Pakistani names, with just one exception: one ND Laegsgaard of Denmark. That looks pretty Norse. Obviously I’m not prejudiced against Indians or Pakistanis – I hope that doesn’t need saying – but still this suggests that cricket is an ex-imperial game still. It’s not yet properly penetrated Europe.

I have a theory about this. In England cricketers used to be divided between ‘gentlemen’ (amateurs, usually upper-class), and ‘players’ (professionals, who couldn’t afford to take the time off that it takes to play a cricket match without pay). They had separate changing-rooms, different ways of printing their names on the scorecards (‘Mr’ for the Gents, plain ‘Smith JJ’ for the Players), and there was an annual match between them – ‘Gentlemen versus Players’ – at Lords. It was there that one noticed that most of the best batsmen in the country were ‘gentlemen’, with the bowlers coming from the ranks of the ‘players’. For a ‘gentleman’ to get a decent game of cricket, therefore, he had to engage working-class men to bowl to him.

Then they went out to rule the Empire, most of them upper class; and so – without a regular supply of white proles – needed natives  to bowl at them. That’s how the Indians and all the others learned the game. Later on the natives found that they couldn’t play amongst themselves without having batsmen, and so taught themselves to bat. That was the origin of the great West Indian teams of the 1950s and ’60s, and the Indian team of today; surpassing the English inventors of the game in every department.

The lesson to be taken from this is that for a nation to be able to avail itself of this inestimable benefit, a century or two of British imperial control are necessary. I don’t suppose the Scandinavian countries would be much in favour of this. (Especially now.) But it’s a great shame. If Sweden could put out a team full of Sjöqvists and Anderssons, alongside the Mohammeds and Guptas, I’d feel that Britain’s ‘civilising mission’ in the world had finally come to pass.