Porter’s Pensées

Of course Corbyn is right about Boris Johnson: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/nov/11/boris-johnson-jeremy-corbyn-iran. Everywhere you go abroad he’s regarded as a joke. If he remains much longer as Foreign Secretary he’s likely to be a disaster, for his compatriots as well as for him.

It puzzles me why anyone ever thought he was ‘bright’. It must be because he went to Oxford, where he learned to spout ancient Greek. In the nineteenth century it was assumed that anyone with a good Classics degree could do anything – run the country, rule a colony, even organise a piss-up in a brewery. What the ancients taught about politics was carved in stone, applicable in every conceivable situation. And their politics never got beyond the idea of ‘aristocracy’. (That figures.) You could always dredge up a Latin tag about any political situation, which seemed to fit. In fact my experience of those who excelled in Latin and Greek at my own school, and won Oxbridge scholarships, was that it proved they had good memories, and nothing more. None of them, to my knowledge, went on to achieve what was expected of them. That’s because their study of the ancients didn’t teach them to think. Not like modern History. Am I doing the study of Classics an injustice here?

Here’s an (edited) version of Boris’s biography in Wikipedia. It really shows him up, I feel.

Johnson was awarded a King’s Scholarship to study at Eton College, the elite independent boarding school… At Eton, Johnson began using the given name “Boris” rather than “Alex” and developed “the eccentric English persona” for which he later became known…. Although school reports complained about his idleness, complacency, and lateness, he established himself as a popular and well-known figure within the school. His friends were largely from the wealthy upper middle-classes…. Johnson won a scholarship to read Literae Humaniores, a four-year course based in the study of Classics, at Balliol College, Oxford.

Arriving at the university in late 1983, he was part of a generation of Oxford undergraduates who later dominated British politics and media in the early 21st century, among them senior Conservative Party members David Cameron, William Hague, Michael Gove, Jeremy Hunt, and Nick Boles. At the university, he… associated primarily with Old Etonians, joining the Old Etonian-dominated Bullingdon Club, an upper-class drinking society known for its acts of local vandalism. Johnson entered into a relationship with the aristocrat Allegra Mostyn-Owen and they became engaged while at university.

Johnson became a popular and well-known public figure at Oxford…. In 1984, Johnson was elected secretary of the Oxford Union. In 1986, he ran for president…; his campaign focused on reaching out from his established upper-class support base by emphasising his persona and downplaying his connections to the Conservatives…..  Johnson won the election and was appointed president, although his presidency was not seen as particularly distinguished or memorable, and questions were raised regarding his competency and seriousness. Having specialised in the study of ancient literature and classical philosophy, Johnson graduated from Balliol College with an upper second-class degree, but was deeply unhappy that he did not receive a first.

So he wasn’t even the best at Classics. (And my experience at Cambridge was that Classics gave out an awful lot of Firsts.)

As an imperial historian I agree, too, with Corbyn’s references to the ‘imperial’ flavour of his ideas. It permeates everything he says, and imagines, deludedly, about Britain’s ‘place in the world’. It’s interesting that his Oxford College was Balliol, which was known as the ‘seminary of Empire’ in British imperial times. Johnson’s background, education and former career (as a mere journalist!), as well as his clownishness, and his appalling judgment (over the Zaghari-Ratcliffe case, for example), should rule him out of contention for any responsible job. He needs to resign, and then get fundamentally re-educated, if he ever wants to get back, into any higher position than the jokey blimpish panelist in that famous episode of Have I Got News For You. That was probably the high point of his career.

Poppies are not patriotic. They are worn to remember the terrible slaughter of war, irrespective of the poor victims’ nationalities. For this reason it’s wrong for the International Football Association to ban players’ wearing them for international matches; but equally wrong for this decision to be objected to on patriotic grounds. Unfortunately that was the argument of one Tory minister six years ago; to which I responded with this letter to the Guardian:

‘“Wearing a poppy,” writes our sports minister to Fifa, “is a display of national pride, like wearing your country’s football shirt” (Report, Sport, 9 November). I have worn a poppy at this time of year for as long as I can remember. For me it has always been in sad remembrance of the slain of two world wars, with no shred of nationalism attaching to it. Talk of “national pride” and “football shirts” cheapens the gesture. If this is what it really signifies, I shall not wear one again.’

I am wearing one this year, believing that most people share my interpretation. But in sorrow and sympathy; not with any particular ‘pride’.

On my way to London to give moral support to my daughter-in-law at her ‘citizenship ceremony’ in Chelsea Old Town Hall tomorrow. She needs it, otherwise she might not be allowed back in after she’s spent this Christmas with her folks in Australia. We had a scare two or three years ago, when she was laid up in hospital in Melbourne while her visa expired; lawyers and her local MP came to her defence, but we didn’t know until the plane landed at Heathrow whether or not she – and her new baby – would be let off. I think the Home Office (under the dreadful Theresa May) was wanting to make an example of her: firstly to demonstrate to Brexiteers that it was ‘serious’ about cutting immigration; and secondly to reassure liberals that it wasn’t only darkies it was trying to keep out. After tomorrow, she’ll have dual nationality, and so be (relatively) free.

Dual nationality may become the norm quite soon. My children can all claim dual Irish citizenship whenever they want – their mother has an Irish passport. I’m in the process of applying for joint Swedish (no word yet). In my case and, as I understand it, thousands of others, it’s in order to remain a citizen of Europe, once Britain has cast herself adrift.

That was the cruellest aspect of Brexit for people like me, though I sense that others will be affected worse and more materially. Why do Brexiteers believe that one essential part of being a British ‘patriot’ lies is keeping yourself apart from other nations? That’s not my understanding of the history of our ‘national identity’; about which I’m presently writing – or, rather, compiling, from old papers and unpublished lectures – a new book. It will be a kind of democratic history of the relations between Brits and Continental Europeans over the past two centuries, at the level of ‘the people’ rather than of governments. The working title is ‘Cosmopolis’.

I’ve been to one of these ‘citizenship ceremonies’ before: for my son-in-law, an American (now Anglo-). It was rather low-key: a tiny room, two flags (one for Hertfordshire County), a civil servant administering the oath – not Queenie: that was a disappointment – and the national anthem played on a portable CD player. The oath itself is a bit tame – ‘I, [name], [swear by Almighty God] [do solemnly, sincerely and truly affirm and declare] that, on becoming a British citizen, I will be faithful and bear true allegiance to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, her heirs, and successors, according to law’; there’s nothing there about having your head chopped off if you don’t. Doesn’t becoming British deserve a bit more pomp? Tomorrow’s is a group affair (several new citizens), which might make it jollier.

I’ve nothing to add on the great issues of the day – the Cabinet falling apart, Boris’s clowning, dirty old Conservative MPs clutching women’s bottoms, increasing poverty, Donald’s idiocies, imminent war with ‘Little Rocket Man’, famous people (including Queenie) cheating the taxman; West Ham sacking Slaven… It’s all been said already. Weird enough, i’d have thought, to make Kellie think twice before becoming one of us. Can you apply for more than two nationalities? It could be a good escape route for all of us. And express our multiple ‘identities’ more meaningfully.

Deleted.

‘Tyranny is probably established out of no other regime than democracy.’ So said Socrates, apparently. (It’s been decades since I read Plato’s Republic.) Here, one Andrew Sullivan explains how, with reference to Trump. I have to say this impressed me.

Analysis of the votes cast in the 2016 Europe Referendum and in this year’s General Election revealed, among other patterns, two quite striking ones: that both Remain and Labour voters tended to be (a) younger and (b) better educated than the rest. This set some on the Conservative and Brexit sides ‘blaming’ the rapid expansion of University education in Britain in recent years for the difficulties they had experienced. There were several possible conclusions that could be drawn from this. The ‘elitist’ one was that Remain and Labour were the more intelligent or educated ways to vote. (But we’re not allowed to say that.) The one that many on the Right favoured, however, was that students were being over-influenced by the views of their academics, who were reputed, probably correctly, to be predominantly Leftish.

It must be this that has given rise to the extraordinary and alarming suggestion by one pro-Brexit Tory MP yesterday, that Universities report to the Government on courses that include studies of British-European relations, especially those that bear on the issue of Brexit, to the extent even of forwarding their syllabuses, booklists and outline lectures, and naming lecturers: https://www.theguardian.com/education/2017/oct/24/universities-mccarthyism-mp-demands-list-brexit-chris-heaton-harris. That would have included me, when I used to teach the history of Britain’s relations with Europe in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

This is, of course, appalling. Apart from its being based on entirely erroneous ideas about higher education – that it consists of lecturers dictating their own views to students, rather than encouraging them to think (I see that Chris Heaton-Harris went to the University of Wolverhampton, an institution the existence of which I was snobbishly unaware of before today: is that how they’re taught there?) – it has brought to many critics’ minds the spectre of ‘McCarthyism’: policing teaching and so undermining freedom of thought in universities, which of course is the basis of all academic enquiry and teaching in a ‘free’ country. Universities will certainly resist it for this reason. Hopefully the Conservatives will too; even – or perhaps particularly – the Oxbridge-educated ones. (That’s one thing you can say about Oxbridge.)

There has always been an element in the Conservative Party that has opposed all popular education on the grounds that it would give the working classes ‘ideas above their station’. This may be what is behind Mr Heaton-Harris’s fears for the effects of Higher Education on the classes that have only recently been admitted to what had previously been a mainly elite cadre. Keep them ignorant, and they’ll be more likely to vote Tory. (Or for Trump in the US. Did his voters break down demographically the same way?) Benjamin Disraeli is supposed to have consigned this attitude to the past with the famous declaration he made in support of the 1870 Education Bill, passed at the time that Parliamentary democracy was just beginning to emerge in Britain: ‘We must educate our masters’. But only – Heaton-Harris would say – if their educators are carefully monitored.

I can well believe David Lammy’s recent complaints about Oxbridge admissions, having witnessed exactly the same during my time at Cambridge (1960-68). (See https://www.theguardian.com/education/2017/oct/19/oxbridge-becoming-less-diverse-as-richest-gain-80-of-offers#img-1.) My only surprises are that these abuses have lasted so long since I left, and – in retrospect – that I wasn’t more aware of them at the time. I did become so during my last two years there, as a College Fellow; and indeed it was my college’s deliberate (it seemed to me) exclusion of boys from State schools that caused me to resign my Fellowship, and take up a job in a more sympathetic university, Hull, to the surprise of all my fellow Fellows, to whom Hull sounded rather ‘Secondary Modern’ – ‘it’s in the North, isn’t it, Bernard?’ – but to my great relief at the time. Once there I found I could sleep at night, unlike after those awful ‘High Table’ dinners with some almost unbelievably reactionary dons: ‘we don’t talk about the Round Ball game here, Bernard. Only rugger’; and indeed I never regretted my decision thereafter. The specific reason for that decision was the Senior Tutor’s deletion of the names of four or five good State schools I had provided for him, from a list of headmasters invited to a dinner at the college to establish ‘links’ with them. ‘The Master and I looked at your recommendations, Bernard, but came to the conclusion that these weren’t the sorts of schools we wanted our students coming from.’ It was as blatant as that.

So, how had I got in? I hadn’t been to a ‘Public’ School, but to something close: what was called at that time a ‘Direct Grant Grammar School’, where about two-thirds of the boys (boys only of course) were fee-payers, many of them boarders, and the rest, including me, financed by ‘County Scholarships’ from the local Education Authority. (When the ‘Direct Grant’ was abolished, it became fully ‘Independent’.) It had all the Public School attributes: lots of ‘Classics’, the ‘House’ system, a CCF, huge playing fields, bottom-beating (as a ‘Praeposter’ – or prefect – even I was allowed to cane smaller boys. I never did), and, of course, ‘links’ with Oxbridge colleges. The ‘masters’ – teachers – knew the ropes. I was ‘put in’ for an Oxford and a Cambridge College, and offered places at both, but chose the Cambridge one because it offered me a College scholarship too. (More money.) The day I received its offer, by telegram, was, I think, the happiest of my life.

It never occurred to me then that my success was not based purely on merit, but had depended very largely on luck. I was beneath the ‘class’ level of all my contemporaries: not working class but pretty near – lower-middle, the son of Secondary Modern school teachers, and with what today would be called an ‘Estuary’ accent, not quite Cockney, but pretty plebbish; all of which clearly put the College off me when I went ‘up’ for an early interview in my Lower-Sixth year. ‘The college is a community,’ explained the Senior Tutor (later incidentally to become Headmaster of Eton). ‘What we’re looking for is people who are clubbable.’ I clearly wasn’t, so I failed that; but later took the College’s scholarship exam, and passed that. (I was – always have been – better in writing.) Later I came suspect that the College, aware even then of public complaints of class bias, had taken me in as its ‘token prole’.

I didn’t mind. I was gloriously happy at Cambridge, during my undergraduate and postgraduate years: wonderful buildings, pretty good (but far from outstanding) teaching, long vacations, friendly mates, even the public-school boys (or ‘chums’, though they could be a bit patronising), and – at that time – adequate State grants of money for both tuition and living. Best of all, there were the fantastic ‘extra-mural’ opportunities that Cambridge offered. I concentrated firstly on the theatre, as a set-designer, taking productions to the Edinburgh Fringe and meeting many of the great actors, producers and comedians of my generation (I could name-drop if I wanted!); and secondly on Labour politics. (I was the sole member at my college of the University Labour Club.) I learned a great deal about the upper and upper-middle classes there, which stood me in good stead afterwards – in my understanding of British history, that is, rather than socially or materially. Looking back, I’m not surprised I loved it all.

It may have been this love that blinded me to the obvious fact that there were no non-whites or genuine working-class lads at my college then: though of course I noticed the absence of women – excused on the grounds that they would need special toilet facilities. (A lot of the older Fellows were bachelors. They obviously has no idea about girls’ plumbing.) And this was in spite of my socialism (even then), and my active participation in the Anti-Apartheid movement. How could I have not noticed? There were ‘blacks’ in Britain then. Maybe it was for the same reason – love – that Oxbridge has neglected this problem during the 50 years since I left. In my case I did get to know non-Europeans in my postgraduate years, in the research seminars I attended (in Imperial history), and in my college’s postgraduate annexe. (PhD students came from all over.) But still never the ‘working classes’, or Northerners, or Welsh. They only came into my purview at Hull.

I fully accept all the points that are made by Lammy and his supporters about the adverse social and political impact of this Oxbridge segregation. It has lain at the root of our national problems for decades. Cameron, Osborne, May, Gove, Johnson – all Oxbridge. If only they had come into contact there with plebs – except as college servants: they don’t count – don’t you think we would be far better run as a country? Harold Macmillan was as snooty as they are, but had had contact with ordinary soldiers in the First World War, which is what he claimed widened his vision and softened his sympathies. Public Schools and the ancient Universities don’t give you that. Open them both up to the ‘people’, I say. And don’t let Oxbridge tell you they’re trying. They really aren’t.

Excellent piece by Simon Jenkins in today’s Guardian – https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/oct/18/mi5-lost-plot-britain-safer-than-ever-andrew-parker-terror.

It really is important to distinguish between politically-motivated crimes that ‘only’ hurt people, and politically-motivated crimes that genuinely threaten the state – or democracy, or the British way of life, or whatever. Terrorists want to have their actions put in the latter category. That’s their whole purpose – to bring about political or religious change, through ‘terrorising’ the general population. Parker’s scaremongering must be music to their ears.

They understood the difference in the late nineteenth century. See my The Origins of the Vigilant State (1987).

It’s becoming more apparent by the week – almost by the hour – that Brexit is a disaster, led by idiots, clowns and vagabonds, voted for by a misled population (misled, not stupid), enabled by a deeply flawed political system, stirring up the worst passions of our people, and being implemented now – on our side – by incompetents.

Looking at it as a historian – one historian: others will disagree – it seems to me to mark an extraordinary stage, possibly the ultimate one, in the story of Britain’s decline from a position of perceived ‘greatness’, which in my view was never based on either ‘splendid isolation’ or ‘imperialism’, which is what the Brexiteers appear to be harking back to; but always on high ideals (not always lived up to), generosity (ditto), pragmatism, adaptability to a changing world, and good relations with our immediate neighbours. The end result will almost certainly impoverish us as a nation: materially of course – that’s becoming obvious; but also in terms of reputation, and, for those of us whose patriotism, such as it is, is not founded on illusions of past power and domination – national pride.

I’ve been energised by this to return to an old abandoned project of mine: a collection of essays analysing Britain’s ‘identity’ as a nation, and her historical relations with the rest of Europe: see https://bernardjporter.com/2017/10/10/cosmopolitan-britain/. (I know, I keep announcing new projects. It’s the conception that excites me. Let’s hope this one isn’t aborted, like ‘Essex’ and the rest.)