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Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Praise for Island Stories

Epigraph

List of illustrations

Introduction: Brexit Means …?

1. Decline

2. Europe

3. Britain

4. Empire

5. Taking Control of Our Past

Notes

Index

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Also by David Reynolds

About the Publisher

List of illustrations

1. ‘Brexit means …’ © Christian Adams (Tim Benson, The Political Cartoon Gallery)

2. ‘Bull and his burdens’, John Tenniel © Punch, 8 February 1879, Vol 76

3. ‘We can fly the Union Jack instead of the white flags …’ © Cummings, Daily Express/Express Syndication, 16 June 1982

4. ‘Er, could I be the hind legs, please?’ © Vicky/Victor Weisz, Evening Standard, 6 December 1962

5. ‘The Double Deliverance’ (1621). © The Trustees of the British Museum.

6. ‘Very Well, Alone’. © David Low, Evening Standard, 18 June 1940.

7. ‘Come on in! Vite! The water’s wunderbar.’ © Cummings, Daily Express, 28 June 1989

8. ‘The United Kingdom: Liberate Scotland now …’ © Lindsay Foyle, 15 January 2012

9. Woodcut from James Cranford, ‘The Teares of Ireland’ (1642). © British Library Board/Bridgeman Images

10. ‘Massacre at Drogheda’ from Mary Frances Cusack, An Illustrated History of Ireland (1868)

11. Mr Punch reviews the fleet at Spithead, Punch, June 1897. © Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group/Getty Images

12. ‘Windrush Betrayal’. © Patrick Blower/Telegraph Media Group Ltd, Daily Telegraph, 18 April 2018

13. ‘The Aliens Act at Work’ (1906). © Jewish History Museum, London

14. ‘We need migrants …’ © Matt Pritchett/Telegraph Media Group Ltd, Daily Telegraph, 30 June 2017

15. ‘It’ll whisk you back to the sepia-tinted 1950s’. © Kipper Williams, In or Out of Europe (2016).

16. ‘Remainers Ahead’, © Grizelda, New Statesman, 13 April 2018

17. ‘Free at Last’ © Patrick Chappatte, New York Times, 23 June 2016.

Introduction
Brexit Means …?

On 23 June 2016, the British electorate voted to leave the European Union. The margin was arithmetically narrow, yet politically decisive: 51.89 per cent ‘Leave’ and 48.11 per cent ‘Remain’. ‘Leave’ meant ‘out’ but nobody in the governing class, let alone the country, had a clear idea where the country was going. No contingency planning for a ‘Leave’ vote had been undertaken by David Cameron, the Prime Minister who had called the referendum. And Theresa May, who succeeded Cameron after he abruptly resigned, lacked any coherent strategy for exiting an international organisation of which the UK had been a member for close to half a century. Her mantra ‘Brexit means Brexit’ initially sounded cleverly Delphic, but it became a sick joke. Even after her successor Boris Johnson finally took the UK out of the EU on 31 January 2020, there was still no clear idea what Brexit meant. The country’s future seemed more uncertain than at any time since 1940.

And not just its future; also its past. How should we tell the story of British history in the light of the referendum? Had the turn to ‘Europe’ in 1973 been just a blind alley? Or was the 2016 vote mere nostalgia for a world we (thought we) had lost? Bemused by both future and past, Brexit-era Britons feel challenged about their sense of national identity – because identity has to be rooted in a clear feeling about how we became what we are.

This is not a book about Brexit – its politics and negotiations: these will drag on for years. Instead, I ponder how to think about Britain’s history in the light of the Brexit debate. Because the country’s passionate arguments about the European Union raised big questions about the ways in which the British understand their past. About which moments they choose to celebrate and which to blot out. And about how to construct a national narrative linking past, present and future. Or, more exactly, national narratives – plural – because a central argument of this book is that there is no single story to be told – whatever politicians may wish us to believe.

For a century, there was a dominant national narrative: about the expansion of Britain into a global empire. In 1902 – after victory over the Boers in South Africa – the poet A. C. Benson added words to Edward Elgar’s Pomp and Circumstance ‘March No. 1’, extolling the ‘Land of Hope and Glory’:

Wider still and wider shall thy bounds be set,

God, who made thee mighty, make thee mightier yet

But after two world wars and rapid decolonisation, the ‘ever-mightier’ imperial theme rang hollow. In 1962, Dean Acheson, the former US Secretary of State, declared that Britain had ‘lost an empire’ but ‘not yet found a role’.[1] Over the next decade British leaders – Tory and Labour – tried to join the European Economic Community. But two French vetoes from President Charles de Gaulle blocked their way and it was not until 1973 that the UK (together with Ireland and Denmark) eventually became a member of the EEC. Even though Britain was always an ‘awkward partner’[2] – protesting about the size of its budget contributions and the EEC’s obsession with farm subsidies – for the next four decades or so the narrative did seem clear: the British had lost a global empire but found a European role.

But in 2016 that new role suddenly also seemed to be lost. During the referendum debate, various historical precedents and patterns were invoked to help frame Brexit Britain’s historical self-understanding. Much cited was ‘Our Finest Hour’ in the Second World War. Leaving the EU ‘would be the biggest stimulus to get our butts in gear that we have ever had’, declared billionaire Peter Hargreaves, a financier of Brexit. ‘It will be like Dunkirk again … Insecurity is fantastic.’[3] Developing the 1940 theme, Tory politician Boris Johnson asserted that the past 2,000 years of European history had been characterised by repeated attempts to unify Europe under a single government in order to recover the continent’s lost ‘golden age’ under the Romans. ‘Napoleon, Hitler, various people tried this out, and it ends tragically,’ he claimed. ‘The EU is an attempt to do this by different methods.’ The villains of the piece, in Johnson’s view, were once again the Germans. ‘The Euro has become a means by which superior German productivity is able to gain an absolutely unbeatable advantage over the whole Eurozone.’ He depicted Brexit as ‘a chance for the British people to be the heroes of Europe and to act as a voice of moderation and common sense, and to stop something getting in my view out of control … It is time for someone – it’s almost always the British in European history – to say, “We think a different approach is called for”.’[4]

Also touted as a historical guide for Britain’s future was the idea of the ‘Anglosphere’ – influenced by Winston Churchill’s A History of the English-Speaking Peoples from the 1950s – and even the concept of an ‘Imperial Federation’ with the ‘White Dominions’, as proposed by Joseph Chamberlain in the 1900s. Churchill biographer Andrew Roberts was one of those advocating CANZUK – a confederation of Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the UK – as potentially ‘the third pillar of Western Civilisation’, together with the USA and the EU. He argued that that ‘we must pick up where we left off in 1973’ when the ‘dream of the English-speaking peoples’ was ‘shattered by British entry into the EU’. Theresa May spoke in a similarly expansive vein when outlining her government’s vision of Brexit. ‘June the 23rd was not the moment Britain chose to step back from the world. It was the moment we chose to build a truly Global Britain.’ Although stating that she was ‘proud of our shared European heritage’, May insisted: ‘we are also a country that has always looked beyond Europe to the wider world. That is why we are one of the most racially diverse countries in Europe, one of the most multicultural members of the European Union.’[5]

Here were hints of how Brexit might be seen in historical perspective: as the latest attempt to resist a continental tyrant, or as the chance to resume a global role that had been rudely interrupted by joining the EU. But neat historical analogies are not adequate. Nor are simplified benchmarks like 1940 or 1973. We need to probe more deeply what is still often called ‘our island story’ – and to do so with greater geographical breadth and over a longer time span – in order to gain some perspective on the Brexit malaise.

* * *

Our Island Story was the title of Henrietta Marshall’s best-selling History of England for Boys and Girls, first published in 1905. In 2010 the education secretary Michael Gove told the Tory party conference that he would ‘put British history at the heart of a revived national curriculum’, so that ‘all pupils will learn our island story’. In 2014 Prime Minister David Cameron lauded Marshall’s stirring account of the country’s inexorable progress towards liberty, law and parliamentary government.[6] But today a simple ‘Whiggish’ narrative is implausible. This is a book about ‘stories’, plural – about different ways in which to see our complicated past. In particular, we need to move beyond the idea of a self-contained ‘island’, portrayed as adopting various roles over the centuries – empire, Europe, the globe – as if these could be tried on and then taken off, like a suit of clothes. In reality, ‘we’ have been ‘made’ by empire, Europe and the world as much as the other way round.

And the ‘we’ – the United Kingdom – has also been a shifting entity, a historically conflicted archipelago, comprising more than six thousand islands, and not a unitary fixed space occupied by a people whom many in England still tend to call, interchangeably, ‘British’ or ‘English’.[7] In particular, ‘our island story’ omits Ireland – ‘John Bull’s Other Island’, as George Bernard Shaw entitled his satirical comedy of 1904 about an English con man who dupes Irish villagers into mortgaging their homes so he can turn the place into an amusement park. Ireland was brought under English rule in the Norman period but never really subdued, despite the Acts of Union in 1801. Its centuries of turmoil and tragedy, in turn, had a profound impact on the island of Britain.

This, then, is a book about history, framed by geography. But it is also a book about ways of thinking, because being ‘islanded’ is a state of mind.[8] The English Channel did not always seem a great divide: for four centuries the Anglo-Norman kings ruled a domain that straddled it and treated water as a bridge rather than a barrier. The sense of ‘providential insularity’ came later, as a product of England’s Protestant Reformation, followed by several centuries of war against the continental Catholic ‘other’, embodied in Spain and then France. As the power of Protestantism waned in twentieth-century Britain, providential insularity was given a new lease of life by two wars against Germany, and especially by the way that 1940 has become inscribed in national history and popular memory.

Nor would the ‘island’ narrative have proved so enthralling had medieval English kings not created such a strong state, which they then tried to impose by force on their neighbours. The Welsh were incorporated in the 1530s, the Scots not until 1707, but thereafter – during the eighteenth, nineteenth and most of the twentieth centuries – the London government effectively directed the whole of ‘our’ island of Britain. Yet making the ‘other island’ across the Irish Sea ‘British’ as well proved a far more difficult task. The English failed to do so, but the struggle ebbed and flowed for centuries, costing several million lives through war and famine. At points along the way the ‘Irish Question’ also tested the unity of Britain itself – in the 1640s, for instance, when it was the catalyst for civil war, and in the Home Rule crisis before 1914. In 1920, after the brutal war of independence, it resulted in the partitioning of the island of Ireland in two between an independent Catholic state and an embattled, Protestant-dominated Ulster clinging on to its Britishness within the UK.

In the mid-1960s the rancorous issues of partition and sectarianism escalated into the three-decade long ‘Troubles’ in Northern Ireland, whose brutal violence was quelled only by the Good Friday agreement of 1998. This brought a ragged peace to Ulster and also redefined the political geometry of Ireland, opening up the border between the two states. Yet during the EU referendum debate, the Conservative and Unionist Party closed its eyes to recent history. Only after the vote to leave the EU did it start to grapple with the profound implications that Brexit would have for Northern Ireland, the peace process and the unity of the UK.

By the end of the twentieth century, both the Good Friday agreement and the institution of devolved governments in Scotland and Wales presaged a different set of relationships between and within the two main islands. In England the apparent indifference of London to the socio-economic problems of the regions, especially in the north, played a significant part in the Leave victory in 2016, and the failure of the Westminster Parliament to resolve – or even address – the challenges of Brexit aggravated this sense of alienation. Yet the saga of Britishness – forged by war and burnished by retelling – continues to exert immense power, whether deployed by politicians or dramatised in movies. Equally potent are the individual national stories of the Scots, Welsh and Irish – even of the English without the others[9] – all reinvigorated by the crisis of the Union. In a struggle for the future, the past really matters. Yet not just the past of the two islands and their tangled relations with continental Europe. The global dimension is equally important.

Developing as a seafaring nation from the sixteenth century, the English used their relative security from the Continent as both a sanctuary and a springboard. Exploiting their growing naval reach they were able to prey on foreign rivals, profit richly from the slave trade, open up markets and create settlements – first in the Caribbean and North America; later in the Indian subcontinent, Australasia and Africa. The wealth thereby generated played a critical part in Britain’s precocious industrial revolution. It also drew the country gradually and messily into a patchwork of formal empire, which the British then struggled to rule on the cheap in the face of bigger and stronger international challengers. By the 1970s, after two world wars and an often violent process of decolonisation, the British Empire has disappeared. But the UK remained a global economy, shaped by its commercial and financial past, and the stories of global greatness, now somehow disconnected from the empire project, still appealed to political and public nostalgia. More problematic legacies of empire, such as the slave trade or mass immigration, tended to be ignored in the grand narrative of our island’s worldwide reach.

Those simple words ‘island’ and ‘stories’ are, therefore, worthy of close examination. To do so we need to engage with ‘big history’ and the longue durée in ways which do justice to the English stamp on these islands’ histories without being narrowly Anglocentric. And although Island Stories has been prompted by the Brexit imbroglio, it reflects deeper concerns. There is now a profusion of innovative and detailed scholarly research, based on analysis of new sources and fresh insight into old sources. But much of this work takes the form of micro-histories, addressing narrow topics for an academic audience, and a good deal of it has been shaped by the ‘cultural turn’ – which privileges food, dress, and gender relations and frowns on political history as being antiquated and irrelevant. As a result, big-picture narratives have been left to popular writers skimming the surface, or to politicians advancing their own agenda. This short book is an attempt by one professional historian to start filling this gap, at a time when political and international history really matter.

The four main chapters outline and probe four alternative, if overlapping, ways of telling our island stories in the era of Brexit. They draw on some of the narratives that have been offered by famous voices of the twentieth century, such as Joseph Chamberlain, Winston Churchill, Hugh Gaitskell and Margaret Thatcher, and also by politicians of our own time including Boris Johnson and Jacob Rees-Mogg. But the chapters range far beyond the problems and personalities of the twentieth century, and offer some very long views to offset the national fixation with 1973 and 1940.

Each chapter explores an overarching theme, reflecting on the history of the last millennium. The first chapter ‘Decline’ looks at how and why Britain’s place in the world has changed in recent centuries, and whether the turn to Europe represented realistic statesmanship or a failure of national will. I also consider the country’s assets – both ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ power – in the Brexit era and the powerful hold of ‘heritage’ in the national culture. The second chapter looks more closely at Britain’s engagement with Europe, going back beyond the Protestant Reformation to the Anglo-Norman kings, and exploring that ambiguous role of the Channel as both barrier and bridge. The third chapter turns to the long history of Britain, tracing the impact of English empire-building on the archipelago and assessing the two Acts of Union in 1707 and 1801 that brought Scotland and then Ireland into the United Kingdom. The chapter also discusses the impacts of two world wars, 1990s devolution and the Brexit vote on the unity of the Union. The fourth chapter, ‘Empire’, emphasises the role of slavepower as well as seapower in making Britain great, but also examines how the ideology of freedom both promoted the empire and eroded it. In the last section of this chapter, ‘The Empire comes home’, I offer a historical context for the impassioned Brexit debate on immigration and reflect on a post-imperial country in which racist attitudes coexist with multiculturalism.

In the concluding chapter, ‘Taking Control of Our Past’, I reflect more generally on what the political feuding since 2016, and the 2020 Covid-19 pandemic, reveal of Britain’s deeper problems in dealing with Brexit and also in coming to terms with its past. This is, of course, a personal view – on topics that are highly contested, for history has become an integral part of the country’s Brexitoxic political argument. Island Stories is a contribution to that fevered debate. And by taking a long view, it also offers an unconventional history of Britain.

1
Decline

Of every reader, the attention will be excited by an history of the decline and fall of the Roman empire, the greatest, perhaps, and most awful scene in the history of mankind.

Edward Gibbon, 1788[1]

Thus began the final paragraph of Edward Gibbon’s magnum opus The History of the Rise, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Volume one had appeared in 1776, just as the American colonies declared independence from Britain and proclaimed themselves a republic. The sixth and last volume was published in 1788, a year before ancien régime France was engulfed by revolution. Its fratricidal anarchy would spawn Napoleon’s continental empire.

Gibbon’s chronicle of the Pax Romana became a literary classic during the nineteenth century, as Britain saw off the Napoleonic challenge and grew into a global power – spanning the world from India to Africa, from the Near East to Australasia. By the end of the century the term Pax Britannica had entered the vernacular. But there were also creeping fears of imperial mortality – captured by Rudyard Kipling, the bard of empire, in his fin de siècle poem ‘Recessional’:

Far-called, our navies melt away;

On dune and headland sinks the fire:

Lo, all our pomp of yesterday

Is one with Nineveh and Tyre![2]

An 1879 Punch cartoon by John Tenniel shows John Bull the ox carrying the world’s woes on his back – Russia, Afghanistan, Egypt, Scotland (a recent financial scandal in Glasgow), a striker and a gleeful African warrior from the costly Zulu Wars.

Britain’s Victorian and Edwardian leaders sought strategies that might save their unlikely empire from a Roman fate. How best to deal with jealous rivals? By military confrontation, or selective appeasement? The first could sap the nation’s wealth and power; the latter risked letting in the barbarians by the back door. They also wrestled with the Roman tension between libertas and imperium, of civic virtues supposedly corrupted by militarism and luxury. Would British imperialism undermine political liberty at home? Conversely, would a freedom-loving people have the backbone to resist the jackals of the global jungle? These dilemmas became acute during the era of the two world wars.

On a larger canvas, Gibbon’s Rome has provided a template for telling the story of Britain’s changing place in the world over the last five centuries in terms of a great empire’s rise, decline and fall. This held a perennial, almost mesmeric fascination for a political class that modelled itself on imperial Rome. Under this narrative, however, lurk problematic notions of empire. Should it be understood as a clearly defined possession – eventually ‘lost’ or ‘surrendered’? Or was it like an increasingly outmoded and ill-fitting suit of clothes, which was finally tossed aside? This chapter looks more closely at Britain’s changing global role and at related shifts in the country’s power and prosperity – arguing that the Gibbonian concept of ‘decline’ is deeply misleading. In doing so, it also highlights a recurrent pattern of British political rhetoric from the late nineteenth century right up to the present. Politicians have frequently couched their campaigns to change national policy within a dramatic ‘declinist’ narrative of the recent past. Here are a few examples.[3]

Ideologists of ‘decline’

Joseph Chamberlain has been described by historian Peter Clarke as Britain’s ‘first leading politician to propose a drastic method of averting the sort of national decline’ that he ‘saw as otherwise inevitable’. Chamberlain was also the first to do so in a style of populist nationalism crafted for an era of mass politics. He and his followers posed a ‘Radical Right’ challenge to mainstream Toryism, preaching what has been called a gospel of ‘messianic catastrophism’.[4]

Chamberlain was a self-made Birmingham businessman who got rich as a manufacturer of screws, before moving into politics in the 1870s as a reforming Mayor of Birmingham (‘Radical Joe’) and then as a member of W. E. Gladstone’s second Liberal Cabinet. His ego and energy splintered not one but two parties – first the Liberals in 1886 because of his opposition to Home Rule for Ireland, and then the Conservatives in 1903 over ‘Tariff Reform’. Quite what that phrase meant was almost as elusive as ‘Brexit’ in our own day, but at its core was Chamberlain’s conviction that the rise of competitors such as Germany and the United States must be met by abandoning the Victorian precepts of ‘free trade’ and imposing tariffs in order to protect British industry and to consolidate the empire. Only this strategy could save ‘the weary Titan’ who ‘staggers under the too vast orb of its fate.’ He told the colonials, ‘We have borne the burden for many years. We think it is time that our children should assist us.’ The alternative was decline into ‘a fifth-rate nation’ – another Venice or Holland. ‘All history is the history of states once powerful and then decaying,’ Chamberlain told a political rally in 1903. ‘Is Britain to be numbered among the decaying states: is all the glory of the past to be forgotten? … Or are we to take up a new youth as members of a great empire, which will continue for generation after generation the strength, the power and the glory of the British race?’[5]

Chamberlain’s aim was to shore up Britain’s power base in an era of rival empires by protecting its existing manufacturing industries. For him, structural economic change was unacceptable: it would mean replacement by ‘secondary and inferior’ industries, causing ‘individual suffering’ to the working man without ‘any real compensation to the nation’. ‘Your once great trade in sugar refining is gone,’ he declaimed mockingly in another speech in 1903: ‘all right, try jam. Your iron trade is going; never mind, you can make mouse traps.’[6] But although Chamberlain’s populist crusade for tariff reform briefly caught the public imagination, it soon burnt out. The main effect was to divide the Conservatives and pave the way for the Liberal landslide of 1906. Chamberlain died, bitter and disillusioned, in July 1914 – a month before the Great War began. Ironically, during the 1920s and 1930s, the very restructuring and diversification he deplored would transform the Birmingham area. Chemicals and electrical engineering, aviation and motor vehicles not only rejuvenated the Midlands economy but also prepared Britain to wage a second world war in the era of airpower.[7]

Winston Churchill was another politician who, in later life, became obsessed with Britain’s decline – doing so, like Chamberlain, when in opposition and with one eye on gaining power. Conviction and calculation conjoined. After a spectacular political rise on either side of the Great War, culminating in Chancellorship of the Exchequer at the age of 50, the premiership seemed within Churchill’s grasp. But then, for a decade from 1929, he was cast out into the political wilderness, regarded as a wilful opportunist too mercurial for inclusion in the National Governments of Ramsay MacDonald, Stanley Baldwin and Neville Chamberlain – Joe’s son. To attract attention he campaigned loudly on various causes, from Edward VIII in the Abdication Crisis to air rearmament against Germany. It is the latter for which Churchill’s ‘wilderness years’ are now best remembered. But the underlying issue for him – and the one that sustained the rest of his life – was Britain’s decline as a great power.

Churchill’s crusade, however, took a very different form from Chamberlain’s. He was and remained a staunch Free Trader who had broken with the Tories over tariff reform. Churchill’s vision of Britain’s greatness centred not on the white-settler colonies that Chamberlain wanted to weld into an imperial economic bloc, but on India, which young Winston had experienced first-hand as a soldier fighting for his Queen Empress. In 1931 the Conservative party adopted a policy of giving India ‘dominion status’ within the British Empire – potentially setting it on a course of devolution and independence similar to that already conceded to Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. Incensed, Churchill broke with the party leadership and embarked on a four-year crusade against what became the Government of India Act of 1935. Now virtually forgotten in British history, this was the biggest parliamentary struggle of the 1930s – eclipsing in time and passion even the issues of Germany and rearmament – for which Churchill rolled out some of his most extravagant rhetoric.

Inveighing in February 1931 against the ‘nauseating’ sight of ‘Mr Gandhi, a seditious Middle Temple lawyer, now posing as a fakir of a type well known in the East, striding half-naked up the steps of the Viceregal palace … to parley on equal terms with the representative of the King-Emperor,’ Churchill claimed that India was ‘no ordinary question of party politics’ but ‘one of those supreme issues which come upon us from time to time’, like going to war against Germany in 1914. A month later he warned that ‘the continuance of our present confusion and disintegration will reduce us within a generation, and perhaps sooner, to the degree of States like Holland and Portugal, which nursed valiant races, and held great possessions, but were stripped of them in the crush and competition of the world. That would be a melancholy end to all the old glories and recent triumphs.’[8] The root problem, in Churchill’s opinion, was a failure of national will since the Great War. ‘The British lion, so fierce and valiant in bygone days, so dauntless and unconquerable through the agony of Armageddon, can now be chased by rabbits from the fields and forests of his former glory. It is not that our strength is seriously impaired. We are suffering from a disease of the will. We are the victims of a nervous collapse, of a morbid state of the mind.’[9]

If willpower alone was what counted, Winston would have won the battle over India. But he led a diehard minority within the Tory party. What’s more, his vehemence and obduracy not only estranged him from the party leadership; it also undermined his credibility on more consequential matters. His description of the Indian nationalist leaders as ‘evil and malignant Brahmins’ with their ‘itching fingers stretching and scratching at the vast pillage of a derelict empire’ was striking, but it was ‘not likely to make comparable descriptions of genuinely evil men credible’.[10] Churchill’s hyperbole about India helped keep him in the political wilderness. Only with the onset of a second German war was he brought back into government.

Churchill never modified his opinions about India, empire and decline. Even in the darkest days of the Second World War in April 1942 – as Hitler’s Afrika Korps advanced on Cairo and the Japanese conquered Burma – he deplored any concessions to Indian nationalists. When President Franklin D. Roosevelt breezily informed Prime Minister Churchill that the British should concede self-government to India, on the lines of the Articles of Confederation under which the new United States had initially been run after independence in 1783, Churchill replied that he ‘could not be responsible’ for such a policy and even threatened to make it a resignation issue.[11] In November 1942 he warned defiantly: ‘We mean to hold our own. I have not become the King’s First Minister to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire.’[12]

On this, Churchill proved as good as his word. But not because liquidation did not happen; only that he did not have to preside over it. For that lucky escape, he had the British electorate to thank: they voted him out of office in July 1945. What one might call his ‘second wilderness years’, from 1945 to 1951, allowed him to watch from the sidelines and criticise with impunity Clement Attlee’s Labour Government for its ‘scuttle’ from India and Burma in 1947. Some of his predictions had prescience – for instance that ‘any attempt to establish the reign of a Hindu numerical majority in India will never be achieved without a civil war’ – but, as in the 1930s, they were blunted by his jeremiad of decline and his lamentations about lack of will. ‘It is with deep grief that I watch the clattering down of the British Empire with all its glories, and all the services it has rendered to mankind. I am sure that in the hour of our victory now not so long ago, we had the power to make a solution of our difficulties which would have been honourable and lasting. Many have defended Britain against her foes. None can defend her against herself.’[13]

In similar vein, campaigning for the premiership again in October 1951, Churchill denounced Attlee’s six years as marking ‘the greatest fall in the rank and stature of Britain in the world’ since ‘the loss of the American colonies two hundred years ago.’ He asserted that ‘our Oriental Empire has been liquidated’ and ‘our influence among the nations is now less than it has ever been in any period since I remember.’[14] Back in office, however, the ailing Churchill did not fight the tide. He saw little choice but to approve the withdrawal of British troops from the Suez Canal Zone in 1954, arousing the anger of a new generation of Tory diehards, which opened the door to Egypt’s nationalisation of the Canal two years later.

Although Tories have been particularly prone to narratives of decline, something of the sort also underpinned Labour’s election victory of 1945. The party’s manifesto ‘Let Us Face the Future’ was rooted in a historical narrative of lost greatness – this time not about empire, but about social promise betrayed by wilful politics.[15] ‘So far as Britain’s contribution is concerned’, the manifesto argued, ‘this war will have been won by its people, not by any one man.’ (The Tory campaign featured Churchill.) The Great War had similarly been a people’s victory, Labour went on, but afterwards the people had allowed ‘the hard-faced men who had done well out of the war’ (Stanley Baldwin’s famous phrase) to craft ‘the kind of peace that suited themselves’. And so, despite winning the war, ‘the people lost that peace.’ By which Labour meant not only the Treaty of Versailles, but also ‘the social and economic policy which followed the fighting’.

In the years after 1918, those ‘hard-faced men’ and their political allies kept control of the government, and also the banks, mines, big industries, most of the press and the cinema. This, said Labour’s manifesto, happened in all the big industrialised countries. So, ‘The great inter-war slumps were not acts of God or of blind forces. They were the sure and certain result of the concentration of too much economic power in the hands of too few men.’ They acted solely in the interest of their own private monopolies ‘which may be likened to totalitarian oligarchies within our democratic State. They had and they felt no responsibility to the nation.’

Similar forces were at work now in 1945, the manifesto warned. ‘The problems and pressure of the post-war world threaten our security and progress as surely as – though less dramatically than – the Germans threatened them in 1940. We need the spirit of Dunkirk and of the Blitz sustained over a period of years. The Labour Party’s programme is a practical expression of that spirit applied to the tasks of peace.’ On election morning, 5 July, the pro-Labour Daily Mirror told readers: ‘Vote on behalf of the men who won the victory for you. You failed to do so in 1918. The result is known to all.’ The paper devoted most of its front page to reprinting a Zec cartoon first published on VE Day in May. This showed a weary, battered soldier holding out a laurel wreath labelled ‘Victory and Peace in Europe’. The caption read: ‘Here You Are – Don’t Lose it Again.’[16]

This narrative of the lost peace, torn from the hands of the people by greedy capitalists, was sharpened by bitter memories of mass unemployment during the 1920s and 1930s. Together they informed Labour’s campaign of nationalisation after its triumph in 1945. The flagship policies of bringing the commanding heights of the economy – industries such as coal, steel, utilities and railways – into public ownership and providing a stronger social safety net through the welfare state and the National Health Service were presented as repayment to the people for their sacrificial efforts during two world wars in a quarter of a century.

Once built, however, Labour’s edifice became a central target of the declinist narrative of another Tory three decades later: Margaret Thatcher, Prime Minister from 1979 to 1990. She outlined her stark version of history in the introduction to her memoirs, The Downing Street Years: ‘Britain in 1979 was a nation that had had the stuffing knocked out of it’ over the course of the previous century. In economic terms, Thatcher acknowledged that some degree of relative decline was inevitable, once rivals such as America and Germany caught up with Britain’s head start. But, she argued, the country had ‘failed to respond to the challenge effectively. We invested less; we educated and trained our people to a lower standard; and we allowed our workers and manufacturers to combine in various cartels that restricted competition and reduced efficiency.’ Most serious of all, after 1945 the country had indulged in a protracted and disastrous experiment with socialism. This ‘represented a centralising, managerial, bureaucratic, interventionist style of government’, which ‘jammed a finger in every pie’ on the principle that ‘the gentleman in Whitehall really know better what is good for the people than the people know themselves.’[17]

Breaking the hold of Labour statism was not merely a domestic priority. Thatcher argued that ‘Britain’s weakened economic position meant that its international role was bound to be cramped and strained as well.’ She cited the failure of the Suez expedition of 1956 as a turning point – in her opinion a military victory undermined by ‘political and economic weakness’ because Anthony Eden’s government withdrew the troops that had regained the Canal after a run on the pound encouraged by Washington. ‘Whatever the details’, she continued briskly (and evasively), this defeat ‘entered the British soul and distorted our perspective on Britain’s place in the world.’ Thanks to the ‘Suez syndrome’, as she called it, ‘having previously exaggerated our power, we now exaggerated our impotence.’[18]

Her account of history was not just retrospective wisdom. Reversing decline was almost the leitmotif of Thatcher’s politics. ‘Britain’s prestige in the eyes of the world has gone down and down,’ she had declared during her very first election campaign in 1950, when she was 24: ‘We Conservatives are not afraid to face the future whatever problem it entails, because it is our earnest desire to make Great Britain great again.’[19] Such rhetoric was certainly at the heart of her message in the 1979 campaign. ‘I can’t bear Britain in decline. I just can’t,’ she exclaimed to a BBC interviewer. ‘We who either defeated or rescued half Europe, who kept half Europe free, when otherwise it would be in chains. And look at us now!’[20] She told an audience in Bolton: ‘Unless we change our ways and our direction, our greatness as a nation will soon be a footnote in the history books, a distant memory of an offshore island, lost in the mists of time, like Camelot, remembered kindly for its noble past.’[21] This was her refrain right to the end. ‘Let me give you my vision,’ she declaimed in her final election broadcast. ‘Somewhere ahead lies greatness for our country again; this I know in my heart.’[22]

Thatcher shared with Joseph Chamberlain and Churchill a Napoleonic belief in the capacity of a great leader to transform history through sheer willpower. Indeed, in her memoirs she applied to herself the famous words of William Pitt the Elder, during the Seven Years’ War of 1756–63: ‘I know that I can save the country and that no one else can.’[23] And she employed her formidable will and conviction to cover inner insecurities and get her way in an overwhelmingly male world. Not only did she seem happiest when ‘up against a wall’, biographer Hugo Young observed. But ‘when she wasn’t actually embattled, she needed to imagine or invent the condition: embattled against the cabinet, against Whitehall, against the country, against the world’.[24]

After Margaret Thatcher’s victory in the Falklands War, Cummings in the Daily Express (16 June 1982) shows her waving the Union Jack in triumph while white-flag merchants from the Foreign Office and the Labour party – Tony Benn (middle) and party leader Michael Foot (right) – lie flat on their backs.

Indeed one can say that her grand narrative of those Downing Street years was constructed around two triumphant battles royal against ‘decline’: the Falklands War in the spring of 1982 and the miners’ strike of 1984–5. Argentina’s shock capture of the Falkland Islands, which it claimed as the Malvinas, provoked a cross-party wave of anger in Parliament on 3 April, but Thatcher made the operation to liberate the 1,800 British islanders from Argentine rule into her own personal crusade. And she used the eventual victory over General Leopoldo Galtieri’s military junta to make a larger point. ‘When we started out, there were the waverers and the fainthearts,’ she told a Tory rally in Cheltenham on 3 July 1982. ‘Those who believed that our decline was irreversible – that we could never again be what we were.’ But now, she proclaimed, ‘We have ceased to be a nation in retreat … Britain found herself again in the South Atlantic and will not look back from the victory she has won.’[25] Or more pithily, to a jubilant crowd singing ‘Rule Britannia’ outside 10 Downing Street: ‘Great Britain is great again.’[26] Almost as if the mission she had set herself in 1950 had now been accomplished.

In June 1983 the ‘Falklands Factor’ helped her to win a landslide election victory and in 1984–5 she was ready to take on Arthur Scargill and the striking miners in their last-ditch effort – under the slogan ‘jobs, pits and communities’ – to stop what was effectively the closure of their industry. For Thatcher, however, the miners became the centrepiece of her struggle to break up the unprofitable and bureaucratic state monopolies and she treated Scargill as the domestic equivalent of General Galtieri. Notes for a speech to Tory backbenchers in July 1984 read:

Since Office

Enemy without – beaten him

& strong in defence

Enemy within –

Miners’ leaders …

– just as dangerous

Biographer Charles Moore writes that Downing Street staff prepared for the miners’ strike as if it were another war. ‘Instead of names like Bluff Cove, Goose Green and Mount Longdon, they became familiar with pits like Shirebrook, Manton and Bilston Glen. And once she had vanquished Scargill just like Galtieri, Thatcher won the election of 1987 on the slogan: ‘Britain is Great Again. Don’t Let Labour Wreck It.’[27]

Yet there were limits to Britain’s ‘greatness’. Margaret Thatcher was also the Prime Minister who, having liberated 1,800 British subjects from the Argentine junta, in December 1984 signed over 5.5 million other British subjects in Hong Kong to the rule of China – a communist state to boot. Like Churchill over the Canal Zone, she saw no choice given the realities of power. Under the ‘one nation, two systems’ principle enshrined in the Sino-British Joint Declaration of 1984, British sovereignty would end in 1997 but Hong Kong was to be a ‘Special Administrative Region’ enjoying ‘a high degree of autonomy’ for another fifty years, with its social and economic system ‘unchanged’ and civil and property rights ‘protected by law’. Even before the handover in 1997, however, these guarantees were called into question by the Chinese government’s brutal repression of the pro-democracy movement in Tiananmen Square in June 1989. And nothing the British government said or did could influence Beijing.

The rhetoric of reversing ‘decline’ by the assertion of willpower has also been at the heart of the Brexit narrative. Take, for instance, the speech delivered by Tory MP Jacob Rees-Mogg, a leading Brexiter, who took pride in his nickname ‘the Honourable Member for the Eighteenth Century’.[28] That, he claimed, was the century in which ‘the seeds of our greatness, sown long before in our distinguished history, sown conceivably by Alfred the Great, began to grow and to flourish in a way that led to our extended period of good fortune and greatness.’ But Rees-Mogg said that he also wanted to be the ‘Honourable Member for the Twenty-First Century’ because this was the century in which the country would ‘regain its independence’ and ‘rediscover the opportunities of a truly global Britain’.

‘How we came to join the European Union is an important part of understanding our Island story,’ Rees-Mogg explained. ‘We won the war and were full of optimism about our place in the World, but then came Suez.’ In his opinion, the debacle of 1956 had a profound and debilitating effect, permanently undermining the nation’s self-confidence. ‘Margaret Thatcher tried to break away from that, but it was such a strong feeling that once she had gone it seeped back again.’ As a result of Suez, ‘the Nation’s view of itself changed and the Establishment, the Elite, decided that its job was to manage decline, that the best they could do was to soften the blow of descending downwards, soften the effect on the Nation of being less successful than it had been in the past, and recognise that we would not be able to keep up with other countries. This led to the notion that it was Europe or bust.’ But that, he argued, was a false contrast because Britain had ended up with both: in Europe and also bust. The country made the mistake of joining flagging, low-growth economies so that the process of ‘managing our decline’ became ‘part of managing the decline of the whole of the European Union by putting a fortress around it’.

So, he asserted, the 2016 referendum was a vote ‘by people who believed in democracy’ and ‘voted to take back control’. And any attempt by those he derided as ‘cave-dwellers’ to keep Britain in the EU – in fact if not name – ‘would be Suez all over again. It would be the most almighty smash to the national psyche that could be imagined … an admission of abject failure … that we were not fit, that we were too craven, that we were too weak to be able to govern ourselves … Although countries across the Globe can govern themselves, poor little Blighty cannot.’ But if, on the other hand, Britain embraced Brexit wholeheartedly, there was ‘a world of opportunity ahead of us’ as we took ‘charge of our own destiny protected by our own laws’ and ‘setting our own direction’ in international affairs rather than ‘hiding behind the skirts of the German Chancellor’.

This, then, was Jacob Rees-Mogg’s take on contemporary history: the ‘brave British people’ asserting themselves against the establishment’s ‘managers of decline’, and scorning the nanny state across the Channel. His fixation with 1956 echoed Thatcher’s ‘Suez syndrome’. His drama of goodies versus baddies paralleled the tone, though not the content, of Labour’s 1945 manifesto. And the elevation of willpower was a feature of all these anti-declinist narratives of betrayal. But the spin on Brexit was all his own.