‘The England he knew is now no more’
You cannot suppress the individualism of an island race.
John Major (1994)
England is obsessed with the war. It is the only nation in the world that has decided to make the Second World War a sort of spiritual core of its national self, understanding and pride.
Michael Naumann, German culture minister (1999)
We are forging a new patriotism based on the potential we can fulfil in the future. There is an energy about Britain at the moment.
Tony Blair (1998)
In 1994 the news broke that during the prime minister’s weekly audience with his monarch, John Major had come to blows with the Queen, and that a fist-fight had ensued. In a state of panic, all the television channels switched to a patriotic piece of film that had long been kept in reserve for just such a constitutional emergency. ‘Britain is a nation built on the very scowling face of adversity, its dauntless spirit unbowed by any crisis,’ intoned a reassuring voice, over the strains of ‘I Vow to Thee, My Country’, while a series of pictures were shown of characteristic British images: a fluttering Union flag, a bulldog, the white cliffs of Dover, city workers playing with skipping ropes, a white policeman smoking a joint while dancing with a black woman, leafy country lanes in villages with names like Manford Thirty-Sixborough and Wabznasm, where a man in expensively casual clothes doesn’t have a match for his cigarette and is instantly surrounded by children with lighters, eager to help. ‘This is Britain,’ concluded the voice-over. ‘And everything’s all right. Everything’s all right. It’s OK. It’s fine.’
It was one of the best sketches in the comedy series The Day Today, delivered in a warm, paternalist tone that parodied the BBC’s role of nanny, wrapping the nation in a comfort blanket during its darkest hours. And the humour came in part from the appallingly anachronistic nature of such attitudes at a time when opinion polls were showing that half the population, given a chance, would like to emigrate and that 40 per cent of adults under the age of thirty-five believed that Britain would become a worse place to live over the next ten years. In 1996 the Daily Telegraph commissioned Gallup to repeat a survey investigating the mood of the nation, using questions originally put in 1968. The picture it painted was not encouraging. In a reversal of the previous results, people believed that the country was becoming less healthy, less educated and less honest; behaviour was deteriorating and peace of mind was in decline. The contrast between The Day Today’s mocking evocation of an unchanging country and the public perception of national decline was self-evident.
Elsewhere in the schedules, of course, the BBC was continuing to produce programmes that provided exactly the consoling warmth held up to ridicule by The Day Today, and in the process was securing much larger audiences than a BBC Two satire could ever aspire to. The one sitcom that lasted throughout the decade, for example, was Last of the Summer Wine, in which three elderly Yorkshiremen enjoyed a second childhood. It had just completed its twelfth series when John Major became prime minister and, in the week that Tony Blair went to the polls in 2001, it came to the end of its twenty-second, showing no signs of going away. Equally it showed no signs of changing, save for the occasional adjustment in cast, necessitated by age and infirmity rather than discontent and restlessness.
Roy Clarke, the writer of Last of the Summer Wine, also created Keeping Up Appearances. This, the most old-fashioned sitcom to debut in the 1990s, depicted a world long since thought to have vanished from light entertainment, in which a visit from the vicar is fraught with danger, the working class are always feckless and any suggestion of sex is inherently laughable. The cast of characters was equally dated, from the sexually frustrated sister to the browbeaten middle-management husband, but was saved from cliché by Patricia Routledge’s portrayal of Hyacinth Bucket, a monstrous embodiment of suburban snobbery who pronounces her surname Bouquet and is obsessed with maintaining standards in a world of moral decline. Every episode sees her efforts end in humiliation, undermined both by her family and by her own foibles, but nothing can shake her faith in the eternal virtues of cleanliness and rank, property and propriety. She was, for many viewers, the ultimate caricature of a certain kind of Tory woman, in the tradition of other sitcom battle-axes like Sybil Fawlty and Margo Leadbetter, and if she lacked their redeeming features, she did at her best exhibit the same pithy turn of phrase, as when worrying (needlessly) that her neighbour has taken a lover: ‘I warned her against watching Channel 4. She’ll come to no good identifying with the continental classes.’
It was an image of Britain that exported rather better than many might have wished. When television viewers in New England were asked in 1995 to vote for their favourite programme, Keeping Up Appearances, somewhat surprisingly, emerged as the winner, having built a cult following on the Public Broadcasting Service.
If that popularity remained intriguingly unexplained, the attraction for a domestic audience was clear. ‘I think an essential part of the appeal of these comedies,’ reflected Clarke, who had also given us Open All Hours, ‘is that they portray small worlds, which people find reassuring. People’s lives, until not so long ago, used to be circumscribed by small boundaries. They didn’t travel much and if they went a few miles they would experience a culture change. Today things are becoming more and more evened out from one end of the country to another. I wonder if these little individual comedy worlds provide something in people’s lives that has been lost.’
When A.J. Cronin’s characters were revived for a new series of Doctor Finlay in 1993, twenty-two years after its hugely successful first run had ended, and now set in the 1940s, its executive producer, Robert Love, shared Clarke’s perspective: ‘If there is a desire for a bit of nostalgia, a return to simpler and older values, I wouldn’t blame the audience for that frankly. After all, we live in pretty shitty times.’
In a similar vein, the biggest television hit of the recession years was The Darling Buds of May, adapted from the novels by H.E. Bates (and produced by his son, Richard Bates) about the happy-go-lucky Pop and Ma Larkin and their seven children, living an idyllic life on twenty-two acres of Kent countryside in the 1950s. Seventeen million viewers tuned in for the first episode, mostly attracted by the idea of seeing David Jason in his first role since Del Boy in Only Fools and Horses, which had recently come to the end of its regular run.
In truth Pop Larkin wasn’t far removed from being Del Boy’s country cousin. Relentlessly cheerful, and displaying much the same repertoire of shrugs, stretches and tics, he has no truck with officialdom and is one of nature’s anarchists. ‘Since when has the state had a conscience, eh?’ he asks, in a tone of fair-minded reason. Even his optimistic new catchphrase (‘Perfick!’) echoes that of his previous incarnation (‘Lovely jubbly!’), and in case there’s any doubt, he’s also trying to find someone on whom to offload three hundred army-surplus catering tins of pickled gherkins.
Exhibiting a casual, even negligent, attitude toward both public and private morality, the Larkins are far from paragons of Conservative virtue. Pop has never paid tax (‘I think you should get it off them before they get it off you’), while his unmarried daughter is pregnant and doesn’t know who the father is. Nor was the series much interested in defending the rule of law; in the first Christmas special the family harbour an escaped convict, so that he might see his children in the festive season, and the story was treated in an unashamedly sentimental manner. Elsewhere, an unsympathetic official voices the authorities’ dislike of Pop: ‘Here we are, a nation even now still recovering from the economic wounds of the Second World War, and parasites like this Larkin seem to think they have a God-given right to exist outside the system.’ But there was never a sliver of doubt as to whose side we were on in this evocation of Arcadia.
The series opened with a visit from a tax inspector (Philip Franks), looking not unlike a young John Major with his glasses, earnest manner and slight stoop. He’s come to investigate tax arrears, but chooses to stay on, unable to resist either the bucolic paradise of Pop’s farm or the charms of Mariette (Catherine Zeta-Jones), whom he first encounters when she’s clad in jodhpurs and riding boots. Much of the country could see the considered wisdom of his decision, and the viewing figures increased still further, reaching a peak of twenty million, to outscore even EastEnders. The appeal of the series was self-evident. It had all ‘the joie de vivre, the sunshine and the easy sexuality traditionally associated with France’, wrote Craig Brown, while another reviewer, Patrick Stoddart, concluded that ‘John Major would call it “extremely agreeable”, and you can’t argue with that.’ He may well have been right that the show would prove popular in Downing Street, for David Jason was awarded an OBE shortly after the third and final series aired.
Some remained unconvinced, however, amongst them the leader writers at the Sunday Times. Under the headline darling buds of major, an editorial in February 1993 called for more radical thinking by the government: ‘The prime minister seems to hanker after a Darling Buds of May Britain, circa 1955, when every summer was warm, every village had its bakery, life revolved round the Rotary Club and the Women’s Institute and every child sat attentively in front of a teacher in a cardigan reciting Shakespeare’s sonnets.’ It added sternly: ‘Nostalgia has its attractions. But its relevance to the increasingly nasty and brutish world that too many of today’s Britons endure, even after fourteen years of Tory rule, is something of a mystery.’
Undeterred by such criticism, John Major delivered perhaps his best-known speech a couple of months later, on the eve of St George’s Day, appearing to articulate precisely the position that had attracted the disapproval of the Sunday Times. Addressing the Conservative Group for Europe, with the storm of Maastricht still breaking around him, he spoke about the continuity of national identity: ‘Fifty years from now, Britain will still be the country of long shadows on county grounds, warm beer, invincible green suburbs, dog lovers and – as George Orwell said – old maids bicycling to Holy Communion through the morning mist. And, if we get our way, Shakespeare will still be read, even in school.’
The intention of the speech, Major insisted, was not to celebrate nostalgia, rather it was to suggest that international cooperation did not mean the death of distinct cultures, and he was later to lament the way his words were used as ‘a caricature of my political philosophy’. The problem, however, was that his speech was, in John Redwood’s words, ‘too easily caricatured’, resonating with a public perception of Major as a decent man who would have been perfectly comfortable in a 1950s suburb. This image was not improved by a choice of slogan for the 1997 election – ‘Britain is booming. Don’t let Labour blow it’ – that consciously echoed Harold Macmillan’s in 1959: ‘Life’s better under the Conservatives. Don’t let Labour ruin it.’
And so, despite Major’s protestations, the public did see his speech as a reflection of his philosophy. They detected a wistfulness about his words that might be endearing – for there was something attractive about a patriotism that had no need to resort to xenophobia, much less to racism – but was a little lightweight, conveying a spirit of Sunday-night television that seemed faintly inappropriate in the country’s supposed leader. There was a touch of the sad, lovelorn aristocrat Ralph, as played by Charlie Higson on The Fast Show, a man inclined to wax lyrical on catching sight of a slightly overcast sky. ‘So typically English. That’s a Constable sky, isn’t it?’ he muses. ‘It’s Turner, Gainsborough, it’s the music of Elgar and Vaughan-Williams. It’s picnics with Scotch eggs and pork pies and the rain just spattering onto a white linen tablecloth. It’s summer holidays on the beach, huddled beneath the blanket, sheltering from the wind. Some memories are so vivid.’
It was easy to mock, but there was undoubtedly a part of the British psyche that yearned for the old certainties. Major’s creation of a cabinet post for national heritage (which didn’t outlast him, being reconstituted as the department for culture, media and sport) reflected not only the public taste for those period dramas of which Virginia Bottomley approved, but also the standing of the National Trust. Founded in 1895, the organisation had celebrated its fiftieth birthday at the end of the Second World War with 8,000 members; by the end of the century it numbered two million, far in excess of all the political parties put together. Major’s desire to wallow in the past was not unique to him.
It was his reference to Orwell, however, that provided a field day for the prime minister’s critics. The allusion was to a passage in a 1941 essay ‘The Lion and the Unicorn’, where Orwell sought to capture something of the diversity of England, though Major wisely avoided other examples from the same sentence about ‘the queues outside the Labour Exchanges’ and ‘the rattle of pin-tables in the Soho pubs’. In no spirit of helpfulness, an editorial in the Independent on Sunday, headlined WHAT A LOT OF TOSH, quoted further from the essay, contrasting Orwell’s ‘solid breakfasts and gloomy Sundays, smoky towns and winding roads, green fields and red pillar-boxes’ with the reality of modern Britain: ‘that solid breakfast known as muesli, that winding road called the M25, that gloomy Sunday spent in Tesco, that bright-yellow field of rapeseed, that old mill town where the only smoke is on bonfire night, that pillar-box which may be privatised.’
That slightly pessimistic vision of where Britain now stood was itself becoming dated, however, as the waves of Cool Britannia began to wash across the country. Martin Jacques, the former editor of Marxism Today, was closer to the new spirit of the age in his response to Major’s speech. ‘We desperately need to make a new start, to draw a line under the past, to reinvent ourselves,’ he argued, calling instead for a celebration of a cosmopolitan, meritocratic, ethnically diverse country that could be part of Europe, and citing as symbols of this new Britain the likes of Vivienne Westwood, Stephen Hawking, Richard Branson and the Olympic gold medal-winning athlete Linford Christie. This was to be the dominant strand of thinking on the centre-left over the next few years, an attempt to shed much of Britain’s past and to discover a new identity in a post-Thatcher world.
It reached its most articulate expression in Mark Leonard’s pamphlet Britain™, published by the think tank Demos in 1997. Leonard emphasised the role now played in the economy by the creative industries (pointing out that design, fashion and music were ‘our strongest export sector with a £1.1 billion turnover in 1996’), saluted retail entrepreneurialism (‘Britain has more shop workers than either France or Germany’), and celebrated diversity (‘Indian restaurants now have a higher turnover than coal, steel and shipbuilding combined’). Britain was already ‘the global hub’ for business and culture, but there was a gap internationally between the reality and the perception – hence perhaps that American fascination for Keeping Up Appearances. The solution was the rebranding of Britain, the development of a national character that reflected the country’s true nature, both for export purposes and to assist the building of a better society domestically.
Although it became associated with the Cool Britannia phase of New Labour, Britain™ didn’t share the same fascination with the 1960s, nor was it quite as obsessed with newness for its own sake as Tony Blair sometimes appeared. Alongside his acceptance of what had changed in Britain, Leonard also stressed older values that would have been recognisable to those on the right: a British tradition of non-conformism and eccentricity, an ethos of fair play and support for the underdog, a tradition of silent, peaceful revolution.
Nonetheless, it was all a long way from old maids and Holy Communion. And there was still the issue of Britain’s history to deal with. This turned out to be one of the recurrent themes of the decade: appeals to historical episodes made regular appearances, however trivial they might seem. In 1992 Gillian Shephard told the Conservative Party conference that the May Day bank holiday was to be abolished, because it was ‘socialist’, and suggested that it might be replaced by a holiday on 21 October, Trafalgar Day. The proposal was said to have worried the Foreign Office, fearful of sending the wrong diplomatic signals, but it attracted the support of novelist Kingsley Amis at least: ‘If it’s going to get up the noses of the French, then I’m all for it.’ Like so many government initiatives in the 1990s, it came to nothing; May Day survived, and the Trafalgar Day idea was still being floated by Tory politicians twenty years later.
The latter years of the decade also saw a boom in Tudor history that was to prove remarkably durable. In 1997 Fiona Buckley launched her Ursula Blanchard series of mystery novels with To Shield the Queen, set in Elizabethan London, while the following year, two actresses were separately nominated for Oscars for their portrayal of Elizabeth I: Judi Dench in Shakespeare in Love and Cate Blanchett in Elizabeth. (Sadly, Quentin Crisp’s incarnation as the Virgin Queen in Sally Potter’s 1992 film Orlando had gone unrecognised by the Academy.) Meanwhile Vivienne Westwood took to dressing in the manner of Elizabeth I, and a Hula Hoops advert on television starred Harry Enfield and Paul Whitehouse in their characters as the Self-Righteous Brothers at the Elizabethan court (the mise-en-scène was clearly derived from Blackadder II).
At a slightly more serious level David Starkey, who had already strayed beyond academia into a more public role on Radio 4’s The Moral Maze and as a shock-jock on the short-lived independent station Talk Radio, became a television star with his documentary series on Henry VIII (1998) and Elizabeth (2000). His camp foppishness was in the grand media tradition of eccentric experts, but he broke with convention by cultivating a persona that was smug, rude and unattractive; consequently, he enjoyed a smooth passage into television, where a willingness to be loathed is a rare and precious commodity. Starkey seemed to revel in his status as a hate figure, and the commentators duly built up his reputation, David Aaronovitch suggesting in the Independent on Sunday that even modern saints would be hard pressed to tolerate him: ‘From time to time, Mother Theresa and Princess Diana may well have interrupted their ministrations to the dying, and cursed him for a fuckpig.’
Starkey’s key selling points to a wider audience were his treatment of historical events as soap operas – albeit ‘soap operas which had the quality of Greek myth’ – and the drawing of parallels between the Tudors and the current royal family. He was also keen to address contemporary politics. ‘The target of Tony Blair’s Cool Britannia is, fundamentally, Henry VIII’s England,’ he argued. ‘Henry cut us off from the pan-European, Catholic church; Blair will take us back to the heart of Europe. Henry turned England on itself and back to its past; Blair will have us look forward and outward.’ Meanwhile Mark Leonard was keen to claim the Tudors for Blairism: ‘In those days foreigners regarded this country as one of expressive, emotional people, not of stiff upper lipped types.’ It was only in the last couple of years, he suggested, that Britain had started to reclaim this honourable tradition.
This rise of media interest in the sixteenth century was not paralleled in schools, where the Midlands Examining Group, the most popular supplier of history GCSE exams, announced in 1997 that it was dropping its papers specialising in particular periods of British history. The previous year just 97 pupils had sat its Tudors and Stuarts paper, while 52,000 had opted instead for world history. A rival board, the Southern Examining Group, likewise dropped its 1509–1689 paper, replacing it with modern world history.
One area on which pretty much everyone was agreed, however, was that the Second World War was of central significance to understanding Britain, whatever one’s perception of the country, whatever lessons one wished to learn.
There were, to start with, those for whom the war years still burned brightly on a personal level. They included some of the Maastricht rebels – both Bill Cash and Nicholas Budgen had lost their fathers on active service – as well as Laurence Passmore, the hero of David Lodge’s novel Therapy, who is reluctant to buy a Japanese car because ‘I’m old enough to remember World War Two, and I had an uncle who died as a POW working on the Siamese railway.’ That meant that he was now in a minority in Britain, but if anything the veneration of those who had served had grown still stronger in some quarters. They were, wrote journalist Tony Parsons, ‘the best generation that this country ever produced – the generation that fought World War Two and then built the welfare state, the men and women who fought for Churchill and voted for Attlee’.
Parsons returned to the theme of the sacrifices made by his father’s generation in his best-selling novel Man and Boy (1999). ‘His youth might have been marred by the efforts of the German army to murder him,’ the flawed protagonist, Harry Silver, reflected of his father, ‘but at least in his day a father’s role was set in stone. He always knew exactly what was expected of him.’ That sense of a simpler time when a man knew his position in the family and in society ran through much of the literature of the era. ‘I’m happy to be a bloke, I think,’ worries Rob Fleming in Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity (1995), ‘but sometimes I’m not happy being a bloke in the late twentieth century. Sometimes I’d rather be my dad.’ It surfaced too in John O’Farrell’s The Best a Man Can Get (2000), whose hero argues that his inability to be a responsible parent is the result of his own father having walked out of the family home in his childhood; but even that goes back to the war, because his father, as a child, had similarly been deprived of his parents: ‘I mused that if Dad hadn’t been evacuated, then he would have had a father as a role model, which might have made him stay around to be a role model for me, which would have made me a better father.’
Part of the yearning for a more straightforward era, when being a man didn’t require the construction of an ironic laddishness, was a kind of war envy, a feeling that no man was truly complete until he had stared death in the face. It was a romantic notion that war was life painted in the starkest black-or-white tones, when men were ‘tested in battle’, and was an indulgence made possible by half a century without British involvement in major conflict. Eddie Izzard once talked of the time when, as a child, he had been taken by his father to the beaches of Normandy, recalling the impact that had made on him. ‘I don’t know what it is; I just feel I should have been there to do a bit,’ reflected Izzard. ‘It was just something I wanted to be involved in.’ The tendency found some odd expressions, none more so than in Nigel Planer’s The Right Man where the narrator encounters a tree surgeon hanging out of a tree and is filled with admiration and envy for ‘a man’s legs, tough, sinewy, bloody British legs. Not pumped up with steroids, vitamins or gym machinery.’ And the thought strikes him: ‘Men’s legs must have been like this at Agincourt.’
Nor was the theme restricted to male writers. ‘My father has carried grown men with bullet wounds through the jungle, he has cut the heads off his enemies and carried them back to base in a rucksack,’ reflects the heroine of Jenny Eclair’s Camberwell Beauty (2000). ‘We are all so wet these days. Maybe it’s time we had another war to put things into perspective, and as I say that I almost laugh; it is impossible to imagine either Henry or Jed in combat.’ Given subsequent events, the most ironic such comment came from Adrian Mole in 1997: ‘Due to Mr Blair’s obvious hatred for war I am never going to be tested in battle. A shame.’
‘Our fathers, they did national service,’ moans Gary Sparrow (Nicholas Lyndhurst) in the sitcom Goodnight Sweetheart (1993). ‘Their fathers fought in the war. Experiences that marked their shift into manhood.’ Now, there was no equivalent rite of passage, no way of symbolising the end of adolescence. Except that Gary stumbles upon the solution. A television repairman living in a starter home in Cricklewood, dissatisfied with his life and feeling threatened by his wife – a personnel manager who’s studying for a psychology degree – he discovers a time portal that takes him back to an East End pub during the Blitz in 1940. Over the course of fifty-eight episodes, he lives a double life, balancing the normality of the present with the excitement of the past, where he poses as a glamorous secret agent. And as his fantasy becomes all too real, he finds himself caught up in action and discovers that he too can be a war hero.
Throughout the series the contrasts between then and now are repeatedly pointed out, whether it’s Gary’s best friend Ron (Victor McGuire) lamenting the growing complexity of masculinity – ‘Men were allowed to be gross in those days, before Women’s Lib’ – or his present-day wife, Yvonne (Michelle Holmes), who can see why he’s become so obsessed with the past: ‘I can understand why the forties appeal so much. It’s a time of certainties, a time when people knew what they were doing and why they were doing it.’
Related to this feeling was the phenomenon of the SAS memoir, one of the big success stories of 1990s publishing. It began with Andy McNab’s Bravo Two Zero (1993), which sold 350,000 copies in hardback to become Britain’s best-selling war memoir ever, as well as being a book ‘which actually improves with every read’, according to Alan Partridge. An account of a failed SAS raid behind enemy lines in the Kuwaiti War, it was followed by Chris Ryan’s The One that Got Away (1995), which gave another version of the same incident, complete with heavy digs at McNab. (Both names were pseudonyms, of course.) McNab went on to write the autobiographical Immediate Action (1995) – ‘the book they tried to ban’ – before launching a fiction series starring an SAS character named Nick Stone, that opened with Remote Control (1997), while Ryan also created a fictional SAS hero, Geordie Sharp, in Stand By, Stand By (1996).
Effectively these books replaced the Commando comics and the Sven Hassel novels that had proliferated in the 1960s and ’70s, supplying tales of violence and endurance to keep the Loaded generation entertained between gangster movies. They did, however, represent something new, for there hadn’t previously been much of a tradition in Britain of popular memoirs and fiction from the other ranks; demand was satisfied instead by translations of Hassel and, on a somewhat higher literary plane, Erich Maria Remarque. For an older generation, there was ITV’s Soldier, Soldier (1991–7), a popular drama series that launched a brief but hugely successful singing career for its stars Robson Green and Jerome Flynn. As with cooking and gardening, it appeared that the less soldiering that was actually being done, the greater the public appetite for its depiction on screen and in print.
Memories of the Second World War were also kept alive in the coverage of sport, particularly when England qualified for a football tournament, since Germany always seemed to be lurking in the same half of the draw. ‘We beat them in 1945,’ said the Sun in the build-up to the 1990 World Cup semi-final. ‘Now the battle of 1990. Herr we go again.’
Most notorious of all was the Daily Mirror’s front page on the day of the Euro 96 semi-final. ‘ACHTUNG! SURRENDER – For you Fritz, ze Euro 96 Championship is over’, ran the main headline, illustrated with pictures of Stuart Pearce and Paul Gascoigne wearing Second World War helmets and accompanied by a front-page editorial: MIRROR DECLARES FOOTBALL WAR ON GERMANY. The leaden attempt at humour continued over the next two pages: ‘There is a strange smell in Berlin and it’s not just their funny sausages, it’s the smell of fear.’ The Daily Mirror also approached the owner of a Spitfire to ask whether, in the event of an English victory, he would perform a victory roll over the hotel where the Germans were staying, though England’s defeat meant that this proved unnecessary. (To be fair to the Daily Mirror and its editor, Piers Morgan, the xenophobic abuse was not restricted to combatant nations; England’s quarter-final against Spain prompted a list of TEN NASTIES SPAIN’S GIVEN EUROPE, which opened with syphilis, Spanish flu, carpet bombing and the Inquisition.)
With such willing cheerleaders, it was unsurprising when a friendly match in Berlin between Germany and England, scheduled for 20 April 1994, was cancelled on the grounds that Adolf Hitler’s birthday was probably not the ideal date for such an encounter.
The war-obsessed coverage of football was hardly new. On the day of the 1966 World Cup final, the Daily Mail, showing little confidence in the prospects for Alf Ramsey’s team, got its excuses in early: ‘If Germany beat us at Wembley this afternoon at our national sport, we can always point out to them that we have recently beaten them at theirs.’ But that was a very different time, and the distance that had been travelled was brought home by the death in February 1993 of Bobby Moore, captain of that World Cup-winning England team. ‘He looked like a Greek god, with his clean-cut limbs and short golden curls,’ mourns Laurence Passmore in Therapy. ‘They don’t make them like that any more. They make overpaid lager louts plastered with advertising logos, who spit all over the pitch.’ Like so many in Britain, Passmore has a weakness for the 1960s: ‘It was a time of hope, a time when it was possible to feel patriotic without being typecast as a Tory blimp. The shame of Suez was behind us, and now we were beating the world in the things that really mattered to ordinary people, sport and pop music and fashion and television.’
The mostly hostile reaction that greeted the Daily Mirror’s Euro 96 front page illustrated how fine the line was between jocularity and offence, and how difficult it was to judge the tone when invoking the war. It was a lesson that the government learnt the hard way in 1994 as the fiftieth anniversary of D-Day on 6 June approached.
Clearly such an occasion would not be allowed to pass without recognition, and a state ceremony was scheduled in Normandy. There was some debate over the involvement of Germany, but it was soon decided that perhaps it would be best to hold over any official participation by the vanquished until the anniversary of the liberation of Europe the following year. The problems for John Major came with the events that were planned at home. ‘We’ll have spam and spotted dick for dinner,’ enthused an official from the British Tourist Authority, ‘and then a singalong with all the old wartime favourites.’ There were to be fun days and street parties all over the country with fireworks, fancy-dress parties and sandcastle-making competitions, while pubs were to be encouraged to sell beer at 1944 prices.
No sooner had the plans been announced than they began to run into political trouble. Major promised ‘celebrations and commemorations’, which many felt struck entirely the wrong note. An operation that cost thousands of British lives should not be the cause of celebrations, regardless of how worthy the cause or how successful the ultimate outcome might have been.
Peter Mandelson put down a motion in Parliament describing the proposals for ‘festivities and public relations stunts’ as ‘inappropriate and in bad taste’, and calling instead for a ‘single, respectful national service of thanksgiving in grateful memory of those who gave their lives so that others could live in freedom’. The broadcaster Ludovic Kennedy, himself a veteran of D-Day, also suggested that the government was cynically exploiting the anniversary for political ends, noting that it fell just three days before the elections to the European Parliament, in which the Conservatives were expected to perform poorly.
This much could have been expected and dealt with. But Mandelson’s complaints were heard elsewhere as well. The Conservative MP Winston Churchill, grandson of the wartime prime minister, weighed in: ‘They have their history wrong,’ he said. ‘They don’t seem to know the difference between D-Day and VE Day.’ The Royal British Legion revealed that they hadn’t even been consulted and suggested that the arrangements smacked of ‘trivial light entertainment’. And then the light entertainment veterans themselves added their voices. Vera Lynn, who had been booked to sing in Hyde Park, said that she didn’t wish to perform in a ‘carnival atmosphere’, and Ann Shelton was equally condemnatory: ‘It’s a bit like saying we should have jugglers at the Cenotaph.’
When asked by pollsters, the public made clear that they shared these opinions. Just about the only person who seemed untouched by the criticism was Tim Bell, the public relations executive famous for his work for Margaret Thatcher, who had been paid handsomely for dreaming up the festivities. ‘If someone wants to mess up the party by moaning and groaning, that’s their problem, not mine,’ he sniffed.
John Major could not afford such disdain, and the plans were radically scaled back in what was inevitably seen as a humiliating climb-down. ‘The debacle and retreat over the D-Day celebrations has confirmed the impression of John Major’s government being accident-prone and incompetent,’ concluded the Independent, and a leader in The Times agreed: ‘The D-Day anniversary could have been an opportunity for the government to prove some competence and for Mr Major to justify his claim to be in touch with ordinary people. Instead it has revealed flaws that have become all too familiar.’
Having got D-Day so entirely wrong, Major was unlikely to gain much credit for the fiftieth anniversary of VE Day on 7 May 1995, even though it proved to be one of the most impressive occasions of the decade. This time the tone was judged perfectly. A service of thanksgiving in St Paul’s Cathedral gathered together more world leaders than any event since the Coronation; a memorial service in the oldest synagogue in the country was attended by the Chief Rabbi, the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Archbishop of Westminster, the first time all three figures had ever gathered at a synagogue service; and Radio 4’s Today gave its ‘Thought for the Day’ slot over to Prince Charles to reflect on the need for remembrance. A two-minute silence was also held across the country.
The sombre side having been catered for, many of the abandoned plans from D-Day were then revived, centring on Hyde Park, where there were indeed spam fritters, the world’s largest hokey-cokey, and a concert of community singing led by Vera Lynn, Harry Secombe and Cliff Richard. It was all a huge success, with around a quarter of a million people gathering in The Mall to see the Queen Mother and her two daughters appear on the Buckingham Palace balcony, just as they had fifty years earlier. In what was not a notably successful decade for royalty, this was the high point, the moment when all the clichés about embodying history, continuity and the British spirit resonated with the nation.
For the government, reeling from yet another appalling performance at the polls, this time in local elections, there was little positive to be taken from the occasion. ‘The most potent political image was of Blair walking down the Mall acclaimed by the cheering crowds,’ remarked Hywel Williams, and a leader column in the Observer spelt out the potential parallels: ‘a seductive, subterranean folk memory is being activated. Might Blair be about to repeat Attlee’s post-war landslide?’ Private Eye made the same point with a front cover headlined THEN AS NOW that pictured revellers in 1945 complete with a speech bubble: ‘Hoorah! We’re all voting Labour.’
Some commentators, including the Independent’s Polly Toynbee, regretted that the VE Day celebrations were all so ‘deliberately backward-looking, in praise of a better past, and fearful of the future’. The very next day, she lectured her readers, had been Europe Day and yet, so obsessed had we become with history, it had passed by without any commemoration at all. Such an absurdly sour note – surely the anniversary of the defeat of Nazism was worth throwing a party for – was rare, however, and even many of those who professed themselves cynical were caught up in the emotion of the moment. The comedy critic Ben Thompson went to a VE Day festival on Hackney Downs in East London, where he was surprised to find himself so moved. ‘Looking around at the genial multifariousness of the crowd,’ he wrote, ‘there was no other option than to be temporarily overwhelmed by a profound sense of patriotic pride.’
Nor was Toynbee entirely right about it all being nostalgia. Some features of that long weekend most certainly pointed the way forward, albeit to a corporate future in which even patriotism was available for sponsorship. The only cola for sale at official events in London was the newly launched Virgin Cola, which had secured exclusive rights to slake the revellers’ thirst, while it was impossible to escape brand advertising by everyone from Eurostar to Sainsbury’s. ‘Serving the nation, then and now’ was the latter’s slogan, which wasn’t everyone’s concept of war service. Vera Lynn was among those to notice that such major companies were much less interested in the more muted celebrations for VJ Day on 15 August; the Forgotten Army had been overlooked once again.
And yet there were still doubts on the liberal left about how to celebrate. ‘Is it possible to have kitsch ironic VE Day party – like for the Royal Wedding?’ worried Bridget Jones. ‘No, you see, you can’t be ironic about dead people. And then there’s the problem of flags. Half of Tom’s friends used to be in the Anti-Nazi League and would think the presence of Union Jacks meant we were expecting skinheads.’ She had touched on one of the central issues of a decade that worried deeply about national identity: how acceptable in modern Britain were the emblems of nationhood and patriotism?
The question had caused some controversy in 1992 in relation to the singer Morrissey, whose album that year, Your Arsenal, was acclaimed as his best ever, with David Bowie’s ex-guitarist Mick Ronson giving the music a glam polish. But songs like ‘We’ll Let You Know’ and ‘The National Front Disco’ struck some critics as overly sympathetic, even dewy-eyed, in their treatment of football hooligans and skinheads. ‘We are the last truly British people you will ever know,’ he sang on the latter, and there were concerns in some quarters that his fascination with the more violent, disreputable end of English youth culture was getting a little dangerous.
Undeterred, he appeared as the special guest at Madstock, a reunion concert by the group Madness in Finsbury Park, North London that August, and stole all the headlines. Singing in front of a backdrop picture of skinheads, he produced a Union flag and waved it around, to the evident excitement of some of the skins in the crowd. The following week’s edition of the New Musical Express devoted its front cover to a photograph of the singer with the flag and allotted more than 6,000 words to addressing the question: ‘Has Morrissey gone too far this time?’ The answer was, not unexpectedly, in the affirmative; stopping just short of calling him a racist, the paper denounced the way that the former Smiths frontman had ‘continued to pick away at the scab of race relations in this country’.
Morrissey was unapologetic. ‘I like the flag,’ he insisted. ‘I think it is very attractive. When does a Union Jack become racist?’ He also pointed out that he was far from the first pop musician to employ such imagery, and indeed precedents could be found for much of the NME’s charge sheet, which included a selection of remarks from previous interviews with the singer. ‘When I see reports on the television about football hooliganism,’ Morrissey was quoted as saying, ‘I’m actually amused.’ This supposedly damning observation in fact sat fairly happily with, say, the comments of former Clash singer Joe Strummer on the behaviour of England fans during the 1990 World Cup: ‘I get a strange swell of pride when I hear of our football hooligans causing trouble abroad.’
But Morrissey’s protestations about the national flag ran counter to the accepted values of the industry that provided him with a living. Ever since the formation of Rock Against Racism in response to comments by Eric Clapton and David Bowie in 1976, the music world had been justly proud of its part in making discrimination on grounds of colour unfashionable and unacceptable; it was largely through the endeavours of popular culture that racist language and behaviour had become the great taboo in Britain.
In the process, racism had somehow been conflated with patriotism, so that any expression of Britishness was itself suspect. When, in 1993, Blur issued a publicity photo which showed them wearing clothes from the mod and skinhead cults, posed in front of a wall bearing the slogan: ‘British Image 1’, the NME said they were ‘flirting with fascist imagery’. One of the babies apparently discarded with the bathwater was the country’s flag, which had for some become a deeply controversial symbol, associated with days of Empire and with a British nationalism that was felt to be at the heart of continuing colonialist attitudes. This feeling was not unrelated to the fact that the flag was employed so ostentatiously by the National Front and their successor groups on the far right.
Such sensibilities, however, were rapidly passing out of fashion. The sleeve of the first Oasis demo tape in 1993 bore an image of the red, white and blue colours swirling inwards as though disappearing down a plughole. Liam Gallagher explained the significance of the symbolism: ‘It’s the greatest flag in the world and it’s going down the shitter. We’re here to do something about it.’ When the group played two gigs at the Maine Road stadium in 1996, their biggest concerts thus far, Noel Gallagher’s guitar was emblazoned with the flag, and at the Brit Awards the following year Geri Halliwell of the Spice Girls captured the front pages by wearing a Gucci mini dress with a Union flag tea-towel sewn onto it. In 1997 too, David Bowie was pictured on his new album, Earthling, wearing a distressed Union Jack frock-coat, and – somewhat tardily – Annie Lennox wore a similar jacket when she performed at the Brits two years later. By this stage, the furore over Morrissey’s appearance at Madstock felt like a very long time ago. It was one of Cool Britannia’s legacies that the Union flag was reclaimed from the right wing to become a truly national symbol.
In a parallel development, the flag of St George – an emblem with little resonance in recent times – also became a fixture, particularly at Euro 96, asserting an English identity that had hitherto felt no need to project itself, but which now seemed a little threatened by the inexorable rise of nationalism in other parts of the United Kingdom. ‘No wonder the English have become so desperate to wave the flag of St George,’ reflected the hero of Tony Parsons’s novel Man and Boy, ‘to remind ourselves that our roots are just as deep and defined as those of the Irish or the Scots.’ Clinton’s Cards even began making greetings cards for St George’s Day and several authors published books in which they made attempts to define Englishness. The television journalist Jeremy Paxman concluded his exploration of the theme with a checklist of traits: ‘individualism, pragmatism, love of words and, above all, that glorious, fundamental cussedness’.
The ease and speed of this cultural embrace of the flags suggested that earlier fears on the left of extreme nationalism had been misplaced. There was little political charge to this appropriation, merely another echo of the Swinging London years. For politicians, on the other hand, it was territory that should have been entered with great caution, for the exploitation of the flag had always been regarded as slightly suspect, even unBritish.
In Stalky & Co, the 1899 school novel written by the great poet of Empire, Rudyard Kipling, an MP visits a fictionalised version of the United Services College to address the boys on the subject of patriotism. The majority of his audience are the sons of servicemen, themselves intending to join the forces, but his speech, which culminates in the unfurling of a Union Jack, leaves them in appalled silence. In the lives of these future members of the imperial officer class, the flag is not intended for such use, nor for everyday display: ‘It was a matter shut up, sacred and apart. What in the name of everything caddish, was he driving at, who waved that horror before their eyes?’ The MP leaves the flag behind, donated to the school’s cadet corps, with the result that the corps quietly disbands itself rather than be associated with such a loathsome gesture.
That example hadn’t put off subsequent generations of politicians. In particular, Margaret Thatcher, fresh from victory in the Falklands War, had been enthusiastic about being pictured in front of the Union flag. Such opportunities included a 1987 election broadcast that featured footage from the two world wars, suggesting a belief within the Conservative Party that it had ‘a monopoly of patriotism’, in the words of David Owen. ‘When you see Mrs Thatcher’s kind of Tories wrapping themselves in the flag,’ remarked Neil Kinnock, ‘it does make you very suspicious when they have done so much damage to people who live under it.’ Exactly the same charge was made eight years later by Tony Blair about John Major’s Conservatives: ‘It is no good waving the fabric of the flag when you have spent sixteen years tearing apart the fabric of our nation.’
The Labour response, however, was very different this time. At the party’s last conference before the 1992 election, a tentative toe had been dipped in the water and delegates had been treated to a backdrop that featured the Union flag ‘discreetly woven into the slogan “Opportunity Britain”’. Now, with the endorsement of Cool Britannia, New Labour simply took the flag for themselves, flaunting it boldly along with other symbols of nationalism. ‘Let us say it with pride,’ declaimed Blair at the 1995 conference: ‘we are patriots. This is the patriotic party, because it is the people’s party.’ A speech he made during the election campaign was originally intended to contain, until it was deleted at the demand of Robin Cook, a more radical declaration still: ‘I am proud of the British Empire.’ (Blair was later to record that, as control of Hong Kong was passed to China, he felt at the handover ceremony ‘a tug, not of regret but of nostalgia for the old British Empire’.)
The first Labour Party broadcast under Blair’s leadership ended with a suitably patriotic peroration – ‘We can change the course of our history and build a new confident land of opportunity in a new and changing world’ – as the sound of Elgar’s ‘Nimrod’ swelled on the soundtrack. An election broadcast in 1997 went one step further, using ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ as it showed patients lying on trolleys in hospital corridors, street muggings, car theft and drug dealing, as well as a Union flag being lowered, all juxtaposed with pictures of leading Conservatives laughing and looking smug. The final shot was of a sandcastle surmounted by a little Union Jack being washed away by waves. It was a slick, cynical, manipulative piece of scaremongering, and it was very effective indeed.
Less successful was another broadcast during the campaign that attempted to put the positive case for voting Labour. It featured that other great symbol, a British bulldog, even though, as Clive Aslet pointed out, the breed had, in modern times, ‘become a wheezing caricature of its former self: overbred, prone to buckling of the legs and devoid of the old athleticism, tenacity and aggression of the sporting dog’. The effect was further undermined when it became known that the animal in question had been rather too well-endowed for media exposure, and had therefore had his testicles airbrushed out; the revelation prompted a slew of jokes about Blair not really being the dog’s bollocks after all.
Some on the left of the Labour Party struggled to accept the rebranding project. When Tony Blair’s speech to the conference in 1996 ended with a back-projection of the Union flag, it was all too much for Tony Benn to bear: ‘It was the National Front, it was everything I feared, and it made me absolutely sick.’ But he was in a dwindling minority, and many of the party were carried along by the way in which New Labour’s unashamed wrapping of itself in the flag succeeded in defusing the allegations of anti-patriotism which had served the Tories so well throughout the previous decade. ‘We have reclaimed the flag,’ declared Peter Mandelson. ‘It is restored as an emblem of national pride and diversity. Restored from years as a symbol of division and intolerance.’
The Conservatives struggled wearily to fight back against the barrage. Where once there had been talk, given Labour’s plans for devolution and its enthusiasm for Europe, of a ‘Union Jack election’, it was becoming increasingly difficult for the Tories to construct a patriotic argument: so many of the symbols had already been taken. An election poster was produced that smacked of desperation, depicting, over the slogan NEW LABOUR, EURO DANGER, a lion with a blood-red tear dripping from its eye. It proved to be the least popular piece of propaganda in the entire campaign. ‘People haven’t got a clue what it’s about,’ complained Sebastian Coe. ‘They wonder what we did to the poor lion to make it cry blood.’
Running through Labour’s campaign, underlying all the patriotic imagery, was the theme with which Blair ended his 1995 conference speech: ‘This coming election is not a struggle for political power. It is a battle for the soul of the nation.’ His words echoed sentiments associated with Margaret Thatcher: ‘Economics are the method,’ she had said. ‘The object is to change the soul.’ Nonetheless it was still a powerful theme, and one that he had begun to explore in his days as shadow home secretary.
In February 1993 James Bulger, a two-year-old from Kirby, was abducted from a Bootle shopping centre by two ten-year-old boys and brutally tortured to death. It was a particularly horrific murder, even without the added factor of the killers’ age, and the public reaction was one of shock and distress, amplified by the release of grainy CCTV images showing the toddler being led away by his murderers. There were further parallels here with the 1960s, though of a less desirable kind: the crime echoed those of Mary Bell in 1968, while the only point of comparison in terms of public revulsion was with the Moors murders case of 1965. ‘Wherever you go, whoever you talk to,’ wrote Andrew Marr, a week after the killing, ‘there is only one subject that interests people at the moment. The murder of James Bulger hangs over the whole country like a dark cloud.’ The crime sparked a national outpouring of emotion and comment as the country tried to find some meaning in a meaningless act of violence. There was an insatiable need to discover what had gone wrong with Britain that such a thing could happen.
Into this debate stepped Tony Blair. ‘Very effectively I made it into a symbol of a Tory Britain in which, for all the efficiency that Thatcherism had achieved, the bonds of social and community well-being had been loosed, dangerously so,’ wrote Blair in his memoirs, admitting that he personally benefited from the intervention: ‘at the time, politically, there was a big impact on my standing, which rose still further.’ Blair acknowledged, as the Labour Party had too rarely done in recent years, that it was not enough simply to talk of social deprivation, that there was a question of morality here: ‘If we do not learn and then teach the value of what is right and wrong, then the result is simply moral chaos which engulfs us all.’
He spoke too of the need for community, and if none of this came with much idea of how it was to be achieved, other than by locking up more offenders, it undoubtedly did its job of stoking public unease. An opinion poll published a fortnight after the Bulger murder showed that law and order was now second only to unemployment as the issue causing greatest concern to the public, the numbers mentioning it having doubled in the last month. Levels of youth criminality, many felt, had reached crisis point.
The belief that there was a terrifying rise in juvenile crime was hardly borne out by the statistics; the number of young people under eighteen cautioned or convicted of an offence had fallen by nearly a third in the last six years. But the perception was allowed to remain and, without offering any way forward, Blair found that his rhetoric captured the public mood more effectively than did that of the government. There was a look of campaigning zeal about him, which outflanked John Major’s more reassuring tone, even when the prime minister promised a ‘crusade against crime’ and adopted a strange position that ignorance was the best policy: ‘We should condemn a little more, understand a little less.’ Major’s ‘back to basics’ speech the following autumn was perhaps a more considered response, though any chance that it might steal Blair’s thunder faded away with the first whiff of Tory sexual impropriety.
Meanwhile the home secretary, Kenneth Clarke, was shocked out of the political complacency he had displayed just a few months earlier at the Conservative conference. ‘We are the party of law and order,’ he had bragged; ‘the Labour Party know it, and the general public know it.’ That was in the wake of Black Wednesday and the David Mellor affair, and offered some reassurance that there was one issue where the Tories remained untouchable. Now, though, with Blair outflanking him in talk of hard-hitting measures, Clarke responded in kind, promising that more detention centres for juveniles would be built, though many experts in the field felt that the contest to be tough failed to shed much light on the problem of teenage criminality. ‘The two of them arguing about whose penal institution is bigger gets us nowhere,’ shrugged Frances Crook, director of the Howard League for Penal Reform.
When Michael Howard became home secretary shortly afterwards, he ramped up the rhetoric still further. He also took pot shots at tried and tested targets, announcing ‘the toughest-ever crackdown on violent videos’. (The judge in the Bulger case, followed by much of the media, had wrongly suggested that videos, including the 1991 film Child’s Play 3, had played a part in the murder.)
It didn’t take much foresight to predict that the proposed measures would do little to prevent another case arising to capture the public mood of anguish. In December 1995 Philip Lawrence, the head teacher of St George’s Catholic School in Maida Vale, London, was stabbed to death outside the school gates after he intervened to stop a gang of children who were attacking a thirteen-year-old pupil with an iron bar. His widow, Frances, wrote an open letter to the pupils of the school, which was read at assembly: ‘Violence is not a knife in the hand. It grows, like a poison tree, inside people who, unlike yourselves, have not learnt to value other human beings. Now I trust you to work as hard as you can, in school and at home, to create a world in which goodness is never again destroyed by evil.’ She later expanded on this, calling on ‘the government and those who shape society’ to lead a moral crusade ‘to re-evaluate what on earth is going on in society now, to try to provide a framework, a guidance for people’.
Philip Lawrence was subsequently voted Personality of the Year in the annual poll of listeners to Radio 4’s Today programme and an award scheme, funded by the Home Office, was launched in his name ‘to show everyone just how many groups of young people are doing extraordinary things for their communities’. A month-long knife amnesty was also called by police forces across the country; as a result, 40,000 weapons were handed in, not just knives, but also machetes, swords, bayonets and knuckle dusters.
Worse was to follow just a few months after Lawrence’s murder, when a 43-year-old man named Thomas Hamilton walked into Dunblane Primary School in March 1996 and shot dead sixteen children and one teacher before killing himself. The scale of the massacre was deeply shocking and again demanded a political response. The government set up the Cullen Inquiry, which called for tighter gun control, and subsequently passed legislation that banned the ownership of almost all handguns.
But the Tories were again outflanked by Labour. Even before Cullen produced his report, the party had invited Ann Pearston of the Snowdrop Petition, a campaign to outlaw all gun ownership, to speak at the 1996 Labour conference. The Liberal Democrat conference that year also voted in favour of a ban, even if one delegate expressed a distaste for such opportunistic resolutions: ‘I don’t believe, emotional as it is, that we should be, in effect, grave-robbing those children for votes.’ When the Labour government was elected, it passed new legislation that finally ended the owning of handguns (except, incongruously, in Northern Ireland); nonetheless, the incidence of crimes involving firearms more than doubled over the next five years.
Equally ineffective was the response to Dunblane by the culture secretary, Virginia Bottomley, who followed Michael Howard’s lead and decided that violence in fictional films was somehow to blame. She announced that the government would introduce legislation to ensure all new television sets came fitted with what was known as a V-chip, a device that supposedly allowed parents to stop their children seeing violent and sexually explicit material. This requirement had recently been passed into law in the United States, but it met with little enthusiasm in Britain, partly because, by venturing beyond ‘video nasties’ into television, it trod on the toes of those newspaper proprietors who had a stake in broadcasting. The proposal had ‘flaws’ thought The Times, was ‘unworkable’ according to the Financial Times, and took us into ‘a thorny area’ in the eyes of the Independent. The Sun was more forthright still: ‘she’s wasting her time.’ Within a week, the government had dropped the idea.
Horrific crimes like the killings of James Bulger, Philip Lawrence and the children at Dunblane quite rightly dominated the headlines for days and even weeks, as all such events will, but there was a new element in the desire of politicians to make quite so much capital out of them. It was hard not to see their contributions as cynical, opportunistic and – worse still – politically foolish.
Tony Blair’s wish to weave the murder of James Bulger into the narrative of a crumbling Britain under the Tories could presumably be extended, so that one might point, say, to the Moors Murderers in the 1960s and the killing career of Peter Sutcliffe in the late 1970s as an illustration of the kind of thing that happened under a Labour government. That would be an absurd claim, of course, but so too was Blair’s implication that a government led by him would prevent such things happening. Yet this was the path he was heading down. Because although it was a short-term success, Blair’s rhetoric stoked up unrealistic expectations for the future, which could surely never be met.
‘This generation, my generation,’ he said at the 1995 conference, ‘enjoys a thousand material advantages over any previous generation, and yet we suffer a depth of insecurity and spiritual doubt they never knew.’ The suggestion that we were about to witness a spiritual rebirth of the nation, a sea change in morality, the very idea that these things were in the gift of the government – all were allowed to run unchecked, until even some of the senior figures in New Labour began to be concerned. ‘I think that if we win the election,’ commented Jack Straw in 1996, ‘the greatest burden on Tony Blair and the rest of us will not be delivering on the economy so much as the huge expectation that we will somehow be the agents of a different ethical order.’
A year later, after the election had duly been won, Giles Radice was surprised to be visited at his constituency surgery by a woman who ‘complains that we haven’t yet managed to “change people’s behaviour towards each other” and asks what I am going to do about it’.
And while the Labour Party in opposition was bemoaning the state of the nation, its continual attacks on the current government’s ‘sleaze’ similarly fuelled the hope that politics itself would be transformed. It was another hostage to fortune, and one that would come to be the source of some regret. ‘We made a very big mistake in allowing the impression to be gained that we were going to be better than the Tories,’ wrote Blair in his memoirs; ‘not just better at governing, but more moral, more upright.’ The implication was that it was the electorate’s fault, that the nation had somehow got a misunderstood message into its muddled head, but perhaps that wrong ‘impression’ owed more than a little to the attitude summed up by a headline in the party’s election manifesto: WE WILL CLEAN UP POLITICS.
These suggestions that morality was at stake were all the more improbable since they came at a time when concrete policy commitments were being kept to an absolute minimum, for fear of promising real things that couldn’t be delivered. In this, as in so much else, the role model seemed to be Harold Wilson in the months before the 1964 election, another young politician thrust prematurely into the leadership by the early death of the incumbent, another who sought to end a long period of Tory government.
The comparison was made explicit in the first episode of Our Friends in the North, broadcast in 1996 but set just before that 1964 election. ‘What actual guarantee have we got that a Labour government will do any better?’ queries Nicky (Christopher Ecclestone). ‘Wilson’s making no promises at all, as far as I can make out. We’ve got the white heat of the new technology, but that could mean more of the same old con trick.’ And in case the contemporary reference isn’t entirely clear, Nicky is seen delivering copies of the Labour manifesto, which that year carried the slogan THE NEW BRITAIN. It was a phrase that Wilson had used extensively, inspiring many in his party, including the young Tony Benn, who talked of ‘changes just as exciting as at any time in the past’ as he looked forward to ‘the implementation of Labour’s New Britain programme’.
Blair adopted much of the same language, particularly in his 1995 conference speech which returned to the theme over and over again, as he promised ‘to build a new and young country’. He referred to the people who had called out to him on The Mall on the anniversary of VE Day, and said they were ‘decent people, good people, patriotic people. When I hear people urging us to fight for “our people”, I tell you: these are our people. They are the majority. And we must serve them, and build that new Britain, that young country, for their children and their families.’ At the same conference, John Prescott went a daring step further and appropriated a Tory slogan that pre-dated the existence of the Labour Party itself, saying that the future now belonged to ‘One-nation Labour. The party that speaks for the whole country.’
The conceit caught on, at least in New Labour circles, and the 1997 manifesto made the extraordinary assertion that the party was now ‘the political arm of none other than the British people as a whole’. That rhetoric was to survive Blair’s first term in office: on the night of the next election, in 2001, the Labour MP Shaun Woodward was to claim that his newly adopted party was ‘a party for everyone, not of any particular class or any particular view’.
On the day after the 1997 election the Labour MP Tony Wright had said of Tony Blair that he was ‘good at being a man of his time. That is to say, he well expresses the fact that there is no Big Idea. Maybe the Big Idea is that there is no Big Idea.’ But perhaps that was to miss the scale of Blair’s ambition. His wish was to elevate his party to such a level that it rose above mere politics and could embody Britain itself. Or perhaps, as so often, Blair was merely perfecting a more voter-friendly version of John Major, of whom Giles Radice had written in 1992: ‘He is clearly going to be the Baldwin of the 1990s, taking the politics out of politics.’
Blair’s moral crusade, intended to reshape the conduct of politics and the nature of the country, came ultimately from his faith, as he made clear in his memoirs: ‘I had always been fortunate in having a passion bigger than politics, which is religion.’ Along with Gordon Brown, Jack Straw, David Blunkett and other leading members of New Labour, he was a member of the Christian Socialist Movement, and in the 1990s there was a notable trend away from the more secular character of the party. When the New Statesman magazine conducted a survey in 1994 of what Labour MPs considered the most important books in their lives, the results showed a marked change since the last such survey two decades earlier; then Karl Marx had been cited as the most popular author, now he had fallen behind the Bible in popularity, and the leading place had been taken by John Ruskin.
In the wider society, however, religion was looking like a quaint, eccentric leftover, unable to retain its moral authority. In his finest novel, The Vicar of Sorrows (1993), A.N. Wilson satirised a Church of England that had lost its way, from the high Anglican priest who still owes his true allegiance to Rome and spends his spare time either cottaging or railing against the ordination of women, via the progressively minded Archdeacon (‘Sin isn’t a word we use much nowadays’), all the way down to the evangelical parishioners who yearn for ‘jollier forms of service in church’. At the centre is the tormented figure of Francis Kreer: ‘A married man, for nearly twenty years, he did not love his wife. A priest of the Church of England, he did not believe in God.’
Kreer’s life falls apart, he suffers a breakdown and in his madness stumbles upon an extraordinary discovery: the fact that there is a direct correlation between the Bible and Who’s Who. It’s played for tragicomic effect, but by the end of the decade ‘the Great Who’s Who Biblical Conspiracy’ would have looked perfectly sane in a world where the best-seller lists included works such as Michael Drosnin’s The Bible Code (1997). That book argued that the Hebrew Bible was written by extraterrestrials who placed hidden messages in the text, including a prediction that the world would end in 2006. Within days of the al-Qaeda attacks on America in 2001, three of the top five best-selling books on the internet retailer Amazon were by or about the sixteenth-century mystic Nostradamus. It was only a short step to the conspiracies of Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code (2003).
The decline of the Anglican church as a social force had been a long, gradual process, but its virtual disappearance into irrelevancy was painfully apparent in the 1990s. On Easter Monday in 1992 a concert was staged at Wembley Stadium in memory of Freddie Mercury, the singer with Queen, who had died the previous year. At the end of his set, David Bowie spoke of Mercury and of others who had died from AIDS and, grasping for a way to express his feelings, dropped to one knee to recite the Lord’s Prayer. There was a time when such a gesture would have been recognised as a communal statement, embracing not only active Christians but pretty much everyone in the country, a ritual of social solidarity; now it was merely embarrassing, for those in the stadium, those watching on television and, it looked, for Bowie himself. Such things were no longer part of the nation’s shared language.
The same phenomenon was apparent elsewhere. There had always been a convention, for example, that both the major television channels would screen a religious programme at the same time early on a Sunday evening, the so-called ‘Godslot’, so that neither would gain an unfair advantage while the other went through the motions of public service broadcasting. But the nature of those programmes had changed, so that the BBC’s holy warhorse, Songs of Praise, which had been on air since 1961, began introducing more ‘human interest’ interviews, with a consequent reduction in the number of hymns sung.
In 1993 ITV went further and cancelled its own religious series Highway, presented by Harry Secombe, after ten years on air. The decision provoked more letters of complaint to the Independent Television Commission than had any other single issue, but ITV’s commercial logic couldn’t be doubted. They began to screen instead a feature film early on Sunday evening, increasing the channel’s audience share and eclipsing Songs of Praise on BBC One. (With less fanfare, Radio 4 also ended Morning Has Broken, which used to broadcast hymns early on a Sunday morning.) By the end of the decade the only spiritual dimension to be found on the major channels in prime time was the appearance of Mystic Meg, the News of the World’s astrologer, on the draw for the National Lottery.
Elsewhere the mockery of religion, once a taboo subject, had become sufficiently commonplace that it barely merited mention. In 1994 the gay performance troupe the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence were reported to the Broadcasting Standards Council for a television routine in which they dressed as nuns. The BSC concluded that the performance was ‘unlikely to cause widespread offence’, and the Sisters issued a press release to apologise for not having done so.
There were still occasional attempts to protect religious sensibilities, as the jeans-manufacturer Diesel discovered in 1998 when it ran a promotional campaign, in places like Minx magazine, as well as on the London Underground, that showed nuns and the Virgin Mary wearing jeans, under the slogan: SUPERIOR DENIM. A spokesperson for the company laughed off the complaints that were received – ‘Diesel’s advertising tends to be on the ironic side and our target customer would understand the advert and not take it literally’ – but the Advertising Standards Authority banned the campaign, saying that depicting ‘nuns as sexual beings was unacceptable’. By then, of course, the images had done their job.
Less conventional forms of spirituality, however, continued to grow in popularity, a trend reflected not only in the proliferation of New Age non-fiction, but in the massive rise of the fantasy genre. At one end of the market were the satirical fantasies of Terry Pratchett, whose first book, The Carpet People, had been published in 1971, and who achieved success with his Discworld series from 1983 onwards. By the 1990s he was regularly hitting the best-seller lists, sometimes twice a year, as well as attracting the backhanded compliment of being the country’s most shoplifted author, but Discworld remained essentially a cult. Those who hadn’t read any of the books might recognise his name, and perhaps the name of his imagined world, but nothing else; he didn’t impact on a general culture in the way that fantasy writers like C.S. Lewis or J.R.R. Tolkien had.
Or indeed as J.K. Rowling was to do. Her first novel, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, was published in June 1997, and by the end of that year had sold 30,000 copies. Thereafter, as word spread, sales really took off and by the time of the fourth volume in the series (Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire in 2000), bookshops were opening at midnight on the day of publication to feed the fan frenzy. The first American printing of 3.8 million was said to be the biggest ever, while the British print run of 1.5 million similarly set a British record. Rowling’s success ensured that the novels encountered some hostility, and reports soon emerged of them being banned in Church schools. ‘The Bible is clear about issues such as witchcraft, demons, devils and the occult,’ explained one head teacher. ‘Throughout it insists that God’s people should have nothing to do with them.’
For those of a like mind, there were dangers everywhere. In 1993 the Reverend Ian Cook of Manchester had objected to a promotion by Kellogg’s in which plastic figures were given away in boxes of Frosties and Weetos cereals. ‘Three of them – Astaroth, Lamia and Alu – are actual demon gods,’ he complained, saying the campaign was ‘grotesque and occult’.
Concern was expressed, too, at the rise of overt paganism. There were said to be a quarter of a million pagans in the country – and Leeds University became, in 1994, the first university in Britain to acquire the services of a pagan priestess to provide spiritual guidance for students – though even devout Christians must have struggled at times to see their activities as being overly sinister. In 1994 a group in Milton Keynes applied to the local council for permission to use a patch of wasteland for their ceremonies, where a small group wished to congregate with lighted candles and an open fire, the latter intended to provide light and ‘to warm up food, such as jacket potatoes’. The group’s leader portrayed its activities in terms of a very British domesticity: ‘If we are denied the right to worship publicly, we are forced to retreat into our homes. This is what happens at the moment, and quite frankly I’m sick of clearing the candle wax off the carpet.’
The decline of the mainstream churches was not a new story; having risen during the 1950s, attendance at Anglican services had been in decline ever since. Nonetheless a noticeable marginalisation of religion, a hastening of that decline did occur in the 1990s. In a parallel manner, another long-running narrative was given a new twist as the debate about immigration shaded into a fear of asylum seekers.
This was an issue that occupied a great deal of media attention during the decade, for there had been a rapid rise in the numbers of people who arrived in Britain claiming that, in the words of the 1951 United Nations Convention on Refugees, they had ‘a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion’. In the mid-1980s around 4,000 such people came to Britain each year; by the start of the 1990s this had risen to 20,000 and it continued to increase until it reached a peak of 50,000. Similar increases were being seen all over Europe, particularly in Italy, where a third of Genoa’s population was soon reported to comprise recent immigrants, and in Germany where there were 400,000 applications for asylum in 1992 alone, though even these numbers were dwarfed by those seeking refuge in countries like Iran and Pakistan.
Much concern was expressed about this level of immigration and how it might impact upon the nation’s coherence. There was also anger at the inability of the system to deal with the number of applications, hampered by a computer system that didn’t work as well as had been promised. By the end of the decade nearly 100,000 people were waiting to see whether they would be granted permission to remain in the country. The response by some politicians of both major parties was to present refugees as authors of their own misfortunes, and to talk about a ‘flood’ of ‘bogus’ asylum seekers, who were merely seeking refuge from poverty. Measures must and would be taken, the public was assured, to prevent Britain being overwhelmed.
This was considered particularly treacherous terrain for Labour, the assumption on both sides having long been that immigration was an area where the Tories were always stronger. ‘Immigration, an issue which we raised successfully in 1992 and in the 1994 Euro-elections campaign, played particularly well in the tabloids and still has the potential to hurt,’ wrote Andrew Lansley, the party’s director of communications, in a memo leaked to the press in 1995. In fact it hardly played in the subsequent election campaign at all, and warranted barely a mention in the Conservative manifesto, which was more concerned with trumpeting British virtues: ‘Tolerance, civility and respect have always been the hallmark of our nation. It is thanks to them that we have an excellent record on race relations.’
If that sounded very much like John Major himself speaking, the same message could also be heard elsewhere. ‘I understand Britishness as being outward-looking, open and internationalist,’ said Gordon Brown, in a speech in 1998; ‘a commitment to democracy and tolerance, to creativity and enterprise and to public service, and to justice or, as we often put it, to fair play.’ And, despite the carping about asylum seekers, this was Britain’s self-image as it emerged during the 1990s: a country that prided itself on a tolerant diversity, and that saw itself as a modern nation while still cherishing its past.
It was striking, however, that culturally so much of that diversity was rooted in the country’s former colonies, with increasing visibility for minorities who had hitherto been seen as peripheral. The decade saw, for example, not only the wave of British Asian films, but also the emergence of musicians including Cornershop, Asian Dub Foundation and Apache Indian, and television comedies like The Real McCoy (1991) and Goodness Gracious Me (1998, following its radio debut two years earlier), while the nation’s favourite boxer was the world featherweight champion Prince Naseem Hamed, born in Sheffield to Yemeni parents. But there was no comparable embrace by the mainstream of the European heritage, a fact that continued to irritate forward-thinking politicians.
Frustration with this lack of interest in Europe was evident in a speech made in 2001 by Robin Cook about Britain’s membership of the EU. ‘I do not accept that to acknowledge our European identity diminishes our Britishness,’ he argued. ‘None of our European partners, with their own proud national traditions, seem afflicted by this self-doubt and insecurity.’ That, at least, was the message that Cook wished to put across, though actually the part of his speech that received the widest coverage related yet again to the theme of national identity, and the tension between past, present and future. ‘Chicken tikka masala is now Britain’s true national dish,’ he explained, ‘not only because it is the most popular, but because it is a perfect illustration of the way Britain absorbs and adapts external influences.’
It was as good an image as any had come up with to symbolise the new Britain, though he didn’t draw the obvious conclusion, that the influence of the former Empire remained more powerful than that of Europe. In any event, he had already gone too far for some. Tony Blair was said to have regarded the speech as ‘a “catastrophic intervention” because it seemed to want to dump our history’.