Sir, – my husband, T. S. Eliot, loved to recount how late one evening he stopped a taxi. As he got in, the driver said: ‘You’re T. S. Eliot.’ When asked how he knew, he replied: ‘Ah, I’ve got an eye for a celebrity. Only the other evening I picked up Bertrand Russell, and I said to him: “Well, Lord Russell, what’s it all about”, and, do you know, he couldn’t tell me.’
VALERIE ELIOT, LETTER TO THE TIMES, 8 FEBRUARY 1970.
THE desire to decode one’s own times – to answer that culturally attuned taxi driver’s question – is present, I suspect, to some degree in all of us. Plainly it’s powerful in me and has provided much of what professional drive I possess. The files, the diaries, the memoirs, the visits to once top secret sites – together they give you a substantial, though never complete, codebook with which to do it – contemporary history as a series of retrospective signals intelligence breakthroughs. But answering the taxi driver’s question to Bertrand Russell is the truly stretching part. I’ve covered but a small fistful of the running themes and questions of postwar Britain in Distilling the Frenzy and it is those I shall concentrate upon in my attempt to meet the cabbie’s cry.
Britain’s place in the world is a very pronounced thread running through these pages. A contemporary British historian of the 2050s coming across this collection may conclude that such a preoccupation on my part amounts to an emotional overhang engineered by growing up in the recent shadow of World War II and living through both the mushroom cloud-silhouetted Cold War and the shedding of the great bulk of Britain’s territorial empire overseas; the whole representing an example, perhaps, of an incomplete psychological adjustment to one’s country’s reduced circumstances of being haunted by ‘the noble ghosts of Britain’s past’, as the former Pakistani Foreign Minister, Yaqub Khan, once put it to his British counterpart, Geoffrey Howe, Lord Howe of Aberavon.1 After all it’s a very long time – July 1914 to be precise – since the UK was last, as Plutarch said of Rome, ‘an anchor to the floating world’.2 And within the first five days of August 1914 that anchor chain had snapped and reforging it proved beyond the Brits ever after.
I would have two answers to that judgement if it were to be made in 2052 (albeit from the grave unless I live to be 105). First that the political leaderships who found themselves in office in the pair of generations immediately younger than mine were similarly afflicted. I am sure Tony Blair’s ‘muscular liberalism’ (a phrase first coined by Michael Howard in his 2008 edition of War and the Liberal Conscience3 which he later came to regret4) as flexed in Iraq in 2003 and David Cameron’s intervention in Libya in 2011 are, in part, illustrations of the old ‘itch after the amputation’. Tony Blair’s Chicago speech on 22 April 1999 on the obligations of the international community5 and David Cameron’s assertion in the October 2010 National Security Strategy that there would be no shrinkage of British influence in the world6 attest to that, as does William Hague’s a ‘nation that is purely reactive in foreign policy is in decline’ speech of September 2011.7 As for Nick Clegg, generally thought to be at the herbivorous end of the British political spectrum and a great critic of what he regards as our more atavistic ways (not least, as we have seen, the survival of an unelected second chamber), he was as eloquent as anyone about Britain’s place in the world after the shock of David Cameron’s vetoing a new European Union-wide treaty at the Brussels ‘save the euro’ summit of 9 December 2011. In the immediate aftermath of the Prime Minister’s action, Mr Clegg plainly saw it as a first step on a possible long march of British withdrawal from the European Communities: ‘I think a Britain which leaves the EU will be considered to be irrelevant by Washington and will be considered a pygmy in the world when I want us to stand tall and lead in the world,’ he said.8
Blair’s, Cameron’s, Hague’s, Clegg’s and, in a minuscule way, my own positions might strike the contemporary British historian of 2052 as an absurd mixture of atavism and optimism. But it is perfectly possible that such impulses will exist in the 2050s though, no doubt, they will take a different form from those of late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century Britain unless prolonged economic setback or stagnation forces us to abandon what Douglas Hurd, Lord Hurd of Westwell, called the playing fields of intervention and influence.
Even so there may be mid-twenty first century consolations – cultural or individual examples of British creativity and specialness – to compensate for a UK (as opposed to a shared European) permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council. The Union Jack may finally be erased from the Bomb – though I doubt that unless a President of the United States sets his or her hand to the task and rescinds the 1958 Mutual Agreement and the 1963 Polaris Sales Agreement. The same applies to the UK’s global reach as an intelligence player should an American President abandon the 1946 Communications Agreement. The armed services generally could be reduced to a residual force for shared peacekeeping in the world under multilateral colours. Heaven forbid that they should be needed for peacekeeping at home.
Despite my shaky record as a forecaster, I reckon the generally shared appetite for Britain to be a touch special and an accomplished swayer in the world will not be but a faded memory in two generations’ time in the 2050s. It has to do with our Archimedean side. What do I mean? Geoffrey Howe, former Chancellor of the Exchequer and Foreign Secretary, is the one to explain as a great quoter of Archimedes. Geoffrey’s version, usually cited in support of Britain’s continued membership of the European Union,9 is:
Give me a place on which to stand and I shall move the world.
The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations version is
Give me but one firm spot on which to stand, and I will move the earth.10
To Lord Howe some attribute the notion of the UK being able to ‘punch above its weight in the world’. More commonly it is cited from a speech of Douglas Hurd’s at Chatham House, the Royal Institute of International Affairs, on 3 February 1993.11 Foreign Office insiders, however, might well award the palm to Lord Hannay of Chiswick, Sir David Hannay as he was at the time, in a widely circulated despatch from the United Nations to Douglas Hurd as Foreign Secretary in early 1991 shortly after arriving in New York as the UK’s representative on the Security Council. David Hannay wrote of Britain and France, Douglas Hurd’s instinctive interveners, as ‘both boxing a bit above their weight, which demands a good deal of ingenuity and fleetness of foot if it is to be done successfully’.12
The Hannay caveat is very important. For as Lord Waldegrave of North Hill, William Waldegrave, has pointed out, ‘If you punch above your weight you place yourself in danger of being knocked out.’13 To my mind, that inner and outer circle of international and domestic threats described on page 35 are not only inseparable, as post-9/11 international and home-grown terrorism has so plainly illustrated, but are quite enough to cope with without looking for more things to do in the world.
For all the potential horrors and threats on the road to 2052, I remain optimistic about the UK. Why? For a start I am as certain as I can be about anything that we will endure as a parliamentary democracy and an open society. Our politics will remain a tussle between individual and collective impulses. Our BBC will endure as the hourly, daily, weekly transmitter of institutionalised grizzling between the factions, the parties, the media, the commentariat and the general public. The irreversible explosion of the means of communication will, I suspect, amplify the ferment rather than transcend it.
The years left to me on the road to 2052 will have their shocks for myself as for everyone else. This was true on the road from 1947 to 2012. What most surprised me, in the regrettable sense of that verb, about the life of my own country in my own times as a stay-behind groupie of the late 1950s and early 1960s? High on the list are periodic episodes that have assaulted my deeply ingrained assumption of Britain as a natural possessor of a high level of social peace. To be sure in the 1950s there were Teddy Boys and rising crime rates generally after 1955, their ascent seeming to coincide with the increasing bloom of affluence. Certainly by the late 1960s a level of industrial unrest was accruing that had not been seen since the 1920s.
But the real shock was the disturbances first in Brixton, later Southall and Toxteth, in the spring and summer of 1981. Riots on one’s own soil still have a particularly searing capacity to tear at the living social tissues of your society. I felt this particularly powerfully in April 1981 when Brixton erupted on an afternoon and evening of the most perfect spring weather. Nothing had been encountered like it on the UK mainland since 1919. The very strong racial element and the deep antagonism towards the police, captured not just in the contemporary media coverage but in the Scarman Report of November 1981,14 worried me greatly about the longer-term prospects for the internal stability of the UK and that model of Beveridgite-Keynesian policies for economic and social amelioration that I had absorbed almost as a birthright since coming into life as part of what was called ‘the postwar bulge’ before somebody, I don’t know who, described us as the ‘baby boomers’.
Each time it has happened – in different places and for a variety of reasons in fluctuating combinations – serious internal disorder has retained its power to shock; Broadwater Farm, Tottenham 1985; the northern cities, Bradford especially, in 2001; the four days of rioting and looting across London and in Liverpool, Salford and Manchester, Nottingham, Wolverhampton and Birmingham in August 2011. It is very difficult, I find, to be detached as a historian of one’s own society. When it bleeds, you bleed.
The jihadi-related attacks on London on 7 July 2005 and the Provisional IRA’s bombs on the mainland over twenty years produced a rending and an anxiety of their own and are in no way to be diminished compared to the rioting. But their roots were different as were and are the methods used by the authorities to deal with them. Perhaps the special ingredient of the riots for ‘my age’ is the feeling that in the years of our maturity we should have been, in our various ways, co-creators of a very different society in which educational opportunity, the expectation of health, the levels of productivity and economic growth and the distribution of the resultant wealth should have coalesced in a society enjoying a betterment in both collective and individual terms never experienced before, not least in terms of wealth per head (we are over three times richer than in 1945 in terms of GDP per capita, though inequalities have widened over the past thirty years15).
In the days following the riots of early August 2011, two members of the stretched edition of ‘my age’ caught the feeling on which I have touched. Jonathan Sacks, the Chief Rabbi (born in 1948, educated at a grammar school in Finchley), said: ‘There can be no doubt that something in our moral ecology has gone astray … There are moments in the history of any civilisation when it catches a glimpse of the state of its soul.’16 Historians usually have a problem with such things as souls (though I happen not to).
The second, the novelist and critic Howard Jacobson (born 1942, educated at a grammar school in Manchester), declared: ‘Those looters are criminals all right – but they are our criminals, trashing left and right what we, left and right, have trashed already.’ ‘Of course’, he went on, ‘we know damn well where they came from – they came from places from which most of us have averted our eyes, hoping they would stay there, praying that their brutalism would be expended on one another…’17
Howard Jacobson’s mea culpa-ism concentrated on the recent past. ‘These’, he wrote, ‘have been a disgusting few years. That form of looting known as corporate larceny continues to rage unchecked. Economic scavengers bring the world to the brink of ruin. We don’t need the discrepancy between rich and poor laid out in percentages, we see the brute fact of it with our own eyes in the shops and on the roads and in the restaurants of our richest cities.’18
For me, the shock of 1981 was even greater. As Michael Heseltine, Environment Secretary and the minister responsible for inner cities, put it in the title of a paper he prepared for Mrs Thatcher in July that year after the Toxteth disturbances in Liverpool, ‘It Took a Riot’ before we realised just what a combination of economic and social ills were afflicting many of our urban areas.19
I’m still intrigued by why I was so shocked. I suspect that for all the bumping and grinding of the 1970s – its industrial disputes, its ‘winters of discontent’, its relative economic decline, widespread de-industrialisation and rising unemployment, its rapid turnover of governments and Prime Ministers – I was still running on the rhythm of my own feel for the engines of postwar consensus. This was of a British New Deal (though neither Clem Attlee nor his ministers called it that).
What were those engines? A mixed economy–welfare state design along Keynesian and Beveridgite principles which, generation upon generation, would describe an increasingly virtuous circle encompassing a healthier, better-educated people with an increasingly skilled, productive and largely fully employed workforce shaped by a set of leaderships across industry, commerce, finance, politics and public service increasingly recruited from wider social circles on the basis of merit rather than the socio-economic status of the loins that had brought them into this world.
It was hard to sustain that mental model from the mid-1970s and my version was already battered before the riots of 1981 dealt it such a blow and, bit by bit thereafter, as the 1980s moved through the ruinous miners’ strike of 1983–84 and the two major political parties increasingly polarised, I came to realise that the very special bloom of that postwar promise into which I was born and which through its welfare and education provisions had made me a member of a special and privileged generation (Mr Attlee’s children, as I conceive of us) was gone. Education and its allied ‘ism’ – meritocracy – seemed the shining key to our individual and collective well-beings. Mine was the generation for whom Beethoven became our composer-in-residence for having said, when asked if the ‘van’ in his name meant he was an aristocrat, ‘I’m a brain-owner not a landowner.’20 The ladder from primary school to top-of-the-rung university was ours to climb. Not until much, much later did I realise that free, taxpayer-funded higher education was unsustainable. This I should have appreciated in 1992, the year I became a full-time university teacher and the proportion of the age group going into higher education passed 30 per cent (it was about 7.5 per cent when I joined the scarlet colours of St John’s College, Cambridge in 196621). But full realisation only came in 2009–10.
Perhaps it was a mixture of complacency, altruism and selfishness that made me cling to that model of the postwar settlement which had gifted such a cornucopia of free opportunity and well-being in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s. I expected the state, the educational system, the British and the world economies to leave me in contented possession of these bounties which I was so sure for so long would be even more lustrous for the generations to come inside the UK, including those arriving in successive waves of immigration from what we then called the ‘New Commonwealth’ once they had been touched, depending on their age, by full employment or our schools, colleges and universities. The only factor that could, I thought, wreck these interlocking benign cycles was the Cold War, whose benign end I did not foresee, tipping into World War III.
Looking back this was my version of Winston Churchill’s speech in the House of Commons in March 1914 on the Naval Estimates, which I quoted earlier, asking only ‘to be left in undisputed enjoyment of vast and splendid possessions’.22 To be frank, I’ve been in search of a surrogate model ever since. And, given the advantages enjoyed by ‘My Age’, I’m haunted, in terms of legacy to the coming generations, by the fact that, as the former diplomat my friend Sir Jeremy Greenstock put it, ‘we have left them an awful lot to do’.23
That said, history as autobiography cannot be a kind of personal National Audit Office to be deployed in balancing the pluses and minuses of the developments unfolding over an individual’s lifetime. How, for example, can you trade off the transformations in medical treatments against the erosion of civil peace in 1981 or 2011, or the coarsening of everyday life in an urban area, with serious deprivations or even the false glitter of celebritocracy (what the incomparable Sir Roy Strong calls ‘the golden age of trashocracy’24)? To be sure, there are paradoxes. Over my first fifteen to twenty years of life, the great concern was to get more and better food into us. Gradually, the anxiety switched to growing obesity.25
There is, however, one huge exception where a collective audit is possible. I was born and I shall die a son of the Cold War. I was also born and shall die a child of the postwar welfare state. These were and remain, to borrow a metaphor from Johan Huizinga’s classic study of The Waning of the Middle Ages, the ‘two poles of the mind’ I carry in my head.26 It was, Huizinga again, as if I lived in a ‘mixed smell of blood and roses’27 – the thought of the unimaginable slaughter of a Third World War amidst the increasingly golden provision of rising standards of physical and intellectual life.
Its ending without global conflict and nuclear exchange remains the single greatest shared boon of my lifetime. If I had come into the world in March 1945 instead of March 1947 I would be a man blessed by two priceless bounties if the defeat of the Axis powers was added to the demise of the Soviet bloc.
I would add a third great slice of good fortune. To have lived and breathed in these islands, to have absorbed the ways we pursue our scholarship, arrange our politics, carry out our administration of both government and justice, exchange our gossip, deploy our humour – for all their imperfections and irritations – comes very close, especially when the joys of family are mixed in, to winning the lottery (or, as ‘my age’ would say, the pools) in life. This is why it is impossible for me ‘to evaporate myself off from my country’, as an old friend from the secret world, who can’t do it either, likes to put it. It is a persistent compulsion, almost part of what IQ researchers call ‘crystallised intelligence … the crystallised fruits of our previous intellectual endeavours’.28 This, in the end, is why writing the history of one’s own country in one’s own times is such a pleasurable and self-energising if ultimately unrealisable pursuit in the sense of completeness.
Why unrealisable? It’s not just the books one will never write (in my case, a history of gossip and rumour as influencers of politics and government). It’s also, as George Steiner wrote in the tantalising studies he called My Unwritten Books, ‘remembrance is never more than a flashbulb’29 for all the cryogenic tricks we bring to thawing out the history frozen in the archives. And as Owen Chadwick put it: ‘All historical events are in part mysterious.’30 Therefore, if you accept Warwick’s assertion in Shakespeare’s Henry IV Part 2 that ‘there is a history in all men’s lives’,31 we who have lived, hovered over and written about our own histories will remain more than a touch mysterious to ourselves let alone those who kindly read or listen to our autobiographical fragments. My friend Alan Judd, the historian and novelist, caught this very well in his spy thriller Uncommon Enemy when his lead character Charles Thoroughgood reflects on being struck by the limited part played by facts in the sense of an individual past. ‘Facts were like longitude on a map, measurements of temporal relativity, evoking but not containing the myriad associations, tones, colours, remarks, incidents, feelings that formed the patchwork brocade of life. It was they that drenched and infused the memory that was the person.’32
Yet for all the fickleness of memory and the historical residue we fail to pick up in our attempts to reconstruct the past, the frenzy is never entirely distilled or the curiosity slaked. Nor will it be on the Road to 2052 unless that ‘crystallised intelligence’, the sacred curiosity of T. S. Eliot’s cabbie, doesn’t just fade but is lost for ever.
1. House of Lords, Official Report, 8 September 2011, col.403.
2. Quoted in Thomas L. Friedman and Michael Mandelbaum, ‘That Used to be Us’: What Went Wrong with America – and How It Can Come Back (Little Brown, 2011), p.328.
3. Michael Howard, War and the Liberal Conscience (Hurst, 2008), p.vii.
4. Michael Howard, ‘The Transformation of Strategy’, RUSI Journal, August–September 2011, Vol.156, No.4, p.16.
5. John Rentoul, Tony Blair: Prime Minister (Little Brown, 2001), pp.526–7.
6. A Strong Britain in an Age of Uncertainty: The National Security Strategy (Stationery Office, October 2010), pp.9–10.
7. Rt Hon. William Hague, MP, ‘The Best Diplomatic Service in the World: Strengthening the Foreign and Commonwealth Office as an Institution’, Locarno Rooms, Foreign and Commonwealth Office, 8 September 2011.
8. Sam Coates, ‘Voters back veto as coalition is put to the test: Angry Clegg raises danger of ‘pygmy’ Britain’, The Times, 12 December 2011.
9. He has used the line more than once in conversation with the author.
10. The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, Second edn (OUP, 1968), p.14. The OED takes as its source Pappus Alexandr., Collectio, lib viii, prop 10, ξ xi (ed. Hulsch, Berlin, 1878).
11. Antony Jay (ed.), The Oxford Dictionary of Political Quotations (OUP, 1996), p.185.
12. Quoted in David Hannay, The Quest for a Role (I.B. Tauris, 2012 forthcoming).
13. Conversation with Lord Waldegrave of North Hill, 27 July 2011.
14. The Disturbances in Brixton, Cmnd 8427 (HMSO, 1981); see also: After the Riots: The Final Report of the Riots, Communities and Victims Panel (Stationery Office, 2012)
15. http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/datasets-and-tables/data-selector. html?cdid=IHXW+dataset=bb+table-id= 15.
16. Jonathan Sacks, ‘We’ve been here before. And there is a way back’, The Times, 12 August 2011.
17. Howard Jacobson, ‘They may be criminals, but we’re the ones who have created them’, Independent, 13 August 2011.
18. Ibid.
19. Peter Hennessy, Whitehall (Pimlico, 2001), pp.313–14; TNA, PRO, PREM 19/484, ‘HOME AFFAIRS. Civil disorder: disturbances in Brixton, Bristol, Liverpool, Manchester and London districts…’
20. Simon Russell Beale, ‘The Symphony: Beethoven and Beyond’, BBC4, 10 November 2011.
21. A. H. Halsey and Josephine Webb (eds), Twentieth Century British Social Trends (Macmillan, 2000), pp.226–7.
22. House of Commons, Official Report, 17 March 1914.
23. Jeremy Greenstock, ‘Freedom, Order and Shifting Sands’, St Michael and St George Lecture, Locarno Rooms, Foreign and Commonwealth Office, 22 June 2011.
24. Nick Curtis, ‘Strong sentiments’, Evening Standard, 15 September 2011.
25. Avner Offer, The Challenge of Affluence: Self-Control and Well-Being in the United States and Britain since 1950 (OUP, 2006); Avner Offer, Rachel Pechey, Stanley Ulijaszek, ‘Obesity under Affluence Varies by Welfare Regimes: The Effect of Fast Food, Insecurity, and Equality’, Economics and Human Biology, Vol.8, No.3, December 2010.
26. Johan Huizinga, The Waning of the Middle Ages, first published 1924 (Penguin, 1979), p.318.
27. Ibid., p.25.
28. Linda Gottfredson, ‘Intelligence’, New Scientist, 2 July 2011, p.iv of special supplement.
29. George Steiner, My Unwritten Books (Weidenfeld, 2008), ‘School Terms’, p.122.
30. Quoted in George Lukacs, The Future of History, p.26.
31. William Shakespeare, Henry IV Part 2, Act 3, Scene 1, line 76.
32. Alan Judd, Uncommon Enemy (Simon and Schuster, 2012), p.150.