CHAPTER FIVE

WE HAPPY FEW

The people of England are never so happy as when you tell them they are ruined.

ARTHUR MURRAY, The Upholsterer, 1758

If being English is a state of mind, the question to ask is what they think makes them who they are. I started trying to find out by taking a trip to Cheltenham and the offices of the most unfashionable quarterly magazine in the country.

When This England was founded in 1967 under the slogan AS REFRESHING AS A CUP OF TEA!, it proclaimed its ambition to ‘capture the true spirit of England in every edition’. Drawing its title from the dying John of Gaunt’s lyrical speech in Richard II (‘This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, This England, this nurse, this teeming womb of royal kings’), the magazine’s softly stated ambition was to be ‘wholesome, straightforward and gentle’.¹ Inside, there was much use of the classic opening threnody ‘a century ago … but now’, plentiful illustrations in a sub-Norman Rockwell style, and the promise, ‘I hope you like our choice for a book serial … a pre-First World War story of a cheeky Cockney called Edwards who reveals his confessions as a jobbing gardener!’

This astonishingly flaccid pitch turned the magazine into a remarkable commercial success, with each quarterly issue selling up to a quarter of a million copies. Thirty years on, each edition was still selling more than the combined sales of each edition of the Spectator, New Statesman, Country Life and Tatler added together. The editor, whose inspired hunch had invented the thing, described his readers as ‘not just dukes, but wonderful dustmen as well, and pensioners from the East End, and judges and ferry boatmen, and vicars’ wives in remote missionary stations, and royalty and shopgirls, and lads and lassies from Lancashire and all over the globe … decent, God-fearing, plain-speaking crusaders whether they wear mitres or mini-skirts’.² The metropolitan response to this studiedly provincial blast came from the Sunday Times’s Atticus column: ‘it’s alright for the wonderful dustmen. They have a wonderful place to put it.’

The magazine has learned to shrug off this sort of sneering, comforted by the steady sales graphs, the lucrative sidelines of St George ties, tieclips and lapel badges and the sacks of unsolicited mail which arrive every week. To a casual reader, it can look as if the thing is written by its readers, none of whom is burdened by a training in journalism. There are many wartime memories and much patriotic enthusiasm for royalty, folk-customs and village life. But its quiet, chocolate-box style and banner, ‘Britain’s loveliest magazine’, belie an astounding editorial robustness. The promise of sentimentality cloaks a torrent of outrage. Ploughing through the whimsy you make a remarkable discovery – if this really is England speaking to itself, not only does the country keep looking backwards, it enjoys feeling persecuted. The photographs are designed to reassure – lots of sheep grazing in front of country churches, streams babbling through southern villages, beefeaters in scarlet and gold tunics. But the copy speaks a much more apocalyptic message: England is about to vanish for ever.

We are in the middle of a carefully-crafted plot going back many years which is designed to create an easily manageable, European super-state to be run like a socialist republic. That means one overall (but unelected) government, one puppet parliament, one federal army, navy and air force, one central bank, a single currency and one supreme court of law. Our precious Monarchy will be replaced by a President on the Continent, the Union Jack will be banned in favour of that horrid blue rag with those 12 nasty yellow stars and we shall all have to sing the new Euro anthem to the tune of Beethoven’s Ode to Joy … except that its title will really mean ‘Goodbye Britain’.³

The people who will bring this catastrophe about are our ‘quisling’ national politicians. But the sense of embattled persecution doesn’t stop there. A regular feature, ‘Our English Heroes’, tells the stories of people like the lone boy sailor awarded a posthumous VC. There is alarming news that the European Commission is trying to make the English bulldog an illegal breed, because they ‘prefer the fluffy little French poodle which always does as it’s told’. The magazine has its own ‘Silver Cross of St George’, awarded to heroes nominated by readers, like the retailer who defies regulations by continuing to sell paraffin by the gallon, instead of in litres. It worries about the fact that the BBC fails to mark St George’s Day. Even ‘The Battle for the Real Counties of Britain’, a campaign to restore ancient county names, is written in the language of the jackboot, with enemies all around and all-powerful –‘officialdom, the Post Office, politicians, journalists, teachers, television newsreaders’ – who have succumbed to the mistaken belief that local government has been reorganized. ‘Schoolchildren, defenceless against such an onslaught, were taken by the hand and led by their teachers into “Cleveland”, “Merseyside”, the “West Midlands”.’⁴ It sounds as if they were being led into the gas chambers.

The enemy, of course, is really the march of time – not a single article looks forward to the future. The magazine has a profitable sideline in tapes by Eric Coates (‘England’s Master of Light Music’), the Forces’ Sweetheart, Vera Lynn, Billy ‘Wakey Wakey’ Cotton, Victor Sylvester, Henry Hall and dozens of others, advertised alongside its bestselling cassette, This Was Our Finest Hour, ‘a unique triple album of memories and melodies that inspired the British people to Victory in the Second World War’. Apart from a handful of services (‘LOST YOUR MEDALS? WE CAN REPLACE THEM NOW!’, ‘HAVE YOU WRITTEN YOUR MEMOIRS? WE CAN ARRANGE PUBLICATION’), the limited number of advertisements are mainly appeals from military benevolent funds and animal sanctuaries to be remembered in readers’ wills.

Roy Faiers, who invented this strange but curiously successful formula, was sitting at his desk in a Victorian mansion in Cheltenham eating a slice of Women’s Institute fruit cake when I arrived. It had been easy to find the house because it was the only one in the street flying the British flag from the roof. I don’t know what I’d expected, some mixture of G. K. Chesterton and Genghis Khan, I suppose. I remembered a letter in one of the back-issues in which a satisfied reader had said he would like to see a copy of the magazine available in every school, library and hospital in the land, on the grounds that he saw This England as ‘the British equivalent of Hitler’s Mein Kampf, but, of course, based on Christian Principles’. But instead of Adolf Hitler, he turned out to be silver-haired, affable and easy-going. Apart from sudden protestations like ‘Oh, the Queen Mother! We all love her …’, he was quiet, thoughtful and likeable.

There were three union flags and a Cross of St George on his bookshelves, a photograph of the Queen on the wall, and plenty of books about dance bands. When he told me that at one time he had been fishing correspondent for the Grimsby Telegraph it did not seem surprising.

Roy Faiers had also concluded that Englishness was not a matter of race. His magazine, which sells nearly 20,000 copies in Australia, and many thousands more in other parts of the old Empire, obviously appeals to expats, by keeping alive a memory of the quieter, slower country they left behind. But Faiers had decided that you didn’t have to be English to be ‘English’. ‘The actor James Stewart, for example, he was American, but he had Englishness. He didn’t brag about himself. He wasn’t pushy. He had one wife all his life. You could trust him with your wallet. That’s English.’ This is certainly how the English like to think of themselves – gallant, upstanding, modest, absolutely trustworthy and with impeccable manners. It is the ideal of the English gentleman. But, by itself, it does not quite answer the question of what Englishness is. Plainly, it cannot simply be a question of class.

‘For years, George Formby was the most successful performer in Britain. He was diffident about his fame and he didn’t like to show off his wealth. But his wife did – no diffidence at all. He was English. She wasn’t.’ I could see what he was getting at, although it struck me as hard on the woman. After all, while George Formby had been awarded the Order of Lenin for popularity with the Russian proletariat, she had the authentically English distinction of being World Clog Dancing Champion. So what, I asked him, was Englishness?

‘Englishness is very deep. It’s a spirit, the spirit of St George. The idea of St George is a fight against evil.’

Whether it’s true or not, this is interesting. Quite why St George became the patron saint of England is a mystery. Edward Gibbon’s description of him as a corrupt bacon supplier to the Roman army who later became Archbishop of Alexandria, subsequently murdered by a mob, is nowadays discredited. A history of the Catholic calendar portrays him in a more favourable light – horribly tortured and martyred for protesting the murder of fellow Christians by the Roman emperor Diocletian. In England, he seems to have been venerated for his courage, long before the Norman Conquest. But it was knights returning from the Crusades who popularized the George and the Dragon myth, which was perhaps a Christian version of the legend of Perseus’ rescue of Andromeda from a sea monster. There does seem to have been some genuine enthusiasm for him – Edward III made George patron saint of the Order of the Garter and built St George’s Chapel at Windsor in the middle of the fourteenth century. As late as 1614 blue coats were still being worn in the saint’s honour on 23 April. But George never set foot in England and also does duty as the patron saint of Portugal, as well as being at one time or another the guardian of Malta, Sicily, Genoa, Venice, Aragon, Valencia and Barcelona. He is a vague, workaday figure, of little spiritual or theological importance.

But when you look back at how the English like to portray themselves, you can see why St George was a convenient sort of patron saint. In identifying with their adopted hero they could assume for themselves a mantle of valiant integrity. It is striking how many of the crucial battles of English history, from the Spanish Armada in 1588 to the Blitz in 1940, have been presented as a struggle of David against Goliath. Angus Calder makes the following list of opposites to show how the English saw themselves and the Germans during the Second World War:

ENGLAND	GERMANY
Freedom	Tyranny
Improvisation	Calculation
Volunteer spirit	Drilling
Friendliness	Brutality
Tolerance	Persecution
Timeless landscape	Mechanisation
Patience	Aggression
Calm	Frenzy
A thousand years of peace	The Thousand Year Reich5

Whether it accorded with reality or not, it seems to have been important to the English to believe that, like St George, they had been roused from their bucolic idyll to fight monsters.

In one of the most celebrated summons to battle in the English language, Shakespeare has Henry V urge his men on to attack Harfleur with the words, ‘God for Harry! England and St George!’ It is the most economical patriotic quadrivium possible – God, homeland, monarch and sense of moral purpose. But Harfleur, which the English had besieged during their invasion of France in September 1415, really fell when it was starved into surrender. Henry then marched his troops towards the English garrison at Calais, when they found the way barred by a vastly greater force of French troops between the villages of Agincourt and Tramecourt. English propaganda, with which Shakespeare was familiar, probably exaggerated the scale of the French numerical superiority, but modern estimates suggest that the English army of some 6,000 men was set against a force of between 40,000 and 50,000. On the eve of the battle of Agincourt, Shakespeare tackles the idea of bravery-against-the-odds. Walking in on a meeting of his senior officers, Henry hears them talking anxiously about the French superiority in numbers. Not only are the English outnumbered, the French troops are all fresh, while the English are battle-weary. Westmoreland sighs for reinforcements:

O! that we now had here

But one ten thousand of those men in England

That do no work today.

Henry cuts in by saying he doesn’t want a single additional soldier, because the more soldiers there are, the more the honour will have to be shared. Rather, ‘he which hath no stomach to this fight’ may leave at once, all expenses paid, and return to England; he would prefer not to risk his life in that man’s company. Those who remain will acquire a shared dignity: anyone shedding his blood with the king will become the king’s brother. In the hierarchical context of the late sixteenth century, it is an astonishing proclamation. The call to arms, ‘We few, we happy few, we band of brothers’, has become the rallying cry of the English idea of heroism.

Agincourt turned out a famous victory. Although pinned between two hills, the English mounted attacks from either wing, their archers rained down a ceaseless torrent of arrows, and the French forces were uncoordinated and ill-disciplined. In less than three hours’ fighting it was all over. The French dead included three dukes, nearly a dozen counts, 1,500 knights and up to 5,000 men-at-arms. English accounts of the battle talk of their casualties being fewer than forty, although more modern estimates put the total at more like two or three hundred. Whether because he feared the arrival of French reinforcements or for other reasons, Henry ordered that most of the French prisoners be killed. Bishop Beaufort told Parliament the French defeat was punishment from God.

The most celebrated modern reinvention of the Few was made on 20 August 1940, when Winston Churchill praised the Battle of Britain fighter pilots. The Germans had taken the Channel Islands at the end of June that year, and Hitler’s order to prepare an invasion of England (Operation Sea Lion) came soon afterwards. The Luftwaffe’s first task was to neutralize the RAF and take over forward airfields from which the British might mount a counter-attack. Goering thought it could be done in four days. With almost 3,000 aircraft at his command and those on the French coast within twenty-five minutes’ striking distance of England, it did not look an extravagant boast.

On the first day, the Germans met much stronger opposition than they had expected, losing 75 aircraft to the RAF’s 34. Yet still the waves of attackers roared in. Churchill’s preferred vantage point was the Operations Room of No. 11 Group, Fighter Command. His staff officer, General Ismay, recalled a visit on 16 August, when

at one moment every single squadron in the group was engaged; there was nothing in reserve, and the map table showed new waves of attackers crossing the coast. I felt sick with fear. As the evening closed in, the fighting died down, and we left by car for Chequers. Churchill’s first words were ‘Don’t speak to me; I have never been so moved.’ After about five minutes he leaned forward and said, ‘Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.’ The words burned into my brain.⁶

Well they might, for they make up the most resonant sentence to have emerged from the Second World War. Churchill’s speechwriting involved perhaps weeks of what his secretary, John Colville, called ‘fertilising a phrase’. But although he spent days polishing the rest of the speech he delivered to Parliament on 20 August 1940, that sentence appeared unchanged. It needed no work, for it said it all, recognizing the courage of the pilots in their flimsy fighters and at the same time speaking to a profound sense of a small island surrounded by menace, but unbowed. In fact, in purely numerical terms, under the direction of the Minister of Aircraft Production, Lord Beaverbrook, Hurricanes and Spitfires were being turned out in Britain at over three times the rate of the Messerschmitts coming off the production lines in Germany. As the historian John Keegan remarks, ‘despite Churchill’s magnificent rhetoric, Fighter Command fought the Battle of Britain on something like equal terms. It would manage throughout to keep 600 Spitfires and Hurricanes serviceable daily; the Luftwaffe would never succeed in concentrating more than 800 Messerschmitt 109s against them’.⁷

But it was still to be a close-run thing. On 30 August, the electricity supply was cut along 130 kilometres of coast, thus taking seven radar stations off the air, and leaving the only early warning of enemy approach in the eyes and ears of the Observer Corps. Airfield hangars and ops rooms were hit, planes destroyed on the ground, aircraft factories damaged. In the air, the real British problem was a shortage of pilots, not aircraft. Privately, Hitler had told his generals that he would not invade unless he was sure of victory. But instead of continuing with the attacks on airfields, famously, Hitler changed tactics and we see another characteristic of the English imagination of themselves.

On the night of 24–25 August, London was bombed. Berlin was then hit in retaliation. Instead of continuing to try to destroy the British military machine, the Nazi objective now became to flatten the capital and thus sap the national will to continue the war. The Blitz started on 7 September and went on for fifty nights, but the bombing had quite the reverse effect to the one Goering expected: rather than weakening the people’s resolve, it strengthened it. Children had already been evacuated to the countryside, 2 million Anderson shelters were distributed to be put up in back gardens, and every employer with more than thirty staff was required to supply a night fire watcher: the bombing became a trial of wills. A leaflet dropped by German planes, A Last Appeal to Reason, by Adolf Hitler, the translation of a Hitler speech to the Reichstag on 19 July, simply caused amusement. The Times reported one woman had found a use for the enemy propaganda: she was selling the leaflets as souvenirs to raise money for the Red Cross.⁸

As the Blitz hit London, another much-loved caricature emerged to stand alongside the tweedy, sensible, Women’s Institute fundraiser: the unconquerable capital and its indomitable people. The Evening News pointed out that ‘Every morning, no matter how many bombs have been dropped in the night, London’s transport runs, letters are delivered, milk and bread comes to the door, confectioners get their supplies, and the fruiterers’ windows are filled.’ The Daily Telegraph despatched a reporter to give this marvel of logistics a human face. One Londoner responded to his questions about the bombing with a quote worthy of the Ministry of Information:

I tell you, mister – and I’m not just kidding you because you’re a newspaper chap – the people round ’ere is A1, and no mistake. Not a bleedin’ moan out of one of ’em. There was one chap – very badly ’urt ’e was – and all ’e wanted to know was if ’is wife was OK. And there was the old lady at No. 51 – the ’ouse came down on ’er and they dragged ’er out of the basement and sent ’er to ’ospital. She didn’t want to go. Would ’ave it she was quite all right. Not bloody bad for over seventy!⁹

The cheeky Cockney and the tweedy countrywoman were united in the belief that there was a right and wrong way of doing things. Extraordinarily, even the men dropping bombs on them seemed to have got the point about a certain basic civility. A German fighter pilot shot down over southern England walked up to a farm worker with his hands up and said: ‘A cigarette and a cup of tea, please.’ The Daily Express reported that another Messerschmitt pilot lying on the ground some distance from his machine was approached by Mrs Betty Tylee and Miss Jean Smithson. He had an Iron Cross on his chest. His first question was: ‘Are you going to shoot me now?’ ‘No,’ said Mrs Tylee, ‘we don’t do that in England. Would you like a cup of tea?’¹⁰

It is worth dwelling on the Second World War for two reasons. Firstly, because wartime tends to exaggerate those things which draw a nation together. And secondly, because World War Two and its aftermath was the most recent occasion on which the English had a clear sense of common purpose. By their own accounts, the picture that emerges is of a quiet people who would rather not have had the inconvenience of war. They certainly only seem to have woken up to its reality at the last possible moment. They saw themselves as law-abiding and civilized. They were certainly sure enough of themselves not to hate, but to laugh at Nazism. And, for all their fear, they took pride in being outnumbered.

The idea of the Few occurs time and again through popular accounts of English history. Military victories are what officialdom chooses to memorialize, and they provide the opportunity for sport at the expense of old enemies. (The late Woodrow Wyatt, Labour MP and author of the News of the World’s ironically titled ‘Voice of Reason’ column, was once asked by a French hotel receptionist to spell out his surname. ‘Waterloo, Ypres, Agincourt, Trafalgar, Trafalgar,’ he replied.) But those military events which have the greatest imaginative resonance in the English mind are not necessarily triumphs at all. Almost the only military event in the British occupation of India which remains in the popular imagination is the siege of Lucknow. It is not the victories at the Alma or Sebastopol that are recalled from the Crimean War, but the doomed charge of the Light Brigade. Few could name an event of the Zulu wars apart from the battle at Rorke’s Drift, when 139 British soldiers held off 4,000. What is known about the campaign to take French Canada beyond the death of General Wolfe in the attack on Quebec, of the battle for Corunna apart from the death of Sir John Moore, of the British Sudan campaigns apart from the image of General Gordon dying as the Mahdi’s followers stormed Khartoum, of the Boer War but the siege of Mafeking, of the First World War but the disasters of the Somme and the 41,000 lost at Gallipoli? World War Two is memorialized less for the drive on Berlin than for the British retreat from Dunkirk, a moment when British soldiers were plucked from the Continent and ferried back to the security of their island.

There is a certain element of myth-making in all these scenes, but their durability tells us something about the way the British see themselves. The common thread is sacrifice in an against-the-odds adventure. The realpolitik, the self-interest that had often put the armies there are forgotten. The impression is always of a small, nobly embattled people. As long ago as the Hundred Years War, the English victories when outnumbered three to one by the French at the Battle of Crécy or perhaps five to one at Poitiers (1356), came to be presented as the result of some special favour from God. Six hundred years later, the belief was still alive. The. 1944 film version of Henry V, starring Laurence Olivier, was given financial backing by the British government not merely because it would provide worthwhile overseas propaganda, but because it propagandized within Britain, by playing on the sense of embattled persecution. The best-known news photograph of the Blitz, the picture that told the British people they would never be beaten, was the image of the dome of St Paul’s cathedral, ‘the parish church of the Empire’, emerging graceful and unscathed from the smoke and destruction of an incendiary bomb raid. Taken by a Daily Mail staff photographer, Herbert Mason, it was printed in the newspaper with the caption ‘The Firmness of Right against Wrong’. ‘What better image could there be of a Protestant citadel being safeguarded amidst Armageddon by the watchful eye of Providence?’¹¹ asks the historian Linda Colley.

This sense of being uniquely persecuted and uniquely guarded must, obviously, be connected with religious belief. But the relevant text is not in the Bible. It is John Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, a lurid piece of propaganda detailing the suffering and death of Protestants executed during Queen Mary’s attempt to turn England back to Rome. It ought to be taken as the third Testament of the English Church. The book first appeared in 1563. It had expanded by 1570, the year of Elizabeth’s excommunication, to 2,300 pages of often gory descriptions of the oppression of English Protestants at the hands of the Roman Catholic Church. Anglican authorities ordered it to be displayed in churches across the country, and the illiterate had it read to them. It stayed on show in many churches for centuries, a ready reference for anyone who doubted the willingness of Englishmen and -women to die for their beliefs. By the end of the seventeenth century, perhaps 10,000 copies were in circulation. Throughout much of the following hundred years, new editions were produced, often in the form of serializations: after the Bible, it was the most widely available book in the land.

John Foxe’s purpose in describing the executions of the victims of persecution was to demonstrate the Church of England as ‘the renewing of the ancient church of Christ’: it was the church in Rome that was deviant. Christianity, Foxe suggested, had arrived in England in the reign of King Lucius of Colchester, and only later with missionaries from Rome. (Another fable, the Glastonbury Legend, tells, of course, that Joseph of Arimathea brought Christianity – and the Holy Grail – to England soon after the crucifixion.) The accession of Mary to the throne, and the reign of terror that followed as she tried to restore the supremacy of the Roman Catholic Church, was, therefore, some mad aberration. In the description of the execution of Ridley and Latimer, bishops of London and Worcester, there occurs the phrase that echoed down the centuries of English history. Condemned to be burned at the stake for their refusal to recant and acknowledge the authority of Rome, on 16 October 1555 the two men were brought to a ditch outside Balliol College, Oxford. There they were made to listen to a humbug called Dr Richard Smith preach a sermon on the cruel text ‘If I give my body to be burnt and have no charity, it profiteth me nothing’. Then their outer clothes were stripped from them and given to the crowd. They were shackled to a stake by a chain round their waists, and faggots of wood piled up around their feet. Ridley’s brother is said to have appeared with a bag of gunpowder, which he tied round the bishop’s neck, to shorten the agony. Ridley asked him to do the same for the elderly Latimer, after which the wood at their feet was set alight. As the flames licked around them, Latimer is said to have cried out to his fellow bishop, ‘Be of good comfort, Master Ridley. We shall this day light such a candle by God’s grace in England, as I trust shall never be put out.’ Latimer died quickly, Ridley only after revolting agonies.

As propaganda, Foxe’s book was a skilful piece of work. It had a veneer of historical respectability, it dealt with real events, it played upon real fears. And it could be terrifically gruesome. The story of Katherine Cawches, burned at the stake with her two daughters in St Peter Port, Guernsey in 1556, contains an account of how the pregnant belly of one of her daughters exploded. Out popped a newborn baby, carried clear of the flames by the force of the explosion, only to be taken from the crowd of onlookers and thrown back into the fire by a bailiff. Foxe adds that the child therefore ‘was both born and died a martyr, leaving behind to the world, which it never saw, a spectacle wherein the whole world may see the Herodian cruelty of this graceless generation of popish tormentors, to their perpetual shame and infamy’.¹²

The influence of this great tract must have been profound. At a religious level, the historian Owen Chadwick believes that

the steadfastness of the victims, from Ridley and Latimer downwards, baptized the English Reformation in blood and drove into English minds the fatal association of ecclesiastical tyranny with the See of Rome … Five years before, the Protestant cause was identified with church robbery, destruction, irreverence, religious anarchy. It was now beginning to be identified with virtue, honesty, and loyal English resistance to a half-foreign government.¹³

Not only did The Book of Martyrs identify the Roman Catholic Church with tyranny, it associated the English with valour. Any citizen could enter almost any church and discover for themselves the ruthlessness of foreign powers. They learned at the same time of the unbending courage of the English casualties. The effect of the book was not merely to dignify English Protestantism and demonize Roman Catholicism, but to hammer home the idea of themselves as a people alone. Being embattled had a moral purpose.

It sometimes seems that the English need to think of themselves like this. At the bathetic level of This England, the enemy ‘doing their damnedest to destroy a way of life it took the English a thousand years to perfect’ is an unholy alliance of metric measurements, town planners, unelected bureaucrats, squatters, vandals, abortionists, adulterers, offensive advertising, political correctness, modern telephone boxes, the ‘unholy trinity of newspapers, radio and television’, multiculturalism, and, most of all, the feeble-minded, traitorous politicians who were prepared to surrender the country to the European Union. Traitor-in-chief was Edward Heath, the ill-starred Conservative Prime Minister who took Britain into the Common Market by telling what turned out to be a lot of fibs about the limited scope of European ambitions. The editor, and, to judge from the hundreds of letters he gets each week, most of his readers, too, wants Britain to withdraw from the European Community, which he sees as a scam by the Germans to achieve by stealth what they failed to win with Messerschmitt 109s in 1940. ‘The whole thing is a racket where we’ll end up being a colony of Germany. We won the war, but they’ll win the peace.’

We are back in the world of Peter Simple, with the barbarians at the gates and the people of England obliviously asleep inside. That’s how the English like it.