Brexit: An Historical Romance

I still have a couple of minutes. Students have a

habit of coming in just the last moment. Some elders want to wait just a minute or so more.

Well, that’s the first time I think that we’re actually beginning early, such as the expectation

of everyone looking forward to hearing Geoffrey Wheatcroft, who is a very

stalwart of British studies. We’re always glad to have him back. And

today he will be talking about Brexit and its historical

perspective. Now, Geoffrey, as I think everyone knows, is a frequent contributor

to The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, The London

Review of Books, The New Republic. One could go on and on. He

is also the author of several important books, The Rant Lords

The Controversy of Zion, which won the National Jewish Book Award

and the Strange Death of Terry England. Perhaps a little bit

premature because the Brexit has a heavy Tory component

to it, or so it seems to me. He is also. It was one time the

literary editor of The Spectator s,

as well as writing for the tearless, The New York Review of Books and so on. And so,

Geoffrey, we very much look forward to hearing your interpretation of the historical romance

as a component of Brexit. Geoffrey Flitcroft,

thank you very much indeed, Roger. And good day, ladies and gentlemen, as ever.

It is a very great pleasure to be back in Austin,

where I have made so many happy visits in the past. I didn’t think it

was going to be able to deconstruct easily the particular Anglo

American statement I’m making today. But those of the braces or suspenders

of they’re not marriageable in cricket Club of Lords. The headquarters of cricket

there is my Longhorns pin.

In 1962, the United Kingdom made its first application to join the European

Economic Community, or Common Market, as everyone then called it. One English politician

just so decided to oppose this bid. And that October, he did so in a rousing

speech which conjured up memories of the Great War battles at Gallipoli in V.me Ridge.

More than that, to join the EEC would mean the end of Britain as an independent

European state. He said I make no apology for repeating it. It

means the end of a thousand years of history. There were echoes

there of earlier phrases, some happier than others. In 1948, Winston

Churchill had famously told the British to brace ourselves to our duties, and

so bear ourselves that if the British Empire and its commonwealths last

for a thousand years, men will still say this was the finest hour.

But then he was facing an antagonist who had spoken of the thousand thousand-year. Right?

And yet there was nothing more striking about those particular thousand years of

history. For a long time now, since well before the referendum

in June 2016, in which a majority of the British people voted to leave what is now the European

Union and much more since then, those who call themselves

euro skeptics, but who might more accurately pooled Europhobes,

mostly right wing conservatives, passionately in favor of what

we’ve come to called Brexit or British departure from the European Union, have again

and again invoked history or their versions of it. But

the speaker in 1962 wasn’t a Tory at all. He was Hugh Gaitskell,

the leader of the opposition, a moderate social Democrat leading the Labor Party

who would have ducked dislike to consider himself an internationalist and have repudiated

any charge of jingoism or nativism. History is

a very potent drug. Above all, national history.

The nineteenth century French writer outstripped all said that to be a nationalist required

two things. Hatred of your neighbors, an ignorance of your own history.

The second of which may ostensibly be less nasty, but may also

be even more dangerous. Certainly much of modern history is explained

by another phrase Jovana deleted the Italian. One hundred years

ago said that Kentucky countries were nourished and sustained by

beautiful national legends. The context itself was interesting.

Jollity was explaining why he didn’t want the Italian archives open to prying scholars

whose investigations might tend to undermine those beautiful legends. And

to be sure, the official version of the so-called ressource Demento was legendary enough.

So much of earlier history has been variously understood and misunderstood,

written and rewritten, appropriated and misappropriated,

used and abused. One could say that very nearly every nationalist movement

and Brexit is very much an English nationalist movement has partaken of rewritten

history. Intellectual dishonesty in some degree and

invented tradition all across 19th century Europe enthusiasts.

It reconstructed what had been dialects as national languages

rediscovered or sometimes simply made up ancient national epics

and antique documents on which could be based. Historic claims for independence or

own frontiers, irredentist or whatever. Even

those earliest Slovakian or Slovak enthusiasts, however, might

have been impressed by the appetite for dubious history mongering among our

Brexiteers members of the coyly named European

Research Group, of whom Jacob Rees-Mogg is only the most egregious,

have tried to ring out our US and make our flesh creep by variously, variously

citing the corn laws, King Henry the 8th and King John.

Some of these spoonfuls of potted history are quaint or contradictory or plain

wrong, but they’re all invoked for one purpose, and there’s one

date more intoxicating than any other

in the British Isles. To use a phrase which itself is now frowned on in some quarters,

our Celtic fringes have long been very prolific in this regard,

eagerly using the past for the purposes of the present, albeit very often

an imagined riposte. The classic case is the invented tradition of the Highlands,

about which first Lord McCallie, and then you, Trevor Roper, wrote Mr.

musingly. This was a confection. In any case. But it became

far more absurd when it was turned into the book for portrait culture,

not only of the Highlands and islands, but of the whole country, so that everyone

from five to Galloway was supposed to wear a kilt and play the bagpipes.

In 1821, King George. The fourth was the first Hanoverian monarch to visit

Scotland, where he held court at Holyrood and donned a kilt

worn over pink tights. Or, as Macaulay put it. The king

thought that he could not give a more striking proof of his respect for the usages

which had prevailed in Scotland before the Union of Seventeen Hundred and Seven.

Then, by disguising himself in what before the union was considered by nine

Scotchman out of ten as the dress of a thief.

That hasn’t stopped him. The modern Scottish nationalists come from conjuring up yet

more inventions from the new office of MUCKER, vaguely

like Poet Laureate. What I’ve tried to establish the etymology on, I believe

it’s not Gulick, but Scots Langlands

up to that dreadful dirge Flower of Scotland,

which celebrates the Battle of Bannockburn in thirteen fourteen, and was written about thirty

years ago by a Scottish folk singer. It’s become a kind of national anthem sung

by rugby fans, including one particularly foolish line where

Robert Bruces men fought for your wee bit Hill Helidon Glen.

Although most Scots live and have always lived in the lowlands far from hills and

glens, one might argue, as Trevor Roper did on one occasion

for all his derision, that this misunderstanding of their history and oblivion

of their real old intestine differences was less harmful

to the Scots than a much more accurate awareness of ancient conflicts

has been to the peoples of Ireland. All of modern. Irish nationalism,

notably the strain called Republicanism, has tried to wish those conflicts

away. I mean, the conflicts between what used to be called Saxon and Gayl

in particular, while at the same time exploiting them.

The late 18th century Irish rebel

Wolf Tone said the Protestant Catholic dissenter

should discard those identities for the common name of Irishmen, words which

are intoned quite often but by those who have spent much of their time and

energetically killing Protestants. I mean the Irish Republican Army.

For most of the last century, the Irish. I bet make about the Dublin government

made an irredentist claim on Northern Ireland. While for most of those years it was

governed by the party called the Soldiers of Destiny, or fionna, for

the Irish national anthem is the sanguinary of song mydd cannons,

roar and rifles. Will Charge A Soldier’s Soul, which begins

in Irish Gaelic Chinna Fianna Fail. And this is, I think, the

only country anywhere where the ruling party’s name was sung. In the first line of the national anthem,

Unifor and its rival Fine Gael, or the band of Gael’s who are in

government at present in Dublin, like Doyle for the Parliament and Teashop for the Prime

Minister, are all fine pieces of invented tradition conjured up

from the Mists and Middle Ages. It would be unkind to say that Ireland is

again the only country where leaders and parties are given names in a dead language.

But teh shock might certainly seem an unfortunate name today. It was chosen

or invented in the 1930s and doesn’t actually mean Prime Minister. It means leader

like dooce or fuera, a fashionable type of name on the line. At the time,

this was part of a larger invention seen in the name of Republicanism

and its claim to the whole island of Ireland. This republicanism

has been continued, inspired by dreams and only partly imaginary past

from the incursion of Strongbow and the Anglo Norman Knights in the 20th century, to

pointing more to the curse of Cromwell and the Battle of the Boyne and the famine.

The implication is that some distant policy, some distant polity

lost to English oppression would be restored. Although no Irish Republican

indeed no Irish state ever existed before the twentieth century. My late

friend Fred Halliday, a great scholar of Iran and the Arab world

and an Irishman himself, once suggested that if his compatriots

really wanted a great national hero to venerate, they should choose him.

Who first created a united Ireland King Henry the eighth.

On the other hand, Orangemen had their own invigorating dreams of the past as they sang about

the old cause that gave us our freedoms, religion and laws and

our fathers sash one of Derry under him and his skillern on the Boyne.

One hears less of that nowadays, and in any case, Irish

Ulster Protestants don’t seem very popular in the United States nowadays, although here’s

another piece of historical amnesia. The figures sometimes cited of 20 million

Irish Americans, or sometimes even more than that. But most of them are actually

what old fashioned Americans call Scotch-Irish descent did not from the

green famine Irish who emigrated from the 1840s onwards, but from Ulster Presbyterians

who’d emigrated to a century earlier. One might add that for all the tragic martyrdom

of Catholic Ireland in the century that followed William of Orange, his victory at the Battle

of the Boyne in 60 90 without King billion’s victory, the United

States of America could not possibly exist. And there’s something else

writing about nationalism and national history. And who can and can’t write it?

The late E.J. Hobsbawm said that while a proud attachment, either the Irish

Catholic or Ulster Protestant tradition might be compatible

with the serious study of Irish history, to be a Fenian or Orangemen

would not be so compatible, in my view, any more than being a Zionist is

compatible with writing serious, serious history of the Jews. The

line about Zionist might be debatable. There aren’t many Orangemen writing history

nowadays anyway. But there are plenty of books written by self-proclaimed

Fenians or Republicans. And those books are, without exception, worthless.

All of that might seem a little harsh coming from an Englishman and it might seem a

digression. But then my theme is My own country, which needs

no lessons in national mythmaking. In the forefront

of late have been those Brexiteers.

This not of fewer than 100 euro phobic Tory MP

is in the House of Commons who have dictated the political narrative

for some time past eight years ago, they bullied David Cameron. Then

newly installed as prime minister in coalition with a strongly pro-European

Liberal Democrats into promising such a referendum if the Tories win

an outright parliamentary majority at the next election. There have

been very few referendums in the United Kingdom. The first was in 1975.

Despite his earlier reluctance, Harold Wilson called a referendum then

on whether we should remain as members of the EEC, which we joined two years

earlier. Under Edward Heath, Tory government, this was a tactical maneuver on Wilson’s

part to get around divisions within his own Labor Party and indeed

at the time of the referendum as two years ago. Both of the larger

parties were divided from within over the question of Europe. On that occasion,

in 1975, the vote to remain in the EEC

was won easily by the Romayne. Upon the vote

remain was won easily 30 years later in the summer of 2004.

Tony Blair astonished and horrified his close allies Europhiles

by promising after the blue that a referendum would be held on whether to invoke endorse

the newly promulgated European constitution. This was the result of a private

deal between Blair and Rupert Murdoch, who promised in return

the support of his tabloid newspaper The Sun in the British general election, which was

due to follow the next year, the next spring. In the event

that general election coincided with referendums in which the Dutch

and more importantly, the French rejected the new European constitution

a month after the general election in which Blair was returned to office of professional

gain, a parliamentary majority was only 35 percent of the popular vote. Mr

Blair told the House of Commons that following the French and Dutch votes,

there is no point in having a referendum because of the uncertainty it would produce.

At that point, Angela Browning, a Tory backbencher, reminded the prime minister of what

he had told the Sun three weeks earlier. Even if the French voted no, we would have a referendum.

That is a government promise. When Cameron gave his own promise,

he half hoped that he wouldn’t have to honor it. But he lacked Wilson’s guile

or Blair’s shamelessness, and he found himself trapped in

search of the referendum. The victory of leave and Cameron’s abrupt departure.

How do you know a little more history himself? He might have refused to hold a referendum at all in the first

place. By way of citing the two outstanding prime ministers

since the war. Outstanding, at any rate, in the two prime ministers whose governments

changed the country and changed the political landscape in 1945.

Winston Churchill, who is still prime minister in the wartime coalition government,

wanted to hold a referendum, which would have been the first ever in Great Britain on extending

the life of the parliament. But Clement Atlee, who was the leader

of the Labor Party and was at the time his deputy prime minister in that coalition,

and who was short but to wrote Churchill and the Tories and the great Labor landslide,

replied, I could not consent. I could not possibly consent to

the introduction into our national life of advice so alien to all our traditions.

As the referendum, which was only too often been used as the instrument of Naziism

and fascism, and 30 years later, Margaret Thatcher, who

was then the newly elected conservative leader of the opposition, said that

the late Lord Atley was right when he said the referendums were the device of dictators

and demagogs. This is these are two cases of

a useful citation of history. We

dont have fascism in England as yet or a dictator, but we have plenty of demagogs.

And the referendum was an exercise in necked naked demagogy.

This is something that the Brexiteers, not surprisingly, are reluctant to admit.

But then there are the problems that seem to elude them for all their delight in parading

what they think of as their historical knowledge. A number of prominent figures

in their ranks are Roman Catholics by upbringing or by conversion.

The former conservative leader Iain Duncan Smith, the MP is William Cash

and Rees-Mogg were born Catholics and Charles Moore, sometime

editor of The Spectator and Daily Telegraph. For both of which he still writes columns

left the Church of England for the Roman Catholic Church in protest of the ordination of women.

A Brexit apart that all Thatcherites or what Cane’s would have called

less a fair is that is they favor the untrammeled free enterprise

and free market principles of the Manchester School of Economics, which means

that their grasp of moral and pastoral theology is as shaky as that of history.

They seem not to be aware even that this Manchester

school market economic liberal is one of the very few such doctrines

to have been specifically and repeatedly condemned by the Vatican,

at least since 1891. And Pete Pope Leo the Trent the 13ths

great encyclical rorem Novarro. But that’s only a small part

of their curious and curiously weakish and Protestant reading of history.

One word which has become beguiling, important to the Brexiteers

is vassel or Vassilieva, which had otherwise disappeared from

common currency. Although as it’s been revived, it does speak to a certain sentimental

yearning that you’re earning and sometimes harmless enough.

Every summer, the BBC Promenade concerts at the Albert Hall gives one of the greatest

music festivals in Europe. You can buy a season ticket for

the problems if you’re strong enough to stand through every concert, which I might have been once, but I’m no

longer myself for the entire season for the same price

or rather less than the same price as a single store’s ticket for the opera festival

at Saltzberg. It culminates in September

with the last night of the problems of Frolick some event

when the audience joined in singing patriotic songs with a cheerful lack of irony.

They still sing Land of Hope and Glory, with the land lines

wider yet and further shall light bones be set. Generations after

those bones stopped being set further and contracted to where

they began. And then comes that 18th century tub thumper

Rule Britannia. Britannia rules the waves. Britons never, never, never shall

be slaves whose words by James Thompson didn’t

show much irony even at the time when, however, they might have been.

Britain certainly owned and traded plenty of slaves for

the Brexiteers. Britons never, never, never shall be vassals.

Once again, Jacob Rees-Mogg was to the fore from a more recent

date. He has decried the way Sir Robert Peel repealed the corn laws

in 1846. He deplores that is the way that Piel enlisted

the support of opposition m.p.’s in the House of Commons. Despite the defection

of a large number of his own Tories, that was indeed the case. And it was one of

the three such episodes in the 19th century, which may have been what Bismarck had

in mind with his rule of English politics. The progressive governments take

office to pass reactionary measures, while reactionary governments take office to

pass progressive measures.

The third case. After that second one was the Second Reform Act

in 1867, which expanded the franchise, but the first

was the passage of Catholic emancipation in 1829 by the Duke of Wellington’s Mission

Ministry. If Mr. Rees-Mogg deplores the repeal of the corn laws,

then he ought logically to oppose free trade and support

the protectionist corn laws. And by implication, he ought also

to sympathize with the high Tory Ultra’s of that time who fought to the end against

Killock Catholic emancipation. And you ought to regret that he and his coreligionists

are able to practice their faith at all. Not that logic seems to have much to do with it.

In this Brexit debate.

But that’s only the most recent example. Mr. Rees-Mogg takes us back

much further to the turn of the 13th century, and he anathema

tice’s the government white paper on terms for departing the European Union

by calling it the greatest vassal edge since King John paid homage to

Philip the second lulay in twelve hundred.

They talk of little else in the pub pubs of Sunday London to an athlete which voted

strongly for leave. Once again, he seems a little

selective in his use of history. King John Lost Norman touches the French. It’s true.

But he also stood up for a time to the papacy, which is to say to innocent. The third,

the most imperious of medieval popes. A Jew and Muslim hating crusader.

But really listening to Rees-Mogg at that point reminds some of us a certain age of Tony

Hancock, the English comedian, with his patriotic peroration.

And what of Magna Carta? Did she die in vain?

Then we come forward a century to find yet another Brexit. Yo! Whispering The last

enchantments of the Middle Ages. Boris Johnson is the journalist turned politician

who served briefly as foreign secretary and is at present an apparent serious contender

to succeed Theresa May. It’s true that there are those like the

journalist and historian Sir Max Hastings, once strong science editor of The Daily Telegraph,

who dismisses his erstwhile colleague as a sex or adventurer, a charlatan.

Although, come to think of it, a glance at the White House suggests that there’s may not be absolute disqualifications

for high office in these strange times. Johnson made another

pick out of the historical lucky dip to suggest that the authors of the Checkers

proposal risk prosecution under the 14th century statute of Prima NERA,

which says that no foreign court or government shall have jurisdiction in this country.

Never mind that the statute of Private Neira was repealed long ago.

Then the Brexiteers romantics

move on to the 16th century when Charles Moore denounced the Archbishop of

Canterbury for saying something or other insufficiently patriotic.

He added that the Archbishop we’re looking at Brexit to remember the act in restraint

of appeals. After all, if it had not been passed, his church would not exist

and he would not be living in Lambeth Palace and making speeches in the House of Lords.

That act was part of the process by which England broke with Rome. It was inspired, of course, by Henry Yates,

the desire to be rid of his wife, Anne Boleyn,

and by which in the end England became a fiercely processand country.

So if he follows his own argument, Moore should presumably reluctantly lament

the fact the Jesuits and Roman Catholic country gentlemen are no longer disemboweled. Tyburn

in 1859. I beg of on the first of the Brexiteers,

I should say, to have cited the act in restraint of appeals. Forgive my dizziness

as I continue with these most implausible recitations

was Sir John Redwood. He has been a Tory MP for more than 30 years

and had a brief ministerial career which included a spell of Secretary of State of Way for

Wales when he tried not at all successfully to sing parrot fashion.

My hen Lord Vaughn had-I the rousing Welsh anthem Land of My Fathers, also sung

by rugby fans and incidentally, much the best of the rugby anthems

compared with the Scottish and Irish ones, possibly

compared with God Save the Queen. Later, Redwood was part of a plot by Europhobes

to overthrow John Major in nineteen ninety five. Now he is a man

of some academic standing. An Oxford history graduate p_h_d_.

Or the D Phil, as we say at the old place. A Fellow of All Souls and the author of

Reason Ridicule Under the Age of Enlightenment in England Sixteen Sixty

to 1750. But he knows some history. He doesn’t let us forget it.

He was the first of the Brexiteers to fight to cite the fifty and thirty three act and restraint

of appeals, which claims by diverse sundry old authentic histories and

chronicles. It has manifestly declared and expressed that this realm of England is

an empire, and so has been accepted in the world. A statement which was at

the time entirely untrue. If anything, at that time,

England was regarded by the rest of Europe as a satellite of the Empire,

and Scotland was a rather less important satellite of France. The curious

thing is that it does belong to a

tradition. I sense of history, but of history mongering. It is one which

began to flourish in the 16th and 17th and 18th centuries and evolved into what

Herbert Butterfield would later and famously denounce as the Whig interpretation of history.

It invoked an ancient constitution dating from Anglo-Saxon times

before the court and the Mormon conquest and the Mormon yoke, under which monarchy had

supposedly been contractual and reform guided by common law and parliament,

which held the kings who brought the contract, had been rightly brought down from

their seats. It was the second in 13 27, Richard, the second in thirteen ninety

nine. Charles the first. And still more dramatic fashion sixty and forty nine. And James

the second in sixteen 88. The great Elizabethan jurists, Edward

Cook went even further back when you managed to trace this constitution beyond the

Anglo-Saxons to the ancient Britons.

I can. Restraint of appeals was toughened up in

fifty and fifty nine by the act of supremacy, which has yet again been

cited by the Brexiteers. It was law which held that no foreign prince,

person, prelate, state or potentate, or ought to have any jurisdiction,

power, superiority of preeminence or authority, ecclesiastical

or spiritual within this realm. This was the first year of Queen Elizabeth’s rain

rain, which has been woven into the very tapestry of English

beautiful national legend. It may

have been a misfortune. I sometimes think that the greatest of English writers lived in that

rain. Michael Billington of The Guardian, who’s the outstanding theater critic

of our time, in my view, has plausibly suggested that it’s the history of plays

rather than the tragedies which we should regard as the pinnacle of Shakespeare’s genius.

And yet those great players are what Hollywood calls flag wavers or frankly,

agitprop on behalf of the Tudor dynasty. And they give a grisly, tendentious version

of 14th and 15th century history. Other later and lesser

writers would extoll the sea dogs of good queen best as rain

in Victorian days. Tennyson wrote The Revenge with its tale of Sir Richard Gribble

and his heroism. Sink mother ship master gonna sink her splitter in twain.

Fall into the hands of God, not into the hands of Spain.

It has occurred to me that Theresa May might sometimes have thought, while going into meetings

with the European leaders of the next line, and they praised him to his face with their courtly

foreign grace. Not that she’s been getting much praise herself recently.

Then Sir Henry Newbold beat Drake’s drum tricks in his hammock a thousand

miles away. But as the Dons site Devon, he’ll quit the Port of heaven and drum

up the channels. We run them long ago. Of course, none of those could touch

the heights of Shakespeare and Henry. The fifth cry God for Harry England and St

George, a patriotic legend has been often conjured up before

now and before these recent events and in better causes.

It was not by accident that Laurence Olivier’s movie of Henry the Fifth

was made in 1944, just as another English army was fighting in Normandy.

And on the 6th of June that year, there were English infantry subalterns who steeled themselves

as their landing craft approached Juno Beach with the thought and gentlemen

in England. Now, Abed, she’ll think themselves, of course. They were not here.

It seems almost churlish at this point to observe that Drake and those other Elizabethan sea dogs

were in fact pirates, and that King Henry was a war criminal whose slaughter

of the French prisoners at Agincourt horrified Christian Europe at the time.

Nevertheless, so potent memories of Shakespeare’s age. When our present queen acceded

to the throne in 1952, there was much excited chatter in the press

about a new Elizabethan age. And as that great historian

Sir Michael Howard said, this was truer than those who used the phrase at the time

knew for once again we were, as we had been then, a part

of the second rank, teetering on the edge of bankruptcy and puncturing far beyond

our weight in international affairs. But one date above

all others overshadows I beg your pardon. One date overshadows

any other in the great romance of Brexit.

His life stopped in 1914, says Hester, the heroine

of Terence ratigan’s play Flight Path, talking about her faithless, sudden

lover, a former fighter pilot. He loved making 40.

You know, there were some like that. Well, yes.

Winston Churchill was certainly like that. And so his implausible epic own’s of UKIP

in the IRG. But then it sometimes seems that we

English all love 1940. It’s become our most

powerful, beautiful national legend. And too often one

feels that our life as a nation stopped in 1940, as Esther puts it,

and that we’ve never come to terms with that heroic moment.

If a study in beautiful national legends rewritten history and invented tradition

when needed, it would be the way that different countries have dealt with the legacy of the World

War, which ended in 1945. The English

are by no means unique in their capacity for inventing

tradition or rewritten history. The most remarkable, perhaps, was Charles

de Gaulle’s legend that the French people, apart from a handful of cowards and traitors,

have been united in their determination to resist the German conqueror and the German occupation.

The more somber truth is that for most of the war, most French people may have been subjective

resisters in wishing to be rid of the drones. But most were objective collaborators

in the sense of accepting the occupation. Plenty of Frenchmen and women actively

collaborated with drome and with the Germans in their most terrible crimes a truth that took

the French Republic not years, but generations to acknowledge. Military historians

have pointed out the striking fact that between 1939 and 1945, more French

soldiers fought on the side of the axis and the allies. In the course

of creating a new democratic German federal republic, it wasn’t so

much convenient as essential to exaggerate the importance of the so-called German

resistance and to overlook the fact which has been more recently dissected

by much Drummond’s scholarship that very many of those who served that Federal Republic

had formerly served the Third Reich. Some of them in senior positions and with shameful

records. The Russians had no need to create a myth of military valor, since

it was a matter of historical fact. The development was defeated by the Red Army,

but Stalin added his own legend when he insisted that after this war,

no one dared any more to deny the vitality of the Soviet state system. And

thus that victory had validated his Five-Year Plans. Slave labor

and or much less recognized, I suggest, has been the American version.

The slow, subtle process of turning that war into the good war.

If you visit the remarkable National Museum of World War 2 in New Orleans, for

example, with its extraordinary collection of aircraft tanks and landing craft,

you might easily leave under the impression that the war had been simply a contest between the United States

and the Third Reich. And this connects, I think, with the extravagant American

cult of Winston Churchill. No, well-nigh seen as the man who

inspired the American people to resist Hitler and then led him to victory against him.

What’s been obscured by this is the fact that for most of the American people, for most of the

years, from Pearl Harbor to Tokyo Bay, the war meant the war in the Pacific.

And as Dwight Macdonald said at the time, not the least ironical aspect of this most ironical

of wars was the fact that the war in the Pacific has always been more popular

with all prices of Americans than the war in Europe,

since it was, as he said, impossible to portray that conflict with Japan as a good war

rather than a straightforward imperial contest for mastery. A steady,

subtle revision was necessary over many years

to turn the war in. One might say in movie terms,

from the sounds of it, were Jima to Saving Private Ryan.

And yet, no other country, I think I can say, without

any patriotic pride of my own, has matched our beautiful national legend

in England. Iconic has become an eye and annoying

vogue word as the great hsw founder of modern English usage would have called it.

But sometimes it’s apt enough, and an iconography of Sir Winston Churchill

could be compiled by now. It’s hard to keep count of the times

that Churchill’s visage has appeared on the front page of The Sun and The Daily Mail.

Our two most popular tabloids urging Brexit in one way or another.

One word is the yes, indeed iconic photograph

of Churchill taken by Karsh of Ottawa in 1941,

angrily defiant. Another is the statue by Ivan Robert

Jones, which broods over Parliament Square.

I dont you know, it was a downtime session. I dont haven’t prepared myself

for a TED talk. So if you haven’t seen it, it is a huge statue of Churchill

leaning forward, wearing a great kid with his shoulders hunched, looking towards the

Palace of Westminster. I passed.

Not long ago. A very superior art dealer in

St James’s when I was leaving the London Library and noticed

beyond the plate glass at the back where there were three Renoir’s, I think. But in the front was

Churchill, and it was a bronze replica of the market

from which the statue in Parliament Square was made. It’s about that high.

These bronze replicas have been cast in bronze. Five

hundred of them. They are on sale for one hundred and seventy five thousand pounds each,

or just under two hundred thousand dollars. And I worked out of that, came to about eighty million

dollars, if they’re also. Which they may very well be. Not not only is the Churchill

cult a remarkable phenomenon. The Churchill business is what we call a nice little earner.

Only the other day there was a photograph in the newspaper of a man sitting in front

of that statue in Parliament Square draped in the Union Jack across, which

were the words leave means leave. That

phrase, by the way, was coined by Theresa May. After the time

she became prime minister, I was

delighted. The following summer, therefore the summer of 2017, when

dining at my old Oxford College New College to run into Robin Lane

Fox, the eminent ancient historian. And you told me something that cheered me up

in the previous term was modern paper models as the fifth term

examined classical moderations Latin and Greek, which precedes the

subsequent exam called grades, and it contains a logic paper and that

one of the questions in the logic paper had been, quote, Leave means leave.

I beg your pardon. It didn’t wasn’t. Quote the other phrase, Brexit

means Brexit, the exam paper question was, quote, Brexit

means Brexit. Analyze this statement and discuss what meaning it has, if any.

I felt a little flicker of pride in my old university.

Much of the blame lies with Churchill himself. He said that summer

of 1940 that we are fighting by ourselves alone, but not for ourselves

alone. And later he spoke about the time when we were alone.

Not a few people have been reminded lately of David loh’s famous cartoon published

immediately after Dunkirk, a Tommy on the cliffs of Dover, a rifle

to his side, punching the with the defiant words very well

alone. It was a coincidence, happier for

some than others, that the movies Dunkirk and Darkest Hour,

both set in 1914, came out a year after the referendum. And in

the same year 2017, there was another film called Churchill set in 1944,

which came and went, as I think I’ve forgotten.

Both of those movies are pretty good travesties of history. Darkest hour, preposterously

so. And they’ve had an effect far from what their makers intended,

with Charles Moore yet again claiming darkest hour as a splendid Brexit film.

It’s no pedantic quibble to point out that we weren’t alone even in 1948.

We had the countries of the Commonwealth

fighting with us voluntarily. We had many hundreds of thousands

of soldiers in the Indian army, all volunteers.

We had the. Exile’s governments and fighting forces

of the European countries, which have been conquered by Germany and from the Polish and

Czech fighter pilots who helped win the Battle of Britain to the Dutch and Norwegian sailors

who helped win the Battle of the Atlantic. And in any

case, the most pernicious myth of all.

Which I think really has grown during my lifetime was that we

won the war. Face it, General, said

the writer on trying to Santic stupidity, defeating the goals own self-promoter, self-promoting

national legend. France was defeated and our allies won.

Something of the same might have been said to Churchill if anyone had been brave enough to say so.

Instead, there was an intense mixture of pride and relief when victory came,

followed by a very slow realization that the fruits of victory for the British

were by no means all sweet. As for a financial

crisis was followed by imperial retreat and then by comparison

to comparative economic decline. And finally today,

a national paralysis. After 1918, the Italian

nationalist Gabrielli Dumitru coined the phrase Vittoria Mutu laughter.

Italy had won the war, he said, entirely wrongly, but lost the peace.

And behind because it had not acquired the territorial gains which

had been most corruptly promised secretly by the other allies during the war

behind the rage of the Brexiteers lies a sense that we too had

suffered a mutilated victory. Now, cutting ourselves

off from Europe, as we did at Dunkirk in a rather different way means that we can somehow redeem

that humiliation.

The Third Reich did not last 2000 years, nor did Churchill’s

British Empire last a thousand years. Whether there is any real

purpose in voting as you Gaitskell did, a thousand years of history seems

at present very doubtful. One of the true heroes of 1948

was the Henry Tizard, a physicist, president of Modern College Oxford

and not least a great patriotic Englishman who maybe said without exaggeration,

to have helped save his country. He was a go between. That is, between

the scientists of academe and the officials of Whitehall. And without his work

in ensuring the radar was installed round the coastline, the battle of Britain

might have been lost in 1940. Nine years later, he wrote a minute

which the Brexiteers, with all their dreams of past glory from this

realm of England, is an empire, too. Very well alone, mightve

he did. We persist in regarding ourselves as a great

part. As I wrote in 1949, capable of everything and only temporarily

handicapped by economic difficulties, which is precisely what the Brexiteers say

today. We are not a great power. He went on,

and never will be again. We are a great nation, but if we continue

to behave like a great power, we shall soon cease to be a great nation.

That could be an epigraph or epitaph for my country’s story during

my lifetime, culminating in our latest national nervous breakdown

at times of crisis. Myths have their historical importance. Churchill said

in 1940. And to be sure, he was right then.

But at other times of crisis. Myths can be dangerous or even disastrous.

Thank you.