Buswells Hotel on Molesworth Street in Dublin has a fascinating history. In 1861 it was the Queen’s Institute for the Training and Employment of Educated Women, an attempt by a Quaker activist to help women into the workforce. Nowadays it’s a haunt of journalists and politicians, two minutes’ walk from Leinster House, home of the Irish parliament. When I was in my early twenties and lived in Belfast I often reported on events in Dublin, and on one visit a friend, an editor at the Irish Times, suggested we have a pint together in Buswells, followed by dinner. As the pints were poured, half a dozen members of the Irish government strode in and invited us to join their company in a memorable evening of Guinness, whiskey (no dinner) and excellent conversation. It turned into a profound lesson for me about how history is understood, or misunderstood. We discussed everything from nurses’ pay to the violence of the Troubles in Northern Ireland. We agreed nurses needed more money. Then we discussed the damaging inability of the British (they meant the English) and the Irish to understand each other. We had a shared history, but no sign of a shared understanding of what that history might mean at the end of the twentieth century.
One of the politicians mentioned Ireland’s Great Famine of the 1840s. Unwisely – I blame the Guinness – I offered some… context. These were “the Hungry Forties” all across Europe, I said. Oliver Twist was written in 1838 and in the 1840s London was, as Dickens showed, a terrible place to be poor. Silence followed. One of the Irish government ministers, Brian Lenihan – a lovely man, by the way – “had a word” with me and politely but very firmly put me straight. He listed in detail the appalling and exceptional cruelty visited upon Ireland, the failures of British leadership and the avoidable suffering which led – estimates say – to at least a million deaths. Another million or more Irish people emigrated, mostly to the United States and Britain. Ireland’s population before the Famine was eight million. Even today it has only recovered to just over five million. Lenihan said the British were disinclined to learn the awkward bits of our shared history (Cromwell? The Siege of Drogheda?). Historical illiteracy, he suggested, was not confined to the English but it made solving Northern Ireland’s violence in “the Troubles” difficult.
This conversation was an eye-opener. I’ve never ceased to be grateful for Brian Lenihan’s passionate chastisement of my – our – historical blind spots. Every nation has them. But in the United Kingdom the blindness persists to the extent that it damages our ability to solve problems. Instead, it creates them. In Brexit we weaponised nostalgia, insisting that in some miraculous fashion we needed to “take our country back” rather than forward. The Brexiter Jacob Rees-Mogg was described in the German magazine Die Zeit as “das lebendes Fossil”, the living fossil who spawned the idiotic idea of “restoring” imperial measures. No other country has the antique British imperial system. The United States still has gallons, but a US gallon is 3.785 litres. A British imperial gallon is 4.546 litres. The UK began abandoning imperial measurements in 1965. Rees-Mogg wasn’t born until 1969.
In April 2024 the British Conservative party ran its own weaponised nostalgia, a pre-election warm-up advertisement claiming the UK was the second-most powerful country in the world. “Don’t let the doomsters and naysayers trick you into talking down our country,” the Tories said. There was a montage of modern British triumphs featuring prime minister Rishi Sunak, the England football team, the King, two fighter jets, a cargo ship, an Aston Martin and the assertion that “Britain is the second most powerful country in the world”. Whatever affection some parts of Britain have for the English football team, that affection doesn’t often extend to Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. If you remember England winning the World Cup you are over 60 years old. Aston Martin today is owned by a Canadian. The F35 fighter in the Sunak ad is American. The Eurofighter Typhoon aircraft was developed by a European consortium while the UK was in the EU.
Even such recent history is consigned to the memory hole, and the assertion that the UK is the world’s second-most powerful country is at best meaningless and at worst a delusion. Yet such “great power” delusions persist at home even if they are laughed at abroad. A senior US State Department official put it neatly when he explained to me more than 20 years ago that before the visit of a US president to Britain, American diplomats always insert the phrase “special relationship” into presidential speeches. Why? Because, he said, it “tickles the belly of the Brits”. He explained that the United States has “a special relationship” with Canada, Mexico, Japan, Israel, South Korea, Ireland and numerous other countries round the world. Yet the British historical exceptionalist delusions persist.
The dangers were spotted decades ago. Back in 1947 Prime Minister Clement Attlee’s adviser Sir Henry Tizard warned of a historical delusions affecting then current British policy. Tizard told Attlee that in Britain “we persist in regarding ourselves as a great power, capable of everything and only temporarily handicapped by economic difficulties. We are not a great power 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.” Tizard was correct. And yet the delusions persist.
While there is comedy value in pointing out the nostalgic stupidity of the 2024 Conservative political advertisement, perhaps we should see it alongside the more deliberate comedy of a low-budget 1959 Peter Sellers film The Mouse That Roared. It’s based on a book in which a fictitious impoverished small country – I wonder where they mean? –announces it is going to invade the United States. The plan is to surrender immediately on the principle that no country that has ever fought the USA will ever go hungry. Satire? Yes. Pointed historical assessment? Possibly. Tizard, Peter Sellers and various modern historians of the British empire, along with the evidence of our own eyes suggest the “world-beating”, “world-leading”, nostalgic rhetorical fiction of Britain’s “superpower status” is nonsense. It survives and thrives only because for some – including Boris Johnson – it works. Writing in The Spectator in 2002 Johnson argued that despite the slave trade Britain was not to blame for the sins of the British empire, especially in Africa: “The continent may be a blot, but it is not a blot upon our conscience. The problem is not that we were once in charge, but that we are not in charge any more… Consider Uganda, pearl of Africa, as an example of the British record. Are we guilty of slavery? Pshaw. It was one of the first duties of Frederick Lugard, who colonised Buganda in the 1890s, to take on and defeat the Arab slavers.”
Well, better late than never, you might say, although for Lugard and others the Maxim gun was a useful tool in the colonial enterprise. As foreign secretary in October 2016 Boris Johnson at the Conservative party conference even described Africa as “that country”, perhaps because on his maps it was always coloured pink. (FACT: Africa is composed of more than 50 separate countries.) Yet the imperial delusion continues. In November 2019 the Daily Telegraph was forced to correct a column by then prime minister Johnson suggesting falsely that the UK is set to “become the largest and most prosperous economy in this hemisphere”, bigger than Germany. No such data existed. In May 2020 Mr Johnson told parliament, “We have growing confidence that we will have a test, track and trace operation that will be world-beating.” Beyond the post-imperial delusions, the UK’s performance was summed up less gloriously by a British Medical Association report in 2023: “The UK failed to act quickly in response to the emergence of Covid-19. There was no clear policy approach at the start of the pandemic, with initial contact tracing abandoned in mid-March and a significant delay before population-wide distancing strategies were introduced. Delays continued throughout 2020.”
What then should we do to cherish our history but debunk the exceptionalist myths?
What then should we do to cherish our history but debunk the exceptionalist myths? First, follow Tizard’s advice. Secondly, confront the darker moments of our colonial past raised by distinguished historians and writers including David Olusoga, Sathnam Sanghera and Kavita Puri. And most importantly, think. That is, correct our highly damaging misremembering of British history. We could even – and this is a shock – reconsider the idea that Britain has not been successfully invaded since 1066. (We will get to that in a moment.) First let’s explore how misunderstood British history blights our future. Our valued assistant here is the chief architect of Brexit, David (now Lord) Frost.
In February 2020 David Frost outlined what he clearly saw as his intellectual case for Brexit in a public speech at Belgium’s ULB (Université Libre de Bruxelles). He claimed the system of governance of the UK could not fit with less fortunate European Union countries because their systems came as a result of wars and revolutions. The British system “just evolved”. (FACT: It didn’t). Lord Frost’s Wikipedia entry explains he took first-class honours in French and history at St John’s College Oxford and lists a string of achievements: “David George Hamilton Frost, Baron Frost CMG PC is a former British diplomat, civil servant and politician who served as a Minister of State at the Cabinet Office between March and December 2021. Frost was chief negotiator of Task Force Europe from January 2020 until his resignation in December 2021.” Frost had also been UK ambassador to Denmark. In the Brussels speech Frost quoted Edmund Burke, and Burke is safe territory for English Conservatives, (although Burke, like the Duke of Wellington, was actually born in Ireland). The key Burke passage was a famous quotation from Reflections on the French Revolution: “The state ought not to be considered as nothing better than a partnership agreement in a trade of pepper and coffee, calico or tobacco, or some other such low concern. It is to be looked on with reverence… It is a partnership in all science; a partnership in all art; a partnership in every virtue, and in all perfection.” “Partnership in every virtue” sounds very odd in respect of Brexit. It can’t be much of a “partnership” when English Leave voters overrule the democratic wish of people in Scotland and Northern Ireland to Remain. Moreover, Brexit undermined two previous historic referendums, the Good Friday Agreement referendum of 1998 and the Scottish independence referendum vote of 2014. These referendums were both predicated on the assumption that the UK would remain within the EU. So would the Irish Republic, so the “border issue” would disappear. Scots were told the only way they could stay in the EU was to stay in the UK. A historic Burkean partnership in every virtue wasn’t what was on offer. And then, after the safe Conservative cliché of Reflections, Frost’s speech went completely off the rails when he claimed the UK doesn’t work as European states do. The key – Frost asserted – is that the UK miraculously just “evolved” whereas the EU was created through wars, revolutions and bloodshed: “So in a country like Britain where institutions just evolved and where governance is pretty deep-rooted in historical precedent, it was always going to feel a bit unnatural to a lot of people to be governed by an organisation [the EU] whose institutions seemed created by design more than by evolution, and which vested authority outside the country elsewhere.”
Frost touches on the most potent and damaging British historical delusions here, citing them as the guiding principles behind Brexit. First, our country is not Britain, nor Great Britain. It is the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Secondly, beyond pedantry, Britain had a number of “revolutions” even if we sometimes dislike using the word in our troubled history. What else but a revolution was the seventeenth-century Cromwellian coup that overturned “historical precedent” by overthrowing King Charles I and beheading him in 1649 – more than a century before the French caught up with the idea by guillotining Louis XVI in 1793? What else but attempted revolution would you call the 5 November 1605 gunpowder plot when Guy Fawkes and his fellow conspirators tried to blow up the king and the government? In 1688 the UK came very far from “just evolving” in what we call the Glorious Revolution. This was the first successful foreign-led invasion since 1066, led by William of Orange. King Billy of course had British and Irish Protestant supporters and troops, but he was a foreigner whose key fighters were Dutch and Danish mercenaries, French Huguenots and German Protestants. It is curious that years of study at Oxford university did not somehow correct the “just evolving” solipsism that infect the Brexit negotiator, especially since we could add the violence and turmoil of the Reformation, the loss of the American colonies, the 1832 Reform Act, the repeal of the Corn Laws, slavery and its abolition, the Suffragettes, the Anglo-Irish War of the 1920s, even the change in the name of the British royal family in 1917 by King George V, from Saxe-Coburg-Gotha to Windsor, and of course the loss of empire.
Frost’s “just evolved” historical blindness to inconvenient facts is symbolic of the British disease in the 21st century. From our schooldays we swallow similarly comfortable historical myths yet discount the inconvenience of real facts about the past in ways that blight our future, confirming William Faulkner’s observation that the past is not history. It’s not even past.
Towards the end of his 2020 Brussels speech Frost outlined the principles upon which he based his negotiating strategy with the EU: “One of those fundamentals is that we are negotiating as one country. To return to Burke, his conception of the state was – and is – one that allows for differences, for different habits, and for different customs. It is one that means our own multi-state union in the UK has grown in different ways across the EU – each playing unique roles in its historical development. It is actually fashionable at the moment amongst some to run down that state which has been very successful historically. We cannot be complacent about the Union in the UK, but I nevertheless believe that all parts of the UK are going to survive and thrive together as one country. In particular, I am clear that I am negotiating on behalf of Northern Ireland as for every other part of the UK.”
The misremembered recent history of Northern Ireland has been especially damaged by the carelessness of Frost and Boris Johnson. In effect they moved the Irish border into the Irish Sea, stirring up the worst fears of Protestant unionists that they were now separated and treated differently from the rest of the UK. Protestants in hardline areas of Belfast rioted. I met former loyalist paramilitaries in the Ulster Volunteer Force who told me of their disgust at this Westminster betrayal. The historic Irish border became a live and unsolved political issue once more. Unionism was weakened. Sinn Fein became the largest party in Northern Ireland. Sinn Fein’s leader, Mary Lou McDonald, may even be on course to become prime minister (Taoiseach) of the Irish Republic next year. She tweeted during the 2024 UK election campaign: “These are the years when the journey towards reunification comes to its conclusion and we need to prepare.”
Frost’s “just evolved” historical blindness to inconvenient facts is symbolic of the British disease in the 21st century
David Frost’s boasts about “one country” and “negotiating on behalf of Northern Ireland” proved in reality to be an immense historic boost for the party that was formerly the political wing of the IRA. When an Englishman praises the Burke version of British history, Conservative commentators tend to lose their wits. But in the Times the former Conservative MP Matthew Parris challenged Frost’s description of Burke as a “philosopher”, describing him instead as an “agitator and a crusader”. Parris excoriated Frost’s English exceptionalist history: “Does he think the French, Germans or Swedes have a stunted sense of national identity?”
Perhaps even, or especially, at Oxford (alma mater to Frost, Johnson, Cameron, Sunak, Truss and May) students imbibe historical clichés and exceptionalist fantasies rather than the harder story of our country’s past.
And so, in recent months on my book tour for Britain Is Better Than This, I’ve been trying an experiment. I ask British audiences a simple question: “You all learned that under the terms of the 1919 Versailles treaty German aggression in WWI was punished. Can anyone recall how much land Germany lost?” Audiences generally don’t know the precise answer (13 per cent) but they all know the Versailles treaty was so severe the Nazis came to power on the back of resentment at this unfair punishment. Then I ask if anyone knows how much land the UK lost after WWI. Audiences chorus the word “none” or sit in silence. At the end of WWI the victorious UK lost almost twice the percentage of land mass as Germany – 22 per cent. Ireland’s Easter Rising of 1916 led ultimately to the disastrous Anglo-Irish war which ended when in 1922, 26 of Ireland’s 32 counties left the UK to become what is now the Republic of Ireland. But did you learn this in school? Me neither. Historical amnesia led to the breakup of the UK as then constituted, and the creation of Northern Ireland with a Protestant majority. And that enabled severe, deliberate and official discrimination against Catholics. Which led to 1960s civil rights marches and ultimately terrorist violence with more than 3000 dead.
Karl Marx noted that history repeats itself, first as tragedy, secondly as farce. The philosopher George Santayana was more pointed, saying that: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” In Britain we have a wider problem. We remember our history yet often fail to interrogate its myths. We are not a great power. We can still be a great nation. But there is nothing great about harbouring delusions of being a great power, of weaponising nostalgia and reciting political juvenilia about “taking our country back”. The truth is simple. You cannot go forward if you constantly want to go back. And if you do not do history, it will eventually undo you.
Gavin Esler is a contributing editor of Perspective and the author, most recently, of “Britain Is Better Than This”
