ANOTHER VOICE
At the turn of the millennium, England's fate is to conquer or be conquered
BORIS JOHNSON
Spooky! I have just been struck by a weird symmetry in British history. Once every 1,000 years, more or less at the turn of the millennium, this island is conquered. Once every 1,000 years native institutions are demolished and replaced. At the begin- ning of the Christian era it was the Romans, arriving in the form of Aulus Plautius and his legions in Al) 43, and overwhelming the terrified woad-painted savages. Almost exactly 1,000 years later (and by now your flesh will be crawling) it was the Normans of William the Bastard, who arrived in 1066, confiscated the farms of the Saxons, deposed their bishops and generally toughed up the autochthonous peoples. In the words of one historian, 'probably no other conquest in European history has had such disastrous consequences for the defeated'.
And now, at the turn of the second mil- lennium . aaargh. Help. Is it possible that the 1,000-year rule is being subtly con- firmed? Here we are, slowly ceding control of our destiny, not to Rome but to the Treaty of Rome. Our politicians are losing their ancient prerogatives; our judges bow to a supranational court; the Queen herself is but the citizen of a new pan-European empire; on roads and buildings throughout the captive territory there flutters the blue and gold 12-star flag of the new imperium; in fact, it is on the licence plate of every new car you see. Am I being hysterical? Do I sound cracked, raving like a contributor to one of Bill Cash's journals? Get on with you, you will say, this isn't a military con- quest, like the Roman or Norman inva- sions. You don't expect to see Neil Kinnock or Romano Prodi landing at Pevensey sometime in the next century, and embark- ing on a 15-point programme of rape and pillage. And yet I wonder whether my bril- liant 1,000-year insight is wholly irrelevant.
Whenever this island is threatened with subjugation, we see some fascinating paral- lels in the response of the natives. Backwards travels our gaze to the beginning of the first millennium and the beginning of the second millennium, and, in those threatened cul- tures, we find the same divisions that beset our politics at the beginning of the third. Today we have Europhiles and Eurosceptics. We are split between those, like Michael Heseltine, who believe that Europe, and Europe alone, offers the hope of civilisation. 'Our destiny lies in Europe,' says Tony Blair. 'We have no choice,' we are continually told. 'It is inevitable,' say the Europhiles. Those who resist, who kick against the pricks, are denounced as obscurantist Little Englanders; the kind of people who take Shippams paste sandwiches on the Eurostar, rather than risk having a meal in Paris. It was ever thus.
Back in the days of the first conquest there were Romanophiles and Romanoscep- tics; there were toadies and there were those who refused to bend the knee. Who can for- get Calgacus, heroic British resistance lead- er, denouncing the legions at the battle of Mons Graupius? 'They make a desert and call it peace,' he cried, which, with a slight adjustment, could be a Eurosceptic denunci- ation of the Common Agricultural Policy, and its brutal intensiveness: 'They make a desert and call it peas.'
We all treasure the memory of Boadicea, whose statue still stands by the 'Palace of Westminster, and who attacked the Romans as 'men who bathe in warm water, eat artifi- cial dainties, drink unmixed wine, anoint themselves with myrrh, sleep on soft couches with boys for bedfellows ... and are slaves to an incompetent lyre-player.' Just the sort of thing you might find in one of the stirring orations of Teresa Gorman. And then there were the cringeing, fawning Romanophiles, the collaborators who were all for a spot of unmixed wine, and soft couches, and myrrh: just like the amiable soft-headed Europhiles of today, who believe that 'going into Europe' is all about cappuccino and crois- sants and toasting beautiful girls in the pave- ment cafés of Paris.
There will always be those who don't set much store by British national indepen- dence, like Cartimandua, queen of the Brig- antes, who handed over Caradog aka Carac- tacus to the Romans, or arch-creeps like Cogidubnus, one of those Roman client- kings who wore a toga and had a hypocaust installed. And 1,000 years later, the story was much the same. Some Saxons resisted the Normans, with risings every year from 1067 to 1070. But others decided to become Normanophiles, and to collaborate: there is no other explanation for the manner in which 10,000 Normans held down a popula- tion of between one and two million.
As we raise our eyes from the pages of his- tory, and stare around us, we see the same conflicting instincts in our political classes. Some want nothing so much as to get their bums on the first-class seats to Brussels, and to chow down at the top table; and some cling forlornly to the hope of national self- rule. Indeed, there is one further analogy we might squeeze out of it all. When Britain is threatened with a takeover of some kind, it is the ruling classes, or a large chunk of them, who see the advantages of collabora- tion, and the silent majority of the people who feel betrayed and disconsolate.
Perhaps it is so in all such situations: the toffs — the Hurds, the Hezzas, the Blairs — seeing the advantages of settlement with their fellow members of the international elite; the oiks preferring confrontation. Well, the Romans won at the beginning of the first millennium. The Normans won at the beginning of the next. Will the European integrationists win at the beginning of the third millennium? I suppose they might, it is not as though the advantages of the EU are as obvious as the advantages of the Roman empire (aqueducts, viaducts, roads, ice- cream, law and so on); and it is not as though Brussels has the means to enforce its will with the violence of the Norman knights.
Perhaps my 1,000-year rule will be vindi- cated; perhaps there will be a conquest at the turn of this millennium, but a conquest in reverse. This time, we have language on our side. Fortified by Latin and Norman French, the English language is not only able to with- stand the incursions of Brussels, but has invaded the whole of Europe. First there was Franglais, and the pitiable attempts by the French Academy to resist 'le weekend'. Now there is Denglish, the mixture of German and English which is conquering German firms: 'dm marketing', 'der call centre', 'der computer'. Whole conferences at firms such as Daimler, Siemens and Bosch are now con- ducted in English. Yes, Germany is falling: Germany which, you will remember, beat off the Roman legions in AD 4, is falling to the most aggressive cultural imperium the world has ever seen, the empire of the English lan- guage. Which is perhaps not an altogether wonderful thing, but it shows that the boot is sometimes on the other foot.
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