COGITO,
ERGO SUN Exclusive: David Yelland
celebrates our great island story
THERE'S a depressing vignette in Alan Clark's Diaries which recounts a dinner at Brooks's just after the second Thatcher elec- tion victory. Tories present included Chris Patten, Julian Critchley and Nick Budgen, but the conversation was merely jollyish' despite the party's magnificent triumph over Kinnockio. Clark comments, 'I fear that we all still suffer from a lack of confidence. Very deep-seated it is, running back as far, perhaps, as before the war . . . So when we win something we can barely believe our eyes. There is no follow-up.'
Quite. It's a bloody good job that the Sun didn't lose its confidence, though, dur- ing the Falklands War in 1982, so inextri- cably linked to that 1983 victory. Witness our famous headlines: `Gotcha!' when the Belgrano was sunk; 'Stick it up your Junta', our message to General Galtieri; and the paper's solid support for 2 Para and the British navy (`Our boys') who so bravely won a fine victory. I bet that sounds unfashionable to some. So what? They were great headlines.
Clark showed us the Tories' lack of con- fidence, but I suspect that New Labour has similar problems. I wouldn't be at all sur- prised to learn that the likes of Two Jags, Cookie and the rest of them looked around their first Cabinet table back in 1997 and murmured, 'Christ, lads, we've won. What the bloody hell do we do now, Tone?'
This lack of confidence is the New British Disease. I call it NBD. The old British disease, of the economic variety, was vanquished by Margaret Thatcher — a feat for which we are for ever in her debt. I think NBD undermines everything we do — our politics, our world view, our daily way of life, even the performance of our national sports teams. And, perhaps most importantly of all, it undermines the way we teach our children history. Unlike the Americans and the French, we have no confidence in our past, so we've stopped teaching it. More of that later.
One of the few NBD-free zones in Britain is the Sun. What other paper would have had the sheer guts to print `If Kinnock wins today, will the last person to leave Britain please turn out the lights?' (1992 election); or the rousing 'Clobba Slobba!' — our front page almost exactly a year ago as British forces once again went into harm's way? How many other papers would attain international impact by por- traying Blair as 'The most dangerous man in Britain' in a front page that I firmly believe helped awaken the nation to the dangers of the single currency?
Answer: none.
The Sun is a very special thing. But NBD manifests itself in many forms. The Sun can be a force for good but it cannof defeat the problem. I always knew NBD existed but it hit me much harder when I came back to Britain to edit the Sun in 1998 after six years living and working in New York. America is not a perfect place. Far from it. But the USA does not have a confidence problem. Many of the elite in New York City are people who have built huge wealth, despite being only second- or even first-generation immigrants. For them, anything is possible.
Back home, I find myself frustrated so often at the effects of NBD, this general assumption that British is not best. In so many ways, we are the best. All over the world Brits rise to the top. We run huge chunks of the financial world. Our scien- tists are the best. So are our doctors. So are our creative people. Our top compa- nies are among the finest on the planet. We have nothing to fear, we Brits, out in the big wide world; all we lack is that cru- cial thing: confidence.
I strongly believe that a sense of history and a sense of confidence are closely linked. Which brings me back to the dis- graceful abandonment of history in many of our schools. I know this to be true. I lumbered through the state-school system in the 1970s and early 1980s at a time when the education establishment was murdering the grammar schools and 'experimenting' with new curriculums. Was I taught histo- ry? Was I, hell. I was taught it in small, politically correct nuggets. There was no thread, no intent by my teachers to instil an understanding of the larger canvas of British history. It was only later that I learnt to love the subject. Nothing has changed. In fact, it has got worse.
Why is this? It is partly sheer incompe- tence by those in charge, but it is also linked to this NBD business: as a nation we have abandoned all pride in our history. We have lost confidence. We are no longer certain about anything. In that spirit, I commend to you the Sun's version of our history — Hold Ye Front Page. Here, two of the Sun's most talented men, John Perry and Neil Roberts, do more for the cause of history than any teacher possibly could. Essentially, they trace British history in Sun front pages. The facts are correct. It's a wonderful piece of work. And there ain't no NBD here, dear readers. The book oozes confidence: it tells the tale as the Sun would have done, if we had been around.
This week the Pope apologised for the Crusades; the Sun's version of Richard I's exploits in the Holy Land is less wishy- washy. 'Three Lions on his Tunic: Ruth- less Rizza Mauls Heathens', yells the headline. Was this the mood of 12th-cen- tury England? You bet it was. Perry and Roberts also don't mess around with the death of Joan of Arc. `Gutm! Crazed French Army girl Joan is to be burned alive' is the front page. If the Sun had been around at the time we would have said exactly that. Let's take another example, Drake's victory over the Spanish fleet in 1588: 'The bigger they come, the Armada they fall — Navy routs Spaniards in Chan- nel'. Or how about this less-than-political- ly-correct version of the happenings at the Battle of Waterloo: 'Napoleon Blown Apart'. What a headline! How it would have sold on the 19th-century news-stands! Or this no-messing report of the storming of the Bastille: 'The French are Revolting (And we're not talking about their habits, folks).' The Sun of 1381 would, I am cer- tain, have backed Tyler's boys against an arrogant king. 'Let's give 'em Wat for', cries Perry and Roberts's front page. 'Sun backs revolt by peasants'.
I'm very proud of this book. We are about to reprint it and are planning a fol- low-up for Christmas. It has already sold well over 100,000 copies and we are bat- tling behind the scenes to get it in every school library up and down the country. It might not defeat NBD.
But it is certainly a step in the right direction.
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