W hen informed that this was to be The Spectator ’s English
Special Issue, I happened to be reading a novel by John Buchan called Midwinter. It concerns an unsuccessful attempt by a young Highland laird, Alastair Maclean, to raise English Jacobites for Bonnie Prince Charlie in 1745. Like most Buchan novels, it has a rather weak plot which requires exciting, brilliantly described journeys up and down the country. In Buchan’s favourite Oxfordshire, the hero is rescued by Midwinter, a gentleman-outlaw who leads the mysterious Spoonbills. Maclean asks him who he is. ‘I am a dweller in Old England,’ says Midwinter. ‘That explains little,’ says Maclean. ‘Nay, it explains all. There is an Old England which has outlived Roman and Saxon and Dane and Norman and will outlast the Hanoverians. It is the land on the edge of moorlands and the rims of forests and the twilight before dawn, and strange knowledge still dwells in it.’ This sort of thing is historical rubbish (who were these Old English people who were here even before the Angles arrived to bring the word ‘England’ to our shores?), but I must admit that, from childhood, I have had a certain weakness for it. If you live in an old country, you like the fancy that it has some ineradicable essence. Elsewhere in the novel, Maclean muses on ‘this strange thing, England, which was like a spell on sober minds’. But it does not do to push ideas of Englishness too far. Englishness is perverted if it is turned into a political message. Unfortunately, the loosening of the Union encourages identity politics. If we are moving into an era of bulldogs and St George’s crosses and denunciations of our non-English neighbours, we shall end up like Serbia.
John Buchan, himself a Scot, understood this. His career (Governor-General of Canada, among other things) showed a belief in Englishness and Scottishness combined, though not effaced, in Britishness. In the dedication to Midwinter, he is ‘I, who love with equal mind/ The southern sun, the northern wind,/ The lilied lowland watermead/ And the grey hills that cradle Tweed’. The tale ‘haply tries/ To intertwine our loyalties’. Various forces — devolution, the decline of Protestantism and history teaching, the power of the European Union — have begun to prise those loyalties apart. The most prominent victim of this is one of its authors, Gordon Brown. A natural unionist, Mr Brown has always made Britain, not Scotland, the canvas for his ambitions. But his party’s policy of devolution with the bills paid by the English has made Mr Brown’s Scottishness an issue as it would not have been in the last century. He and his Scottish associates now seem to many English voters like minority colonisers. If Labour wins the next election without a majority in England, this impression will be fatally confirmed. Mr Brown may be confronted with another piece of poetic imagination — Kipling’s Saxon: ‘When he stands like an ox in the furrow with his sullen eyes set on your own,/ And grumbles “This isn’t fair dealing,” my son, leave the Saxon alone.’ (The man giving that advice is another minority coloniser, a Norman.) Englishness resists definition, but is often recognisable. Take this week’s story from the late Lord Hailsham’s diary about how Alec Douglas-Home was nearly kidnapped. During the 1964 election, when he was Prime Minister, Home was staying with his friends the Tweedsmuirs. His single bodyguard was absent, and so, briefly, were they. Home was alone in the house and answered the door to left-wing students from Aberdeen University who had come to kidnap him as a sort of prank-cum-political statement. He said to them: ‘I suppose you realise that if you do [kidnap me] the Conservatives will win the election by 200 or 300,’ and he played for time by offering them beer. The Tweedsmuirs reappeared and the would-be kidnappers retreated. This story has some English characteristics which I like, largely absent from current political leadership — gentleness, humorous common sense, a lack of self-importance and public life run on a very low budget. Perhaps it proves the point I am making above, however, that the main figures in this ‘English’ drama — Home, the Tweedsmuirs, the Tweedsmuirs’ house, and, presumably, most of the students — were Scottish. Lord Tweedsmuir, by the way, was the son of John Buchan.
At an (Irish) party I attended the other day I met a woman of Russian and Greek origins who has spent her life in England after falling in love with it and her future husband in her late teens. I told her about my disappointment at Alan Bennett’s The History Boys, which I had only just seen. It seemed to me to lack tension and reality. She related this to a change in English sensibility. The England that she loved, she said, was free because it was ordered. The English were creative when they were inhibited, when they were taught manners, when the men were made to wear ties. Their jokes were good because they dealt with embarrassment and hinted at things which could not be directly said. So once they could wear what they like, swear as they pleased, express their sexuality in public and generally exercise the liberties in which she, as a liberal-left person, theoretically believed, they became unpleasant and boring. Alan Bennett was once the master of inhibition. In The History Boys, he is explicit, even crude. The subtlety disappears, and so does one’s interest.
TV Licensing (cont’d). A reader informs me of extreme measures taken by a friend who has never possessed a television licence and has constantly been accused of evasion by TV Licensing as a result. When he recently passed the age of 75, he realised that he was entitled to a free television licence. He therefore applied for one, although he still has no television, just to stop the flow of abusive letters. It is satisfying to think that the state is picking up a bill for its own intrusions.
When people complain about the ‘compensation culture’, they usually mean the habit of suing for hurt feelings and so on. But in business pages now, the phrase means the habit of giving bankers enormous bonuses and pay-offs, even when things are going badly. The word ‘compensation’ has gradually replaced the word ‘pay’ at the upper end of the salary scale over the past 15 years. It is a brilliant euphemism because it implies that the large sums handed over are not so much a reward as a restitution for some injury, turning millionaires into victims.
ALabour MP recently told Gordon Brown that he was unpopular because ‘people don’t know who you are’. Surely the opposite is the case. We do know: that is the problem.
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