movies were seen by much larger audiences from the 1970s through endless repeats on television. And, more recently, the heroic narrative has been sharpened down to the person of Churchill himself, through what is called a process of ‘re-mediation’ – as one medium refashions the product of another: book, journalism, film, with multiple feedback loops – and in the process amplifies the Churchillian impact. Churchill started the process with six volumes of war memoirs published between 1948 and 1954. He intended to shape the verdict of history at an early stage by, as he liked to put it, being one of the historians. The most vivid parts of those books were purveyed to a much larger audience through serialisation across the world in major newspapers, including the Daily Telegraph in Britain and the New York Times and Life magazine in the USA. Film-makers also picked up the memoirs, for instance, the Winston Churchill: The Valiant Year series shown in America and Britain in 1960–1, and Churchill’s immortality was then assured by a state funeral in 1965, broadcast on TV across the world. Meanwhile, historian Martin Gilbert was gradually constructing Churchill’s literary mausoleum in what became an eight-volume ‘official biography’, on which he worked for twenty years before its completion in 1986. These volumes and the accompanying tomes of supporting documents in turn provided vast amounts of additional information for new movies and TV films. In The Wilderness Years – an eight-part television series of 1982 – Churchill in the 1930s was brought to life for a new generation by the actor Robert Hardy. In the twenty-first century, British-American co-productions hiked up the budgets and also the special effects. In quick succession came Albert Finney in The Gathering Storm (2002), Brendan Gleeson (Into the Storm, 2009) and Gary Oldman’s Oscar-winning performance in Darkest Hour in 2017 – the same year as the movie Dunkirk, another box-office triumph about Britain in 1940. And so the process of Churchillian re-mediation has continued for some seventy years, with books, films and journalism feeding on each other.[84]
In the process, however, there has been a gradual narrowing of the Second World War in popular British imagination to the story of one country and one leader in one year, and this has distorted the magnitude and complexity of that global conflict. In June 1940, Churchill urged his beleaguered countrymen to ‘so bear ourselves that if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, “This was their finest hour.”’ In his memoirs, Churchill turned exhortation into description, entitling the second volume, about 1940, Their Finest Hour. Over time, ‘theirs’ and ‘his’ have become intertwined. And ‘finest’ implies that Britain’s Churchillian moment cannot be bettered, in other words that it has been all downhill ever since.[85]
In various ways, therefore, heritage is in danger of becoming a substitute for history in public awareness of Britain’s past. ‘The nation’, observed historian Patrick Wright, ‘is not seen as a heterogeneous society that makes its own history as it moves forward, however chaotically, into the future. Instead it is portrayed as an already achieved and timeless historical entity which demands only appropriate reverence and protection in the present.’[86] In other words, history is understood as content not process: a proud inheritance to be cherished and preserved, rather than an ongoing project of making and remaking.
If you are sure what Britain is, or should be, this may not be the book for you. But if you can cope with the challenges of living in the future tense, rather than luxuriating in the past pluperfect,[87] then read on. What follows is an attempt to conceive of Britain and its history as work in progress.
Our links to the rest of Europe, the continent of Europe, have been the dominant factor in our history.
Margaret Thatcher, Bruges, 20 September 1988
The idea of Britain existing separately from Europe is a familiar feature of modern British culture. In daily speech, from football matches to weather forecasts, the two terms are often used to denote distinct entities. This has also been a trope of political rhetoric, from the long debate in the 1960s about whether Britain should ‘join’ Europe, via the 1975 referendum about whether to ‘stay in’, and on to the Brexit vote in 2016 to ‘leave’. Of course, ‘Europe’ here signifies a specific political organisation – the EEC or the EU – but much of the political debate has drawn on a narrative about Britain’s historic and special character compared with the Continent.
One of the most celebrated speeches about Britain’s non-European identity was delivered by Hugh Gaitskell, the Labour leader, to the party’s annual conference in Brighton in October 1962. He spoke at length about the conditions that would have to be fulfilled before Labour could agree to join the ‘Common Market’ – especially changes to the Common Agricultural Policy, which he denounced as ‘one of the most devastating pieces of protectionism ever invented’ – and he stressed Britain’s obligations to the Commonwealth. Gaitskell’s conclusion was that the arguments for British entry were ‘evenly balanced’ and that ‘whether or not it is worth going in depends on the conditions of our entry’. He did not conceal his anger at the way Harold Macmillan’s Tory Government seemed hell-bent on joining, despite the costs to the Commonwealth. Yet what caught the headlines was not Gaitskell’s judicious weighing up of pros and cons but his emotional soundbites.[1]
For instance, he warned about a two-faced Europe, of which Britain had good historic reasons to be wary. ‘For although, of course, Europe has had a great and glorious civilisation, although Europe can claim Goethe and Leonardo, Voltaire and Picasso, there have been evil features in European history, too – Hitler and Mussolini … You cannot say what this Europe will be: it has its two faces and we do not know as yet which is the one which will be dominant.’ The ‘ideal of Federal Europe’ also stuck in the Labour leader’s gullet. This meant that ‘if we go into this we are no more than a state (as it were) in the United States of Europe, such as Texas and California … it would be the same as in Australia, where you have Western Australia, for example, and New South Wales. We should be like them. This is what it means; it does mean the end of Britain as an independent nation state.’ And with that transformation would come, Gaitskell believed, a repudiation of Britain’s historic identity: ‘It means the end of a thousand years of history. You may say “Let it end” but, my goodness, it is a decision that needs a little care and thought … For we are not just a part of Europe – at least not yet. We have a different history. We have ties and links which run across the whole world.’[2]
A couple of months later this kind of British rhetoric about a thousand years of history and a global destiny was picked up by Dean Acheson – who had served as US Secretary of State of State in 1949–53 at height of the Cold War. Acheson’s line about Britain losing an empire but not finding a role – quoted at the start of this book – has now become notorious, but the background story is important. In 1962, Acheson – now a crusty elder statesman – was asked to deliver the keynote address to a student conference at the US Military Academy at West Point on 5 December. He made his usual pitch about the importance of the Atlantic Alliance, and the speech attracted little attention in the United States. But embedded in a section about some of the problems facing Western Europe, was the single paragraph on Britain that proved incendiary:
Great Britain has lost an empire and has not yet found a role. The attempt to play a separate power role – that is, a role apart from Europe, a role based on a ‘special relationship’ with the United States, a role based on being head of a ‘commonwealth’
