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Feb. 6, 2020 - The Delingpod - James Delingpole
44:38
Delingpod 55: Robert Tombs
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Welcome to the DeliPod with me, James DeliPod, and my very special guest, I know I always say I'm excited, but I really am excited about this week's special guest.
He's back for a second time.
It is Professor Robert Toombs.
Hello, James.
Probably the only Cambridge Don who would actually agree to be on this podcast, I would say.
You might possibly be right.
Or is there one more?
No, I'm sure there are a number in hiding.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I was watching the other day this amazing series about the art of Japan, and it's by some hot up-and-coming Cambridge don, I think.
And they're not called dons, are they?
What do you call them?
We do call them.
We still call them that.
What's the other word you use?
Supervisor?
Oh, lots of words.
Well, there are lots of words.
Academics, lecturers, professors, readers, fellows of colleges.
But dons is the sort of generic name.
Anyway, so I don't know, you've probably seen him.
He's really good on art and young and attractive and interesting.
And so I emailed him immediately afterwards.
I said, please come on my pod.
Zilch, nada.
And I reckon probably it's because...
If you're a kind of lefty academic, I'm toxic.
So thank you very much for...
I didn't know you were toxic.
Perhaps I wouldn't have come on if I liked it.
Yeah, exactly.
You should have worn your coronavirus mask in case you get infected.
You are here partly, apart from because you're the only dom I could get, partly because you're an absolute hero of Brexit.
I'm one of the foot soldiers of the great Brexit army.
Well, you are.
Um...
We're recording this, let history note, on Brexit Day, Independence Day.
And I think you are one of the very few people in academe, brave enough and intelligent enough and wise enough to have supported Brexit.
You did briefings for Brexit.
Who were you all?
Well, it started off being three of us.
My two colleagues were Graham Gudgeon, who's an economist, and Chris Bickerton, who is a political scientist.
Chris went off and founded his own left-wing Brexit group.
So there are a number of academics, but they tend to be either quite old, like me, or young and brave.
And many in that case, quite a lot on the left.
But what is kind of lacking are people Middle-aged, semi-established people, I think, who are often rather scared to put their head above the parapet, even if they think the way that we do about this, simply because their career prospects are likely not to be helped, to put it mildly.
Well, I was going to ask you that.
Presumably, you've got a grand title, haven't you?
Professor of French History?
Yes, that's right.
Or French, is it?
French History.
French History.
Okay.
So you're safe.
I mean, unsackable.
Exactly.
But I imagine you've got Sneered out over the port or funny looks or something?
Well, almost the only thing I've got...
I should first of all say that being in this position, which people like you occasionally say, gosh, you're terribly brave, but in fact I've made lots of new friends, which I didn't know I have.
I'm sure I've made more friends than I've lost, quite sure of that.
And actually some people often sort of come up to me over the port, as it were, and say, I really like what you're doing and I really like your piece in the telegraph or whatever, but they often won't say it too loudly.
The only thing I've ever had, this was an elderly colleague whom I'm very fond of, who said to me one day, he said, I hear you're in favour of Brexit.
And I said, yes.
And he said, but you're such a nice chap.
Yeah, that figures.
The people coming up to you and sort of being surprised and impressed by your Brexit support, were they fellow academics or undergraduates or what?
Mainly fellow academics, yeah.
You didn't have any undergraduates coming up?
Yeah, I've had some.
In fact, I had one on a train the other day.
Somehow he recognised me, maybe from your thing.
And he said, you know, you're Robert Toombs.
I said, yes.
He said, I like your stuff.
You know, I read it in the tech or whatever.
And so we talked on the train journey from Cambridge to London, and he's an undergraduate, but he said, I find it very difficult to say among fellow students the way I think.
And there are quite a few like that.
And quite often, they're working class kids, you know, who come...
From the north of England.
In his case he was, I'm trying to think, he was from an ethnic minority.
I think probably a Londoner.
But it's quite common for boys or girls from the north of England who come from homes and from a region in which support for Brexit is quite strong.
And they find when they come to Cambridge everybody's on the other side and therefore they usually keep quiet about it.
Indeed, we have in our group a graduate student who edits our newsletter, but we more or less told her not to let her name be known, because she wants a job in academia.
When she's finished her PhD, she wants a job, and the fact is it would not at all help.
You know, what tends to happen is that people say, well, you know, she's got rather odd views.
Is this going to be a good appointment for the faculty's reputation?
So it sort of whispers often, and that can be enough.
And I don't want to bore you and your viewers with this, but once I was at a conference, Academics attend conferences as part of the job.
And a man who was a professor, a tenured professor at another university, said how much he agreed.
And I said, well, that's great.
Would you like to write for us?
And he said, I'd love to, but I'm applying for a job at another university, and I can't possibly let people know what I think until this job's decided.
And I thought how shocking it is that this should be the reality.
If these people had been communists in the 1950s, subject to a sort of McCarthyism, we'd be up in arms about it.
Yes.
And I've had colleagues, sort of left-wing colleagues, who say, well, you know, 20, 30 years ago there were senior conservative academics, but they never thought of discriminating against left-wing, young left-wing lecturers.
But now I think there's no longer that kind of tolerance for people of different views.
Well, there's an extraordinary...
And this is a long-running thing, the double standards between...
I was talking about this to my previous podcast guest, Christian Nimitz.
Why is it acceptable at political rallies in England now to fly the hammer and sickle flag?
The flag under which millions were killed.
And yet, if you try waving a Nazi flag...
And this is not to say that we should be waving Nazi flags, but how come the left gets a free pass?
Yes, very difficult to say.
And I guess if you ask someone who's waving one of these flags, they'd probably say something like, well, yes, okay, it went wrong, you know, Stalin bad, Mao bad, but the idea, the original idea was good, isn't that it?
You know, it's like, we don't look at the reality, we look at the vision.
Intentions.
A bit like the EU, I would say.
I'm not sure if we're going to get on to that.
We're so sure if we're going to get on to it.
And I liked that segue there.
That's really good.
You've kept me honest.
Exactly.
That so much of...
You must have noticed this.
When you tried pinning down...
During the fraught debates we had about the European Union...
When you tried pinning down Remainers...
On what it was about the European project...
That they found so attractive...
That we should stay in it regardless...
They weren't really able to come up with anything concrete.
It was all about general ideas, about peace and fairness.
And that's not only true in Britain, where, of course, we've had this debate, as you say, very intensely for now four years.
I've had the same thing in other European member countries, which we still are till 11 o'clock tonight, in which you might say to someone, but you're Italian, or you're Greek, and I mean, what do you think about all the youth unemployment in your country, which is due to Eurozone policies?
And they kind of, they don't want to talk about it.
They move the subject onto something else about, you know, as you say, things like, yeah, but it keeps the peace, or what about the wonderful European civilisation that we've enjoyed since the ancient Greeks, or, you know, think about the future and how much things can be reformed and improved.
But very reluctantly...
As you say, to get onto any kind of real engagement with the issues as we would see them, or indeed with our arguments.
It's often quite difficult to get an argument or a discussion in which you say, well, you know, the thing that I object to in the EU is, for example, the economic policy that it follows, which is very damaging, or I don't like the fact that it's impossible to scrutinise legislation effectively, or that you can't get rid of the people in the Commission who make the real decisions.
And sort of blanks out then.
It's not about that.
It's about, you know, yeah, but I feel very European.
Or, you know, I like going on my holidays.
I like travelling in Europe.
And, you know, I'd like to be able to work in Europe, maybe.
Which I think, sometimes I think, you don't speak any European languages.
How are you going to manage that?
But, as you say, I think there is...
Simply a non-meeting of minds.
It's been very difficult to discuss things in a civil, rational way, because there simply is no engagement.
So instead, often, okay, there's been bad temper on both sides.
I'm sure we'd agree.
We can be even-handed about that.
But on the whole, I think no one would deny that there have been far more insults against leavers, who after all are a majority of the country, who have been accused of racism, who have been called bad names, who have been accused of being stupid, they're old so they should all die, who have been accused of being stupid, they're old so they should all die, that kind of thing, which you would not normally have And which, of course, if you were to use in other contexts, would be regarded as absolutely unacceptable, racist, ageist and all the rest.
I was wondering whether maybe one of the reasons there is an irreconcilable divide between Brexiteers and Ramoners, I mean, I think some Remainers came round to our side, but the hardcore Ramoners, is that when you've got...
The abstract on the one hand, and the concrete on the other hand, you're never going to get any meeting of mind.
Because with the Remainers, it's all about ideals.
Well, I don't quite agree with that.
I mean, I agree that their view of the EU Tends to be, in my view, in our view, rather remote from reality.
It's not about reality, it's about a vision.
But on the other hand, many of the arguments that were used on our side were about ideals, were about principles, about who is sovereign, who has the right to govern, who has the right to make final decisions.
And in that case, what were the answers?
They tended to be very, very sort of bread and butter things, like...
Yeah, but it's going to cause unemployment or it's going to mean that there are going to be customs checks at the frontier or it's not going to be very easy to travel.
So on one hand you have Yeah.
Which I thought was pretty shocking.
And indeed, I think some people on the Remain side, Lisa Nandy, the Labour Party leadership candidate, has admitted that.
I think she said something like, you know, on the other side, on the Leave side, they talked about sovereignty and democracy, and we said, oh, but your mobile phone charges might go up.
And I think that's absolutely honest and true.
It's never been about the true advantages of being in the EU. It's always been about the disadvantages of leaving it, which is, in some senses, illogical.
The two things should be opposite sides of the same coin, but they've rarely been that.
It's always been a wholly negative argument on the Remain side, it seems to me.
Okay, there's a bit of window dressing about the Great Vision, but even not very much of that.
It's almost always been about the bad things that will happen if we leave.
Yeah, project fear.
Now, the reason that I think I'm so excited I've got you, and I really want to make the most of, is the fact that you are the author of one of my favourite books in the last five years, The English and Their History, which is a doorstopper of a book, narrative, yellow cover, narrative history, like the kind of thing that they don't make anymore, and you made it, and it's fantastic.
And I had a real sense of Englishness, well, I mean, Britishness, I suppose, is Part of that, to a degree.
But this awful period we've just been through, the three long winters, I suppose you'd call it, that period from the referendum vote in 2016, when we thought it was over, we'd won, to now, when for a long time it seemed like What would you call it?
The deep state, the liberal elite, were conspiring to ensure that we never got Brexit.
Yes.
Which I think was a huge shock to most of us.
Yeah.
Because I remember, you mentioned the phrase deep state.
I think the first time I was ever asked to speak in public on this subject, because I'm a very retiring character, was in Cambridge.
And one of the other people on the platform was a former Labour Minister of Europe, Dennis McShane, whom you probably know.
Yes.
And I remember him saying, it's always stuck in my mind, he said, this was just before the referendum, he said, it doesn't matter how you vote, the deep state won't let it happen.
And I thought, oh come on, you know, that's just science fiction.
But of course the deep state, or at least that section of the establishment, politicians, civil servants, the media, the universities and so on, nearly did stop it from happening.
The judiciary?
The judiciary.
Lady Hale and the Supreme Court?
Yes, I'm afraid that's true.
And I don't think any of us would have believed that possible.
And indeed at the time I thought this is just silly.
You know, we live in a country in which a popular vote is accepted, whether you like it or not.
And I think, of course, none of us can actually talk about what would have happened in other circumstances, but I firmly believe that had the vote gone the other way...
We would not have tried to sabotage it.
We would have said, OK, the people have voted.
We regret it.
We think it was a bad decision.
But we have to live with it.
We have to see how things go in future.
But it's almost impossible to imagine an attempt to overturn, you know, by Nigel Farage and UKIP to somehow undermine the popular vote, to sabotage Parliament.
To novel the judiciary, as you say.
Yes.
And yet all these things did happen.
They did happen, and we found it shocking.
Does that mean that such antics have never taken place in history before?
I guess they've never taken place in history since the beginning of the democratic era.
Which is when?
Well, I mean, in a sense, it's not all that long ago.
You could say it's either the late 19th or the early 20th century.
But I think probably not since the beginning of the 19th century has there been an attempt to really...
I'm not sure how you'd put it, to subvert the proper political process.
Certainly, I would guess not since the passing of the Great Reform Act.
So, you know, we're talking about the 1830s, almost prehistory for most people.
Ever since then, elections have led to the formation of governments who have governed until they were defeated in another election.
But there has not, to my knowledge, been any attempt to destroy a government Really, from within.
Yeah.
As happened with, in a sense, with the May government, which was attempted with the Johnson government, but of course Johnson was able to have an election which he won.
I mean, you know, you might say, or at least I think I would say, that if one is looking for the simplest explanation, and that's usually a good place to start at least, it's because of the Fixed Term Parliament Act.
Which was put up by David Cameron and George Osborne, I think.
And Nick Sleg.
Yes, that's right, it was.
So what normally happens, as you know, is that if a government loses the power to govern, it can ask the Queen, in fact, ask for it to have a general election.
And then the electors decide, OK, we keep you or we try someone else.
This law meant, which of course exists in similar ways in other countries, that you would only have a parliamentary election or the equivalent of a congressional election every so many years.
I expect America was one of the examples for this.
But of course the difference is we don't have a presidential system.
We have a parliamentary system.
So what it meant is that if a government lost control of politics, The House of Commons, which it did, then government cannot simply function.
It can't make decisions, it can't resign, it can't decide where the country should go, it can't pass laws, and it can't ask for a resolution of this problem by going to the country, as we call it, by having an election.
And so I think if we get rid of the fixed term Parliament Act, which I hope will happen pretty soon, then that particular problem will not exist.
We don't have, famously, a written constitution, but we do have traditions and a general understanding of how parliamentarians, how the system should work.
And the basis of that functioning system is that people act in good faith according to the terms of their office.
For example, the Speaker of the House.
The Speaker of the House is bound, at least by tradition, to be non-partisan, isn't it?
Yes.
Exactly.
And As you say, we don't have a written constitution in the sense that we don't have a single document called the Constitution.
We have quite a lot of constitutional laws and constitutional conventions which normally would be thought to apply.
These are not things you can just say, well, you know, it's not written, therefore I'm not going to do it.
These are often things which are recorded as being conventions and which is expected that you would obey.
I can't, again, think of an occasion in which a high official of state, like the Speaker of the House of Commons, has simply said, well, I'm going to change the rules, because I don't like them.
Which is effectively what happened.
And to do so in a thoroughly partisan way.
In this case, to say, I don't agree with Brexit.
I'm going to try and stop it.
Which is effectively what he said and what he did.
And...
I think we began to feel that the pillars of our democratic system, which as you say are based not on a single written document and a Supreme Court which applies that document, but on a whole series of understandings, conventions, laws and so on, which it was assumed that people would voluntarily obey.
Yeah.
And all of a sudden you get people who are not voluntarily obeying them.
What do you do?
Who is it who has the right to put a stop to it all?
Yeah.
And as I said, normally it would be the electorate, because there would be an election.
But if you couldn't even do that, there was no way you could resolve this chaos.
Yeah.
So, I don't think we even mentioned his name.
John Bercow was behaving like...
A very famous man now.
Yeah, but behaving like a bad actor in this whole thing.
Yes, yes.
And how did he get...
Is it because we don't have a written constitution that he could get away with it?
How did he do this?
Well, that's a very good question.
Well, what we haven't got, which I suppose in America, at least in theory you have, is some means of executing the Constitution, if you like.
Okay, Donald Trump can be impeached.
We used to have impeachment, but that died out in the 18th century.
I mean, I suppose the only way you could get rid of...
John Bercow would be if Parliament passed, perhaps the two Houses of Parliament, I don't know, or at least the House of Commons passed a motion removing him from office, but even that, I don't know if that's legal.
But of course you wouldn't get that happening because the government didn't have a majority and the opposition was effectively supporting the man who was acting in their interests.
So we haven't got...
A mechanism by which, if people deliberately break the rules in a blatant way, they can simply be stopped.
Okay, you might say, well, America doesn't really have it either, because impeachments don't usually work.
They haven't worked since Andrew Johnson, wasn't it, after the Civil War?
But, you know, impeachment is a very difficult and clumsy thing.
But we just haven't got a way of making sure that people do obey the rules if they break them.
Of course, you might say, well, there's the Supreme Court, but then, again, to my horror, and that to many other people, it appeared that the Supreme Court itself was not applying the law as it had previously always been understood.
And, of course, the Supreme Court, our American special friend is thinking, well, Supreme Court, you know, it's a long-established tradition, and it's the highest court.
It was only invented ten years ago by Tony Blair.
And there is a difference.
The American Supreme Court now, it's generally accepted that it is a political body, at least in part.
There's a huge scrutiny of judges who are appointed to the Supreme Court to make sure that their political opinions are in accord with what the Senate...
Once, let's say.
So there's some sort of check on who it is.
The British courts have always been appointed in an unbiased manner, and no one looks at who they are.
No one looks at their political opinions.
No one asks them what they think about democracy or about Brexit.
They're simply appointed on the assumption that they will behave in a completely dispassionate and unbiased manner.
Okay, it pains me to say it in a sense.
I'm a small C conservative.
I tend to be a defender of institutions.
But in the case of the Supreme Court's decision over the prorogation of Parliament...
They reached a conclusion, quite a short judgment, which completely ignored and overruled previous understandings of what the law was, with not a single dissenting voice.
Now, there's something wrong with that.
That cannot happen.
It was freaky, wasn't it?
That no dissenting voices part.
I remember that almost for me was the lowest point where I felt really despairing.
I felt like we were victims of a sort of judicial coup.
Well, you suddenly realised, I thought, I realised that there's no kind of life belt in the store, in the quicksands.
You suddenly feel that all the institutions that are meant to be upholding a democratic constitution...
Have crumbled.
So what are we going to do?
What means is there of trying to get back to normality?
And fortunately, you know, disaster did not happen because in the end the House of Commons decided that it could not carry on like this and it could not reasonably oppose a general election.
And so...
It agreed to one.
So the Fixed-Term Parliament Act, which could only be overruled if two-thirds of Members of Parliament agree, that did in fact happen.
And so we had a general election and all of a sudden these problems, at least for the time being, disappeared.
Can you give me a long-term historical perspective, familiar as you are with England right from the start?
Superficial knowledge.
We can do superficial on this show.
We're comfortable with that.
Of previous moments in our history where the elite, as it were, have tried to frustrate the will of the people and not succeeded.
And not succeeded.
Well, OK. I mean, I think the obvious example...
Which in some ways is not helpful, because it's a different age.
But the whole period of the Civil War, or even the whole period from the Reformation under Henry VIII up until the glorious revolution of 1688.
So we're talking about nearly 200 years, in which...
A great religious divide split the country.
The EU and Brexit is hardly religious on that level.
People are not willing to go to the stake or the bloc for it.
But nevertheless, there is a deep ideological divide.
But what you got at the time of the Civil War was, on one hand, the king trying to govern In a way that the law permitted, the fact is, and Parliament saying that we're not going to permit this, we're going to create an authority of our own.
And so at that time you did get the political establishment, king, nobility, commons, being divided into two.
And what most people don't realise, because we have a kind of myth, you know, on one hand you have Charles I, the tyrant, and on the other hand you have the House of Commons, the people's friend.
It wasn't really like that.
The King was always more popular than Parliament, all through the Civil War.
And Parliament behaved...
Was in the hands of an ideologically driven minority of Puritans, of extreme Protestants.
You know, the sort of people who burn witches.
Yeah.
Well, at least in their case.
And banned Christmas and maples.
Yeah, and in one of the nastiest cases, executed an unmarried mother, waited till she'd had her baby, took the baby away and then hanged her for adultery.
So, you know, sort of Taliban, if you like.
Taliban kind of regime.
The King was, by any accounts, a much more liberal and civilised ruler than Parliament was.
But anyway, in a sense, that's beside the point.
You did then have the establishment splitting for a variety of reasons.
Most of the old aristocracy opposed the king.
Most of the old aristocracy was on the side of Parliament, which, again, very few people realise, because Parliament was their voice.
And so, in a sense, what this reminds me of, on a much more superficial and less serious level, is that the establishment suddenly found that Parliament was their voice, not the people's voice.
And we're trying to use Parliament not to carry out the people's will, but to stop the people's will.
Right.
So all the stuff we've been fed about how our history has been an ineluctable progress, well, progress towards better things.
Is that the Whiggish view?
It is, exactly.
So it's basically Parliamentarian propaganda from a bunch of Taliban-type lefty freaks.
Yes, that's a good way of putting it.
Right.
That's interesting.
So, in Civil War terms, we Brexiteers would have been...
The Cavaliers.
The Cavaliers.
Yes, I like to think so, but then I suppose that's because I sort of kind of identify with the Cavaliers, who seem to me a much nicer bunch on the whole.
At least they didn't go around slaughtering racehorses and hanging unmarried mothers.
They didn't slaughter racehorses.
Oh, I think the Parliamentarians did.
Oh my God, I'm so a Cavalier.
Well, you probably, I think it was Macaulay, who himself was a Whig, but quite a wit, which is, the two things don't always go together.
I think he said it was not so much the...
The pain of the animal that worried the parliamentarians, it was the pleasure of the spectators.
So what they wanted was to stop people enjoying themselves, doing what they thought were ungodly things.
Which is exactly like anties and fox hunting.
Yeah, it is rather.
Same thing.
Yeah, that's very interesting.
And Christmas.
I mean, there are people who think we shouldn't celebrate Christmas, after all, as you know, because after all it might offend some people.
Yeah, yeah, that's true.
Well, the Puritans thought Christmas was bad because it gave rise to what they called sensual pleasures.
Do you know what?
I went through a phase where, because I took part in a sealed knot battle.
Did you?
And I was on the parliamentarian side.
And so I got fed all this parliamentarian propaganda, and I was saying things like, a pox on the king, one king, king Jesus, and this kind of stuff.
And I was persuaded that actually, you know, that basically I would have been a leveler probably, because they were like...
You know, they were kind of libertarians, really, and all that.
But talking to you, Robert, it makes me realise that actually I would so have been a cavalier.
Although, one thing I've learned is that we think of the cavaliers as having the best kit, you know, the fancy, the sloppy hats.
But actually, in battle, the kit was often so similar that the only identifying marks, they would have to sort of have a sprig of heather or a sort of band of ribbon or something.
Of course, they had flags.
Each regiment had its own flag, which the colonel would design before the days in which regiments had standard colours.
And so you could put your own motto on your own flag.
And somebody, I forget who it was now, did a study of parliamentary and royalist flags.
And that's quite interesting, because the royalist flags were often more humorous.
The parliamentary ones, of course, were much more Taliban-like.
You know, one was...
Thou shalt break their kings with rods of iron and that kind of thing.
Yeah, lol.
Yes.
So the cavalier ones were much wittier?
Yes, they were.
This is the most interesting thing I think I've learned today about Brexit.
That even then the left couldn't meme.
Even then, the left are a bunch of human...
I say left, of course, we know.
You and I were at a dinner last night where one of the speakers was Kate Hoey.
My former MP, Labour MP, impeccable lefty background, I voted Labour twice, and she was a Brexiteer.
She was one of us.
Well, there is, you know, there's a so-called blue Labour tendency.
I'm not sure whether Kate is in formal terms part of that, but there is an old tradition, quite an old tradition among the Labour Party of being quite close, you know, very close indeed to popular life, popular culture...
Of course, in the old days, the trade unions, now much diminished.
But, you know, a sort of Labour Party that was the party of ordinary people.
And there was always an element in the Labour Party of intellectual leaders.
I mean, the leadership has often been, you know, old Etonians like you.
No, my son is.
Oh, right, I guess.
I've social climbed through my progeny.
Very good idea.
Yeah.
So there's always been some tension between the more popular elements of the Labour Party and its more intellectual leaders, often.
But what's happened now, recently, is that the intellectuals, or at least those who regard themselves as such, have become almost the whole party.
And the rank and file have, in many cases, gone over to the Conservatives.
But Kate, I think, belongs, in a sense, to this blue Labour tradition, which is patriotic, non-elitist, In touch with its grassroots and so on.
And I think that's the part of the Labour Party that has been most alienated by the antics of the last few years and many of whose supporters have come over to voting for Boris Johnson.
Hasn't one of the best things about being a Brexiteer been realising that one is on the side of the people?
Yes.
And you're saying that in the Civil War time, would the people have been mainly on the side of the King?
Well, the people...
Well, yes, that's...
I think, yeah, Orton was certainly true.
No opinion polls in those days.
No.
But when the King was captured, for example, when he surrendered to the Scots, as he did, and then was handed over to Parliament and became a prisoner, wherever he went, there were cheering crowds.
And one reason why they had to execute him was because he was too popular.
Right.
And, of course, the monarchy was brought back in 1660 by popular acclaim, when people got so fed up with Parliament that they wanted the king back.
And, indeed, somebody has made this point.
I mean, Boris is a famous swordsman.
He is rather like Charles II. This is like the Restoration.
The Merry Monarch.
The Merry Monarch.
And people like...
I mean, one funny thing, perhaps, about our political culture is that people quite like politicians to have a sort of lightness about them.
You know, people like, you think the people who are least popular in history, people like poor old Neville Chamberlain, for example, not a very funny man, I think.
And the people who are popular, of course, Disraeli is one, Churchill is one, both great wits.
Boris, in a sense, may be one.
He gives the impression of being the sort of chap you could go to the pub and have a drink with.
Whether he is or not, I have no idea.
Then he'd shake a wife.
Well, you'd have to go on your own, right?
Yeah, you definitely would.
But I think people do like to feel their politicians are sort of like them and can laugh at the things they laugh at.
And they don't like people talking down to them and they don't like people being sanctimonious.
And Jeremy Corbyn, who people say is a very nice chap, he always gives this impression of being a sort of puritanical preacher, a sort of Old Testament prophet who's denouncing sin and telling you you've got to be different because you're a bad person.
So are we talking really about Mary England here?
I suppose we are.
It's the revival of Merry England.
Well, if we're lucky it will be.
I hope it will be.
Can we go through history, through a few moments, and decide which were the Brexiteers of history?
Robin Hood and his Merry Men.
No, I think so.
Didn't like being ruled by the Normans.
Heriwood the Wake?
Definitely.
He'd definitely have been, yeah, one of us.
Yes.
What else?
Peasants' Revolt.
What was that?
Well, it was partly a revolt against serfdom and against the poll tax.
So you could say that's a kind of, what, a right-wing, not liking high taxes on small businesses.
Yep.
But it was also quite a patriotic movement, because they thought the king and his ministers had not been protecting them against the French.
The French had been raiding the coast of Kent, and it's in Kent that the Peasants' Revolt begins.
So it's a mixture of wanting a...
OK, I'm using somewhat modern terms.
A small state.
No high taxes.
No serfdom.
We don't want to be bossed around by...
And we don't want these foreigners raiding our coast.
Now, does that remind you of anything?
Slightly, yeah.
What?
Yes, exactly.
And Wars of the Roses, that's too complicated, isn't it?
Well, that's largely within the aristocracy.
Most people didn't get involved in that.
Well, unless you were a retainer, in which case you were kind of dragged in.
Yes, and you were professional then.
Okay.
What else have we...
Well, of course, you were saying earlier, has there been a time in which, at least I think you were getting towards this, in which part of the established elite were in fact loyal to something outside the country?
Yes.
I mean, George Orwell talks about Communists in the 1930s, but there weren't very many of them.
Some of them were quite prominent and influential in academia and in the media, but there weren't many of them.
I mean, you might think of, again, the Reformation in which the Catholics were, you know, Whoever side you are, whether you think they're a persecuted minority or if you think they were trying to restore a sort of theocratic system, the fact is they were, for a time, loyal to an authority outside the country.
Queen Elizabeth I had been declared a heretic, deprived of her crown by the Pope, and you have people within the country who are plotting to overthrow The government, the Queen, and to bring in, they hope, a foreign invasion.
To bring Britain back, bring England back to the European system, the predominant European system of Catholicism.
So that's, you know, okay, we can make these sort of rather facile comparisons with now, but...
I suppose my serious point would be that there have been very few occasions, you mentioned the Jacobites, a similar kind of period in which part of the ruling class were loyal to a government that was outside the country.
But it's very rare for that to have happened to us.
We've been rather fortunate.
So I would have thought not since the mid-18th century until...
Now, has there been a substantial part of the nation's elite, which seems to have placed its primary loyalty in something other than its own government, its own electorate, its own institutions.
Yes.
What would you say are the characteristics?
The English...
British, let's use the terms interchangeably.
Are there certain characteristics that we've had that have remained with us for a long, long time through the centuries and which came to the fore Well, of course, I don't think we can speak about the English and the British interchange, because we know the Scots are very different in this matter.
But what are the characteristics?
Well, I think the one that's come to the fore most, probably, is that although we...
Usually a fairly deferential society, perhaps, one in which people don't really want to rock the boat too much, in which they don't like extremism in politics.
Extremism is a bad word.
They don't like ideology.
Nevertheless, they all of a sudden were saying, you people, you know, the government, the politicians, parliament, The experts, the business lobbies, the universities are telling us what to do and we're not going to do it.
We don't believe you.
And that, I thought, is perhaps an English or a British characteristic, which I suppose one could call bloody-mindedness.
Bloody-mindedness.
People tell you that you can't do this and therefore you want to do it.
Or they tell you you must do this and therefore you say, well, I'm not going to.
Is that a characteristic that we have that other European countries don't?
Well, the French have it, I think.
Right, yeah.
As President Macron has found out to his cost in recent months.
Yes, that's true.
But then the French tend to be more violent.
The British, on the whole, don't go out in the streets to riot.
I mean, the whole Brexit thing has been completely non-violent.
Yes.
And it's not something that most people do very readily.
You know, you don't get British old-age pensioners blockading the railway station.
In France, you do.
I mean, a lot of the gilets jaunes have been quite old people, well, middle-aged, elderly people.
So we don't do that, but people kind of are stubborn, even if they're not necessarily very demonstrably.
Yes.
So it's not that they go around telling everybody what they think, but deep down they don't like being bossed around.
Why are we less violent than the French?
That's a good question.
And I'm not sure what the answer is.
Because we've beaten them loads of times.
Well, of course, we are capable of being rather violent.
In fact, extremely violent.
Of course, there are elements in our society that are violent.
But I think there has been a kind of inhibition against political violence for quite a long time.
In which people don't like it and it doesn't pay politically.
Violence tends to have a counter effect on your cause.
Because most people think it's not legitimate to use violence.
That's not the case in France.
You could say, well, the French have a tradition.
Tradition is a word that explains all sorts of things.
But the French, of course, since 1789, have frequently had changes of regime and changes of government that have been brought about in the streets.
So you can hardly say, you know, you shouldn't do that.
Because they'd say, well, you know, it was done in 1840.
It was done in 1871.
It was done in 1944.
So why can't we do it now?
So you think it's a function of history rather than of some national character?
It's worked in France, so they can do it.
Also, the other thing is, I mean, I think...
Governments in France tend to listen less, probably.
Great generalisation.
But the President of the Fifth Republic in France is a very remote and Olympian figure, as President Macron...
Announced he was going to be.
And therefore, if you feel that nobody's really listening to you, you can't get rid of the government.
Of course, they have a written constitution, which means you can't get rid of the president.
Well, what do you do if you're very upset?
No point in writing to your MP. You put on your yellow vest.
You put on your yellow vest and you kick up a stink in the street.
Right.
So this is a kind of...
Pivotal moment in our history, isn't it?
I mean, people are going to have a field day analysing all this.
I hope so.
I mean, I'd like to think it turns out to be not such a huge change that we shall find that life goes on happily, peacefully, calmly, and that people will look back and think, what was all the fuss about?
That's what I rather hope.
Yeah, I do too.
I don't want sort of bitterness like you have in France, where when you go to a village and you can still find two boules terrains, one where the people who were collaborators play and one where the people who were resistance play.
Yeah.
Good.
So I think, I mean, after the Civil War, which of course was infinitely worse than our present little disagreements over Brexit, people seem to have got together again quite quickly afterwards.
Did they?
Yeah.
How many died in the Civil War?
Oh, I can't remember, but it was as a proportion of the population more than in the First World War, for example.
Really?
Yeah.
Of course, a lot of that is death from disease, from general disturbance of the economy and so on.
But a lot of people died.
But families that had broken up got together again quite quickly, and it seems that people quite consciously decided that they'd got to put this behind them.
We can't do this again.
We're not going to go back to this.
We must, in future, find a way of getting on in a peaceful and civilised way.
So I hope we shall do that again.
Well, I'll drink to that.
I think we can be magnanimous in victory, aren't we, Robert?
We can.
We are.
Good.
As long as we've got victory, we're making.
Yeah, right.
Otherwise, maybe not.
Great.
Thank you.
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