6 Unmerrie England

Of the forces shaping attitudes to Europe, the great British hangover has gone almost unnoticed. It contributed hugely to the country’s underperformance. Melancholia inhibited a rethinking of national strategy, encouraging policy-makers to rely on an obsolete great power plot.

The Pyrrhic nature of the 1945 victory, compounded by the exhaustion of two back-breaking conflicts and a lot of misery in between, largely explains the hangover. Peace did not bring sunlit uplands. On the contrary, post-war austerity exacerbated the consequences of the war. The nation suffered from a megadose of the universal anxiety about a shifting universe voiced in W.H. Auden’s six-part poem ‘The Age of Anxiety’ (1947). There was plenty to be anxious about. The ‘People’s War’ had not democratized the country – many, like novelist David Lodge, found the experience of national service an eye-opener. The dawn of the atomic age stoked anxiety. ‘Europe is finished, possibly parts of North and South America may survive’, declared Labour MP Evan Durbin after the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Loss of empire dismayed the political elite. From South Africa in 1947 Conservative politician Harold Macmillan mourned, ‘I sorrow for Britain now rapidly moving to a grave crisis, of which people are dimly aware … Much of the empire is in liquidation’.2 Bomb sites, run down cities, shabby furnishings and dreary clothes thickened the gloom. At No. 10 a visitor had ‘the odd feeling … of everything rather broken-down’; at the Foreign Office, ‘intimations of decay everywhere … chairs threadbare … porters in their long frock coats also somehow threadbare’.3

Philosopher Isaiah Berlin pronounced apocalyptically, ‘the ultimate end … is that we shall be absorbed – at least the Commonwealth will be – in the American orbit. We can never recover … People here will never work … they have become too civilized to do so’. Author Cyril Connolly contrasted Britain and America: ‘Here [London] the ego is at half-pressure; most of us are not men and women but members of a vast, seedy, overworked, over-legislated neuter class, with our drab clothes, our ration books and murder stories, our envious, strict, old-world apathies – a care-worn people’. Living for years on a weekly egg and microscopic meat ration made emigration attractive. A 1948 poll recorded 42 per cent of the population wished to emigrate. As war receded, rations contracted – bread in 1946, meat in 1952. American food parcels underscored the transatlantic power balance. The breakneck velocity of international change fazed rulers and ruled. The Soviet Union’s explosion of an atom bomb in 1949 – three years before Britain and much sooner than expected – exposed the nation’s vulnerability. Chief scientific adviser Sir Henry Tizzard was so shocked that he ‘could only believe that the Russians had stolen some plutonium’.4

France shook off post-Liberation blues; Britain’s hangover seemed permanent. Morale boosters made matters worse.

In the campus novel Lucky Jim author Kingsley Amis satirized the establishment’s crude PR exercise about a new Elizabethan age. Professor Welch asks junior lecturer Jim Dixon to give a public lecture for the College’s Open Week: ‘I thought something like “Merrie England” might do as a subject. Not too academic, and not too … not too’. A tipsy Dixon botches the lecture and his academic career: ‘The point about Merrie England is that it was about the most un-Merrie period in our history.’ The fifties were as un-merrie as the first Elizabethan age.6

The frustrations of peacemaking disheartened many. The Manchester Guardian compared the 1946 Paris peace conference to Sartre’s play Huis-Clos. ‘Like the characters in Sartre’s Hell, the nations are trapped by their own past actions and cannot escape. The situation is frozen.’7 A senior UN official observed, ‘It is very difficult to make an interesting report on the proceedings and atmosphere of such a dull conference – there is no enthusiasm anywhere, because everybody knows beforehand what the results will be, which is no results whatever’.8

Multilateralism added to the ennui.

Sport barely lifted spirits. Roger Bannister’s four-minute mile (1954) hardly compensated for humiliating defeats in the 1950 World Cup in Brazil and a thrashing by a West Indies cricket team at Lords. In 1953 Hungary’s national team, ‘the Magical Magyars’, became the first Continental team to beat the English 6–3 at their own game on their own soil. Ealing comedies and spy fiction offered escape. Passport to Pimlico (1949), Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949) and The Lavender Hill Mob (1951) each grossed more than Scott of the Antarctic (1948), apotheosizing self-sacrifice, physical endurance and stiff-upper lip; spy fiction suggested that British brains might compensate for lack of brawn in a superpower era. Ian Fleming’s James Bond, Agent 007, played a pretend game in which Britannia still ruled the waves.

A devil’s kitchen of refractory issues besieged the Churchill government of 1951–5, leaving premier and aides ‘depressed and bewildered’:

It is foolish to continue living with illusions … the facts are stark, wrote the premier’s secretary. What can we do? Increasing production is only a palliative in the face of foreign competition.

Labour’s elder statesman Hugh Dalton lamented the prospect of ‘Europe going by default … Germany will be forging ahead; with all their gifts of efficiency. And we, in our mismanaged, mixed economy, overpopulated little island, shall become a second rate power, with no influence and continuing crises … I should advise all younger people to migrate to Canada or Australia’. In Corridors of Power (1964) novelist C.P. Snow captured Whitehall despair. A tabloid leader, ‘Are they throwing away our independence?’, roused mandarin Hector Rose: ‘Good God alive, what kind of world are they living in? Do they think that if there were a single way in heaven or earth, which could keep this damned country a great power, some of us wouldn’t have killed ourselves to find it?’11

Decolonization deepened depression. Graceful British farewells are sometimes contrasted with French colonialism’s death agonies. The comparison ignores the psychological effects of flight from empire. Historian A.L. Rowse, having grown up ‘with intense pride’ in the empire and ‘an unquestioned assumption … that England and the Empire were the greatest thing in the world’, could hardly believe that it had vanished. ‘The young officers think we are on the decline as a great power,’ reported the British embassy in Cairo, ‘they have a real hatred politically for us … No amount of concession or evacuation on our part will evoke the slightest gratitude in return. Whoever Egypt may want in the future as an ally, it will not be us’. From Aleppo, traveller Freya Stark described how ‘a pale young effendi … made me a long speech about the wicked British colonial empire – a crowd all clustering round … I am never thought to be English, but when I said that I was, “You love the Jews” said another effendi’.

Suspicions that the Americans were ‘out to take our place’ and ‘to run the world’ made retreat harder to stomach. Citing a conversation with the director of the CIA, a former cabinet secretary warned Churchill that once Britain left the Canal Zone America would move in. Eden’s private secretary ‘slept badly and became very depressed about the world in general. Our economic situation, German and Japanese competition, destruction of British influence in the Mediterranean and Middle East … The Americans are not backing us anywhere. In fact, having destroyed the Dutch empire, the United States are now engaged in undermining the French and British empires as hard as they can.’13

How had the country got into such a state? The literati pondered the state of affairs. Novelist and civil servant C.P. Snow ‘probed … a failure of national will, the incapacity of an ageing society to adapt itself to the challenge of the new’. Anthony Hartley, deputy editor of the Spectator, accused intellectuals of a betrayal. Shrinking power and the Welfare State had brought ‘a narrowing of horizons and a sense of frustration’, leaving individuals and governments feeling they had ‘little freedom of manoeuvre’. Historian G.R. Elton lashed out at socialist intellectual R.H. Tawney, condemning his Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (1926) for ‘the whole collapse of self-confidence which we have encountered in this present generation’. Adversity had its uses. Interviewed in 1963, writer Doris Lessing found England ‘a paradise’ for writing because it ‘is a backwater and it doesn’t make much difference what happens here, or what decisions are made here’.14

Westward the land looked bright. Comparisons with the United States cranked up gloom. The UK could not compete with stellar American analysts Herman Kahn, Henry Kissinger and Thomas Schelling on defence and foreign policy. Labour backbencher Denis Healey regularly visited the Boston area, his ‘intellectual paradise’. A young historian migrated to the University of Wisconsin: ‘made the more attractive by my gloomy assessment of the state of British society in the late 1950s. Although the austerities of post-war Britain had gone and there was much trumpeting about affluence and assurances that “you never had it so good”, too many of the old class divisions and inequalities remained for my liking’.15

Exclusion from the Space Age added to despondency. Hope lingered that a country which had invented radar and the Spitfire would move into rockets and eventually moon shots. Eagle comic’s Dan Dare conquered the solar system wearing something that looked very much like an RAF uniform; Sir Hubert called the shots in the international space force, with bit-parts for ‘Hank’ and ‘Pierre’.16 From 1954 Britain’s contribution to joint missile research with the United States was an intermediate range ballistic missile (IRBM) called Blue Streak. By 1960 escalating costs forced cancellation and dependence on American technology. Britain’s pride and joy, Jodrell Bank, the largest radio telescope in the world in 1957, began live tracking American and Soviet moon probes.

Anxiety for the nation’s future provoked a questioning of assumptions. The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) rallied young and old. The film comedy I’m All Right Jack (1959) satirized the class system and labour relations. TV shows like Beyond the Fringe (1961), That Was The Week That Was (1962), and the film Dr Strangelove (1964) targeted the establishment, giving political satire mass appeal. Philip Larkin’s poetry evoked a climate of fatalism, uncertainty and sense of overwhelmingly hostile circumstances. The nation was no longer sure of what it was, or wanted to be. Of those polled by New Society in 1963, 73 per cent considered ‘individual happiness’ much more important than ‘national greatness’. Historian Arthur Bryant, whose writings crafted wartime patriotism, lamented: ‘there is no unifying faith to bind us together.’17

‘The Angry Young Men’ writers pulled and pummelled identity and values in an ironic, sceptical and mocking tone. As consumer durables multiplied, international clout contracted. Why so much self-doubt when Britons had ‘never had it so good’? The mid-1950s surge in living standards came too late to wipe out memories of the Great Depression in the 1930s. Affluence does not equal contentment. On the contrary, as historian Avner Offer argues, it ‘breeds impatience, and impatience undermines well-being’.18 Mixed messages about the nation’s ranking sowed confusion. ‘His Majesty’s Government do not accept the view … that we have ceased to be a Great Power’, Bevin reassured the Commons in 1947. Privately, chief scientific adviser Sir Henry Tizard conceded, ‘We are not a Great Power and never will be again. We are a great nation but if we continue to behave like a Great Power we shall soon cease to be a great nation’.19

Conflicting pronouncements from on high continued. In 1950 Bevin confessed, ‘the day when we, as Great Britain, can declare a policy independently of our allies, has gone’. Greatness returned four years later. In 1954 Whitehall’s grand vizier, Sir Oliver Franks, delivered the annual Reith Lectures, the BBC’s crown jewels. Under the title ‘Britain and the tide of world affairs’, Franks talked up British power, and avoided an ‘exact definition of a Great Power’. After citing American opinion that Britain no longer counted, he asserted: ‘Britain is going to continue to be what she has been, a Great Power’. Two years later in May 1956 readers, sedated by establishment pap, read in the News Chronicle: ‘The Days of GREAT Britain are over.’20

Within months a frenzy of recrimination over the Suez debâcle outed the issue. ‘Britain at this moment is no longer a great Power’, announced Labour’s Daily Herald. ‘Is Britain now a Second-Class Power?’ asked the Conservative Daily Mail. Macmillan’s first television broadcast after becoming prime minister in January 1957 unequivocally rejected dethronement: ‘I’ve heard people say: “is not Britain only a second or third-class Power now?” What nonsense! It’s not just material resources that make a nation great. It’s character and leadership … So don’t let’s have any more defeatist talk of second-class Power’.21

The monarchy joined in the post-Suez gnashing of teeth. ‘Just at this moment we are suffering a national defeat comparable to any lost military campaign’, chided Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh; ‘it is about time we pulled our fingers out’. In different language The Times rounded up the usual suspects to explain ‘the present malaise’ – ‘the pointlessness’ of life felt by many young people, ‘confusion’ about economic problems, ‘bewilderment’ caused by the sudden sharp contraction of imperial and international power, especially painful for a people that had always looked for external outlets, and a conviction that ‘material ease is not enough’. Uncertainty about the country’s domestic and international future ran counter to a profound belief ‘that we should do admirable things and that we should do them better than anyone else’. The leader writer invested hope in the Common Market: ‘if and when Britain enters the Common Market, she may have opened another and a new field in which to employ her outward looking impulses in a constructive manner.’22

‘The British are still quite capable of surrendering to facts provided they are told them,’ argued one analyst, ‘but the institutions and the men who work them have … become dangerously out of touch with the public, insensitive to change, and wrapped up in their private rituals’. This gap between people and decision-makers sustained and deepened the malaise. Citizens had no say in external policy-making. In the general election of 1945 a Conservative candidate refused even to answer questions: ‘It is not my policy during elections.’ A self-styled mature democracy asserting global moral leadership allowed almost no space outside Whitehall and Westminster for international affairs. Parliamentary foreign affairs debates were comparatively rare; MPs and influencers were kept away from the holy of holies. One of the problems in international relations is to ensure that a sufficient quantity and variety of information circulates not only between governments but through the whole spectrum of decision-makers, opinion formers and citizens, then feeds back into government, supplementing the flow through official channels. Whitehall made no effort to connect with metropolitan elites, let alone voters.23

An Anglo–American exchange crystallized conflicting outlooks on policy-making. Livingstone Merchant, assistant secretary in the State Department, astonished Evelyn Shuckburgh, Eden’s secretary, with stories of how he had ‘to appear before Congressional Committees’ to explain policy issues, ‘and even to be “quizzed by Senators on the TV for hours on end”’. Merchant continued: ‘Foreign Policy could no longer be a matter handled by experts in secret, but must be the subject of continuous scrutiny by the masses. Even the English would have to give up the “old-fashioned” idea of entrusting vital secrets to experts.’ Shuckburgh ‘feared that democracy could not survive if issues, as opposed to personalities, were to be put before the public. This was the fascist referendum idea. You can fool the public about issues, but not … about the character and quality of leaders’.24

Why so little debate about foreign policy? No Cobdens and Brights energized Westminster. Parliamentary groups – Keep Left Group, Bevanites, Tory Suez Group and Conservative Monday Club – though mettlesome at times, lacked the muscle to shape policy decisively. The European Movement and Federalist associations did not target a wide public. In his 1955 Ford Lectures historian A.J.P. Taylor charted the dissenting tradition in British foreign policy, but stopped the story in 1939, ignoring the near invisibility of opposition after 1945. Strong extra-parliamentary lobbies like CND and the Anti-Apartheid Movement did not appear until almost the end of the 1950s.

An older historiography assumed indifference to international affairs. ‘Where foreign affairs are concerned,’ wrote one analyst, ‘the bulk of the population knows little and cares less’. In fact, the supposedly silent majority held decided opinions on the Cold War, nuclear weapons, Egypt, Korea and German rearmament. George Kennan, a prime mover in America’s Cold War strategy, became its critic. Invited by the BBC to give the 1957 Reith Lectures, Kennan – rehearsing for one of the talks – caught sight of ‘one of the technicians, a wiry, little Cockney woman’, who he later learned was the wife of a London bobby, ‘pounding the table vehemently with her fist in enthusiasm and approval’. Voter indifference on overseas interests has been greatly exaggerated. Though polls registered big fluctuations of interest in world affairs, they showed consistently strong support for a summit. Asked in December 1951 what was ‘the most urgent problem the government must solve in the next few months’, a majority replied ‘foreign affairs’. Five months later ‘the cost of living’ pushed international affairs into fourth place – by June 1953 international problems again topped the list. The public knew quite a lot about Europe. In 1949 67 per cent of respondents had heard of the Council of Europe and 44 per cent approved; in 1950 77 per cent of those asked knew of the Schuman Plan. Between July 1960 and January 1963 a consistent majority favoured British membership of the EEC. Support for membership peaked at 71 per cent in August 1966.25

Why, then, so little involvement? Quite simply, citizens were unwanted. ‘Keep off the grass’ signs abounded. A secretive, paternalistic state insisted on people knowing their place and deferring to government. Occasionally, one of the political elite broke ranks. A junior minister in the Attlee government believed ministers should give more information: ‘the Government ought to issue a statement explaining exactly to the country the nature of the danger threatening us and the inevitability of sacrifice’. The dearth of think tanks and the absence of a strong community of experts outside Whitehall made ‘the public … much more dependent upon the version of events which the government chooses to give it’. Government managed information, discouraging discussion of defence, security and overseas issues. Before the Public Records Act of 1958 the state locked up official files indefinitely. The foreign secretary refused to allow a prominent backbencher from his own party to consult fifty-year-old FO papers about the Entente Cordiale of 1904.26

The convention that questions involving ‘the national interest’ should not be raised served as a catch-all. Anything nasty in the woodshed had to stay there. ‘I have heard it maintained, in all seriousness,’ wrote historian Geoffrey Barraclough apropos the Suez affair, ‘that no attempt should be made to discover the actual course of events, lest something be revealed which might be detrimental to Anglo–US relations’. ‘I think our spokesmen talk too much’, foreign secretary Selwyn Lloyd advised Macmillan. ‘I am instructing the Department … to say flatly they have no statement to make. We want to have the output reduced and News Department confined as far as possible to statements which it is really in our interest to have published’. Briefing BBC chiefs about civil defence and the H-bomb, Macmillan confided: ‘They [ministers] did not desire to keep the public in entire ignorance; on the other hand they did not want to stimulate the feeling so easily accepted by the British people because it agreed with their natural laziness in these matters, that because of the terrible nature of the hydrogen bomb there was no need for them to take any part in home defense measures.’27

Apparent indifference to international issues reflected inanition, not apathy. British Blue Books and French Yellow Books kept Victorians better informed on foreign policy than their mid-twentieth-century descendants. Globalization and the new communications technology of the sixties released floods of information, but quality suffered. The rise of television forced the downsizing of newspaper offices overseas, leaving coverage patchy. Foreign news had to be of the ‘Gee Whiz!’ variety to win space and attention. The BBC, familiarly known as Auntie or the Beeb, trumpeted its ‘educational role’ in a democracy, providing the public ‘with a service of information’ on foreign affairs ‘so that the public should take an enlightened interest in, and form a balanced view of, current world events’.28 But government had the whip hand because the Corporation’s Royal Charter gave ministers the power to revoke the licence. Ministers appointed the Board of Governors and set the annual licence fee, ensuring opportunities for further interference. The BBC, like the press, was subject to the Official Secrets Act and censorship via Defence Notices (D-Notices). A D-Notice of February 1958 instructed the BBC not to disclose any details of ballistic missile deployment in the United Kingdom. MI5 vetted newly appointed staff and candidates for promotion.

The BBC–Whitehall marriage deprived listeners of an effective forum. The war reinforced deference. ‘The war-time habits of authority on the side of the Government and of subordination on the side of the BBC’, noted a BBC producer, ‘have been transmitted as acquired characteristics to their peace-time descendants’. The popular discussion programme ‘The Brains Trust’ was told to avoid ‘all questions’ involving religion and political philosophy. Questions rejected included: ‘What does “The Brains Trust” think should be the future of the British Empire? Reason for rejection: “risky”.’ In its anxiety to run with the establishment the Beeb shied away from controversy and analysis of overseas news and world affairs. BBC Governor Arthur Mann, former editor of the Yorkshire Post, called for an expansion of news services – all evidence indicated ‘a growing public interest in what is happening of importance at home and abroad’.29

The Corporation gagged itself with the Fourteen Day Rule – excluding any issues currently being discussed in Parliament, or for two weeks before parliamentary debates. The announcement of parliamentary business only one week in advance put discussion of topical issues off limits. Another self-denying ordinance forbade anything controversial between the dissolution of parliament and general elections, and during parliamentary sittings. In the 1950 general election only the BBC and Radio Moscow ignored ‘the headline news of an “atom talks” proposal for the Big Three made by Churchill’. Commented one observer, ‘this was neutrality carried to the lengths of castration’.30 Deeply fractured opinion during the Suez crisis pointed up the absurdity of the Fourteen Day Rule, forcing government to concede its indefinite suspension. As a result, the general election of 1959 was the first to be reported on television and radio like any other news.

‘Coverage of elections and international affairs’, wrote broadcaster Robin Day, ‘was ludicrously unworthy of a mature democracy’. The house-trained Corporation took the initiative in securing Whitehall clearance for potentially controversial broadcasts. In April 1957 foreign secretary Lloyd in a talk on ‘Woman’s Hour’ blamed Communists for instigating an anti-H Bomb tests movement. The smear provoked hundreds of critical letters and the comment from Labour MP Barbara Castle that Lloyd ‘must have thought he was talking on Children’s Hour’. A producer went cap in hand to the Foreign Office to ask permission to broadcast some of the feedback. A.J.P. Taylor’s challenge to the government’s Cold War policy got him banned from the Third Programme. His advocacy of alliance with Russia provoked questions in Parliament – mischievous as ever, he promised not to say ‘anything that will make a Member of Parliament of limited intelligence ask questions in the House of Commons’.31

Insiders spoke out. Third Programme talks producer Peter Laslett protested against the impact of self-censorship:

We deliberately confine ourselves to discussion of foreign affairs, that is, of events and personalities, and meticulously avoid discussion of foreign policy … In my view we should make every effort to rehabilitate its reputation as an organ for the discussion of British foreign policy, and of the attitude of people in foreign countries to us and our allies. I realize that there is a possibility of embarrassing the Foreign Office if we go too far in this direction. But I feel that the Foreign Office is … inordinately sensitive.32

Auntie’s self-censorship ensured that hot button issues escaped effective scrutiny. Taboo subjects included nuclear weapons and pacifism. A ban on unscripted discussions made it easy to filter and monitor output. Scripts about nuclear energy had to be cleared with the prime minister personally. A twenty-minute feature on the peaceful uses of atomic energy took six months to get clearance. The film War Game (1965) was suppressed and not broadcast until 1986. Only two broadcasts about pacifism took place in nearly a decade.

Despite a doubling of weekly television news time in 1954–5, critical discussion of news had to wait until the 1960s and 1970s. The Beeb made little effort to assess continental political developments, barely mentioning French and West German general elections – extensive live coverage went to American politics. Until commercial television arrived in 1955 no one attempted the probing interview. Politicians chose the questions they would answer. Interviewing foreign secretary Lloyd in December 1955 BBC Radio submitted questions in advance: ‘his officials arrived at Broadcasting House … with the questions beautifully typed on thick grey paper which would not crackle and so give the game away when we read our parts from this script.’ The sixties helped to liberalize the Corporation, but it had a long way to go. In 1968 technology minister Tony Benn spoke out: ‘in my view, the BBC absolutely failed in its function because it … always edited things and it always wanted to squeeze people into … programmes instead of providing facilities for people to say what they wanted to say’.33

The press offered no comfort to those turned off by Auntie’s sycophantic twaddle. The ‘Yes Sir, No Sir, three bags full’ relationship between lobby correspondents and politicians bred mistrust. Journalists focused on projecting the decisions and views of politicians rather than nurturing a critical understanding of the political process. Downing Street’s press adviser found the Westminster lobby correspondents remarkably easy to manipulate: ‘it is amazing to see how much of one’s lightest guidance over the phone appears in the papers next day from the Political Correspondents.’ Lobby management worked smoothly, ‘by its control of the sources of information, with the implied threat that criticism of policies would lead to a less full flow to that correspondent, by co-opting all of us diplomatic correspondents into a cosy club of those in the know, I fear that the government … did manage the news of our foreign policy.’ In the Spectator Bernard Levin sided with voters and popularized a new iconoclastic style of parliamentary reporting – treated the Commons as theatre. Journalist John Freeman’s television interrogations in the BBC series Face to Face (1959–62) ended the era of kid-glove treatment. The breakthrough came too late. Sociologist Richard Hoggart claimed that ‘a generation had grown up expert at explaining away, insulated from thinking that there is ever likely to be a cause for genuine enthusiasm or a freely good act … the catch phrase is the brittle and negative, “So what”’.34

The inventor of the term ‘soft power’, Harvard academic Joseph S. Nye, defined it as ‘the ability to get what you want through attraction rather than coercion or payments’. Politicians disarmed themselves, imposing draconian financial cuts on the main arsenals of British soft power. True, a travelling circus of royalty, Old Vic, Sadler’s Wells and Spurs could not replace hard power, but a determined bid to project language and values would have revived brand Britain. The main agencies for publicity – FO, BBC and British Council – liaised closely with Whitehall. Though British propaganda in both world wars scored highly – winning Hitler’s praise – self-marketing in peacetime did not come easily. Churchill’s response to ministerial protests against the Treasury’s unprecendented cuts in overseas publicity illustrates the limitations of his leadership in the early 1950s: ‘As for information that we send abroad, surely that task is accomplished by the newspapers at their own expense. We might help them circulate, but … they say a lot of nasty things about us.’35

Selling Britannia went awry in a Monty Python-like way. Shaped like a medieval tent, the British pavilion at the Expo 58 Brussels World Fair seemed to point backwards in time. The British Council in Asia had lost touch with younger audiences. A Council lecturer invited at short notice to speak in a South East Asian village was surprised to find an audience of mostly small children already dressed for bed. He delivered a set piece on British universities – illustrated by a film on Oxbridge ‘notable for its portrayal of a don in action, giving a tutorial to his pipe. At the end the children had to be woken up just sufficiently to get them into bed’. For some time the United States Information Service had offered a weekly evening of old cartoon films, Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck, and the audience assumed they would get the same.36

UK propaganda neglected mainland Europe and failed to find a voice. From 1951 the BBC’s external services, together with overseas information agencies, suffered savage cuts. Total weekly programme hours sank from 648 hours in 1950 to 540 in 1952 at a time when the Soviet Union trebled its own external broadcasting. BBC offices in Latin America closed down. The widely read Arabic Listener ceased publication. Capital equipment like transmitters could not be replaced. The British Council fell under the Treasury axe, losing 40 per cent of funding between 1949 and 1954. Cuts of this size blighted most activities in Western Europe and Latin America. ‘Our European friends and clients’, recalled a Council representative, ‘were astonished … the whole of Europe had become almost everywhere Anglophile’.37

Officials demanded an intensification of propaganda, leaving their masters in no doubt about its importance. ‘We are already accused of not being serious about the European “idea”. If we were to pull out of cultural activity in Europe our critics would have an unanswerable case against us’. Vincent Tewson, General Secretary of the Trades Union Council (TUC), protested: ‘I am not anti-American … But it would be just as well if we faced the fact that the Americans are pouring people into the countries of Asia and Africa who are making contacts with organized workers and are putting over American ideas.… In many instances Trade Unionists in certain countries would be glad to turn to the British for advice if there was someone with whom they were in contact … the diplomacy of the West is not to be thought of in terms of what the Americans are doing … there is a British angle to be advanced’.38

In the mid-50s Britain lost the initiative in Europe and the Middle East. ‘We are at present being “talked” out of the Middle East. Vicious and wholly mendacious propaganda continues against us, unchecked and unanswered,’ bewailed a leading Conservative. ‘The overriding lesson of the Suez operation’, the commander of the Anglo–French military intervention at Suez insisted, ‘is that world opinion is now an absolute principle of war … However successful the pure military operations may be they will fail … unless national, Commonwealth and Western world opinion is sufficiently on our side’.39

Soft power demanded values and engagement. A penniless Britannia could only appeal to fading moral leadership: ‘it is for us to show that the British way of life with its freedom and democracy, can in peace as in war be an example to the whole world’, proclaimed Attlee. The constant parading of war service invited mockery. ‘How ready they showed themselves to claim the world’s moral leadership in and out of season, or to rub in the debt of admiration owed to them for their steadfastness in their finest hour by endlessly intoning the old theme song “we stood alone”’, jeered a Dutch journalist. The Cold War focus on ‘Free World’ values made it harder to project a distinctive post-imperial British voice. ‘All our propaganda’, noted junior minister Anthony Nutting, ‘is planned against the background of the Soviet threat – no longer just “projecting Britain”’. ‘Our need’, Commonwealth Secretary Lord Swinton urged Cabinet colleagues, ‘is to sell Britain as a great industrial country with great assets, moral, physical and scientific’. A country forced to abandon its Blue Streak missile for American technology could hardly boast of scientific leadership, however. Labour leader Harold Wilson’s electioneering talk in 1964 of ‘the white heat’ of scientific revolution swayed party faithful but not the world. Propaganda lacked a sense of the country’s future.40

The state’s reluctance to reach out to citizens imposed a huge handicap in the race to stay competitive. ‘I doubt if we can really … continue to play a dominant part in world affairs’, warned a Treasury official in 1945, ‘unless the average man or woman in the UK realizes just how we stand, and the colossal effort which is necessary if we are to remain an important and even a leading country.’ The ‘nanny knows best’ ethos shunned a national conversation, focusing instead on constructing a Cold War consensus to underpin an Anglo–American alliance and an Atlanticist approach to European unity. Could Britain have rediscovered a sense of purpose? Belief in a ‘British way’ was robust but undefined – ‘our people’ have ‘never had it so good’ an election slogan, no more. Macmillan’s ‘Let us, if we can, be the Greeks of the new Roman Empire’ was a non-starter. Nothing sounded less sexy than playing sage uncle to American cousins.41

Diagnosing the need for a vision was one thing, defining it another. David Eccles, President of the Board of Trade in the Macmillan government, mused: ‘North America and Russia have that mysterious dynamic which makes a people grow. If we are losing it this is because the nature and direction of the next advance in our strength has to be in ways which offend our tradition of greatness … as incentives we have discarded imperialism and religion.’ Diplomat and moral rearmament crusader Archie Mackenzie vented frustration: ‘We desperately need an ideology to guide our trade, a titanic effort to re-organize and redirect the resources of the Free World – something so big that it will call for sacrifices from us all but will also turn the tide in the key under-developed areas’.42

Macmillan’s efforts to galvanize backbenchers backfired. The ending of ‘the great dominant period of British power and wealth’, he declared, ‘was no reason for defeatism … We now had to struggle to keep the sterling area alive … Yet that was nothing new in our experience. The first Elizabethan age was a period of struggle to play off Spain against France, and even at the time of Marlborough’s wars we had to contend with similar difficulties’. The ‘history for dummies’ ploy fooled no one, least of all ministerial colleagues: ‘Harold’s conversation was littered as usual with historical analogies: “Of course the situation is really like the Augustan Age” etc. Anthony [Eden] said this analogy was inaccurate and anyway unfortunate. On another occasion Bobbety [Robert Cecil, Marquess of Salisbury] had lost his patience in Cabinet and said to Harold, “I really don’t see any resemblance between us and Queen Elizabeth I”.’43

Radical protest arrived too late to correct the democratic deficit or shake off the national depression. The sixties subversion of taboos and authority exacerbated the sense of a collective nervous breakdown. Reminders of ‘national values and enterprise’ provoked mockery. Disillusioned with ageing home models, young Britons hero-worshipped a dynamic and youthful-looking American President. In his English History 1914–1945, A.J.P. Taylor, one of the country’s most popular historians, attempted to restore a sense of national pride, praising Britons as ‘the only people who went through both world wars from beginning to end. Yet … remained a peaceful and civilized people, tolerant, patient, and generous’. Northern Ireland Catholics, prisoners of Kenya’s Hola detention camp and the Nyasaland ‘police state’, and expelled Diego Garcia islanders, would have vigorously dissented.44

The British state defied a quick fix. The hegemony of governing elites made outsider criticisms seem naïve and ill-informed. In 1959 historian Hugh Thomas edited The Establishment, a collection of essays on the theme of the master class’s redundancy. ‘The assumption was that once that class was swept away, proud old England would reassert herself as a society both humane and industrially efficient and capable of exercising by her example a moral force for good in the world’. By 1968 Thomas had retreated: ‘well-established and broad national attitudes rather than those of an elite are making it rather difficult for either a Labour or a Conservative administration to resolve “the English question”.’45

Revelations of political mendacity in the Suez affair and the Profumo scandal of 1961 quickened the corrosion of trust in government, making it much harder to reset the national mood. Hugh Thomas’s The Suez Affair (1966), the first non-partisan history of the episode, rekindled indignation and humiliation. Many sitting Labour MPs had been in the Commons in 1956 and several tried to introduce legislation establishing an inquiry into the episode. Two best-sellers – Anthony Nutting’s No End of a Lesson: The Story of Suez (1967) and J.C. Masterman’s The Double Cross System in the War of 1939–1945 (1972) signalled changing attitudes within and towards the governing elite. Masterman fought for years to publish an internal MI5 study of Britain’s double agents which he had written while working for the agency. Nutting, junior minister in the Eden government of 1955–7, resigned over Suez, losing his parliamentary seat. He waited ten years before spilling the beans.

Nutting debunked denials of Anglo–French collusion with Israel in the attack on Egypt. The perseverance of Nutting and Masterman achieved a significant victory. The state’s guardians no longer preached as an article of faith that policy-making and the existence of the security services were off-limits. Masterman reflected: ‘how strange it was that I, who all my life had been a supporter of the Establishment, should become, at eighty, a successful rebel … But … sometimes in life you feel that there is something which you must do and in which you must trust your own judgment and not that of any other person’.46