OUR TIMES: The age of Elizabeth II
A.N. Wilson
Hutchinson, hbk, $79.99
Review by Peter Goodwin
"Eden, the only male British Prime Minister known to have varnished his fingernails, was easily the best-looking individual, of either sex, to occupy that office in the twentieth century."
Thus begins Wilson's chapter devoted to the Suez debacle.
A.N. Wilson's third volume of his history of Britain, following The Victorians and After The Victorians, is a racy commentary peppered with caricatures of individuals arrogant and vain, and an apparently accidental arrival at policy by those in charge, including the evangelical Tony Blair's misadventures in Iraq.
Surely it is the end of the age of deference.
The jacket prominently features Margaret Thatcher, the shopkeeper's daughter, by far the most interesting post-war prime minister, Falklands war-maker and union-smasher.
She was "Boudicca, leading the charge, the scythes on her chariot wheels cutting the legs off all who stood in her path".
The once "enchantingly beautiful" Elizabeth II is portrayed as a badly educated Philistine but also "one of those very mysterious people in history whose virtues consisted of what she was rather than what she did", one of those virtues being longevity.
The Queen still moves about her alien and indigenous subjects shaking hands and, the author suspects, feeling a stranger in her own land.
We have seen the democratisation of royalty (thanks largely to the cult of Diana), the rise of popular culture (the Rolling Stones, in every way more talented than the Beatles), Private Eye (written largely by men educated at public schools that were not Eton) and the decline of the Anglican Church (in 1967, Evensong was abandoned so people could watch Galsworthy's The Forsyte Saga on TV, never to be resurrected, says Wilson).
After Christine Keeler, Jeremy Thorpe and Germaine Greer, suddenly it's capitalist Damien Hirst's expensive tiger shark in formaldehyde and a confessional Tracey Emin's dirty bed.
So much for civilised behaviour.
Yesterday's hero, David Hockney, longtime exile in California, paints Yorkshire landscapes unrecognisable to many today.
"Today, my Britain, the England of my mother and father, no longer exists," writes Wilson.
There have been great material advances, but the major changes have all been destructive of the common culture.
Diana Dors (Diana Mary Fluck) and cuisine were foreign concepts taken on board that changed the colour and tenor of the place, as the motorway desecrated the countryside and, along with architects, destroyed the cities.
And membership of the EU destroyed the fishing industry.
But it was mass immigration and political correctness that was the final straw for Wilson, and extreme Islam, a form of religious punk, which raised the ante.
At the end of this period of economic prosperity, the City of London might still be a world financial centre, but it is no longer owned and controlled by British institutions.
A Britisher feels it keenly. And the author too, for this summary covers his lifespan.
Was it not always so? As a second-generation Anglo-Saxon New Zealander, I recognise British history, and our place even gets a couple of mentions (Karl Popper, Philip Schofield).
But for many here with other backgrounds, Britain must seem increasingly irrelevant - there has been a global reshuffling, and the map has other places drawn larger.
But there are good stories pinned to historic events in this entertainingly gloomy and well-indexed chronicle of perceived moral decline.
Peter Goodwin is a Dunedin reader.
