The Battle of Britain was won by members of our ‘clapped-out’ ruling class

‘As I write, highly civilised human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me.’ So began one of the most famous essays in the English language, George Orwell’s ‘The Lion and the Unicorn’, written almost 70 years ago.

It’s a much-loved essay thanks to its lyrical invocation of ‘English civilisation’: red pillar boxes, bad teeth, the old maids cycling to Holy Communion through the mists of the autumn mornings, etc. (John Major ‘borrowed’ some of this language when describing what he loved most about Britain.) But it’s worth pointing out that in most respects ‘The Lion and the Unicorn’ was completely wrongheaded. The theme of the essay was that the English class system was impeding the war effort, largely thanks to the incompetence of the public-school educated officer class. England, according to Orwell, was a family with the wrong members in control. If we were to stand a chance of defeating Hitler, the old ruling class had to be put out to grass. ‘What is wanted is a conscious open revolt by ordinary people against inefficiency, class privilege and the rule of the old,’ he wrote.

In fact, no such revolt took place and we still went on to win the war, albeit with a little help from our allies. Orwell’s essay can be read as a veiled attack on Winston Churchill, who was not only the embodiment of class privilege but beyond retirement age when he became Prime Minister in 1940. Orwell can be forgiven for lacking confidence in Churchill less than a year into his premiership, but it is now almost universally accepted that the Allied victory — or, more precisely, the avoidance of defeat before America entered the war — owed much to Churchill’s leadership. ‘I’m absolutely convinced that if Churchill hadn’t been there, the British people would have made terms with the Nazis,’ says Max Hastings, author of the recently published Finest Years: Churchill as Warlord 1940-45.