As a would-be historian (engaged on the biography of Margaret Thatcher), I feel envious of Lord Saville. I could do with having all my hotel bills paid for 12 years, a full legal team to assist, the right to demand the presence of witnesses and £191 million. His 5,000 pages are the most expensive history book ever written. But however judicious Lord Saville has tried to be, his report cannot escape its ultimate political purpose — to please Sinn Fein. In that sense, its author is not Lord Saville, but Tony Blair, who set up the inquiry as part of a political deal. As people call for the soldiers who shot people on that day 38 years ago to be prosecuted, a running commentary is kept up by Martin McGuinness. He is now the Deputy First Minister of Northern Ireland, but he was the IRA’s chief of staff through its bloodiest period and, says Saville, ‘probably’ carried a sub-machine gun on Bloody Sunday and may have fired it. He will not be prosecuted for anything. This is what Mr Blair intended. Perhaps the strongest single element in the New Labour mindset — born of its determination to shed its own party’s past — was the idea that nothing good ever happened in Britain before 1997. So it was a matter of doctrine for Mr Blair to tell the story of Britain’s past unfavourably. He completely lacked the sense, always present in previous prime ministers, that it was dangerous for the nation’s authorities to trash the actions of their predecessors or of the armed forces. As his chief of staff, Jonathan Powell, has put it, ‘Northern Ireland was not our war.’ The notion that Bloody Sunday started the Troubles and Tony Blair ended them is just fine for him. But it is fiction, not history.
On 18 June 1940, 125 years after the battle of Waterloo and 70 years ago this Friday, Winston Churchill delivered his famous ‘finest hour’ speech. What is less well remembered here is that General De Gaulle also delivered his first, almost equally famous broadcast to France that evening. The French government, led by Marshal Pétain, was suing for peace with Germany, ‘alleging’, as De Gaulle put it, ‘the defeat of our armies’. Speaking loudly into the BBC microphone, De Gaulle said: ‘Is the defeat final? No!… For France is not alone… She can unite with the British Empire… I, General De Gaulle, now in London, call upon the French officers and soldiers… Whatever happens, the flame of French resistance must not and shall not go out.’ At the time, not everyone thought that either speech had worked. Churchill made his speech twice on the same day — first to parliament, and then, shortened, as a broadcast. Harold Nicolson recorded that he repeated himself because ‘He hates the microphone… he just sulked and read his House of Commons speech over again… it sounded ghastly on the wireless.’ As for De Gaulle’s words, they were heard by hardly anybody, and were not recorded because all the technical resources of the BBC were taken up in recording Churchill’s broadcast. Instead, De Gaulle’s text was re-read on air by British broadcasters four times over the next 24 hours. The situation which Britain and France faced was so desperate that neither man had much more than words at his command, but perhaps it was for this very reason that the words, once disseminated and pondered, did work. To understand their importance, one must imagine what that single day, and all succeeding days, would have been like if they had not been delivered.
My mind had turned to the war because, on Sunday, we went to a 100th birthday party for our neighbour, Jackie Killearn. Jacqueline Castellani married Miles Lampson, later Lord Killearn, in 1934, when he was aged 64 and high commissioner in Egypt. He was later ambassador there all through the war, effectively running the place. At the party on Sunday, Jackie sat beside a photograph of Churchill, in open-necked shirt, holding her newborn boy, Victor, in the grounds of the Cairo embassy in August 1942. This picture later appeared on the cover of Time magazine, to symbolise hope in the conflict. Back at home, I looked it up in Martin Gilbert. Churchill wrote to his wife: ‘Jacqueline is most agreeable and the baby, with whom I have been — [photographed], is a fat preternaturally solemn child as may well be said [sic] by the seriousness of its surroundings’ [the second Battle of Alamein was not won until early November]. Greg Barker, our local MP, made an excellent speech at the party. He pointed out that, when Jackie was born in 1910, Churchill was on manoeuvres with the Kaiser. A century is a long time.
It was a new thing for Jackie Killearn to admit her age at all. As befits a famous beauty, she had previously kept it concealed, which led to wild guesses. When we moved to the village in the 1990s, I mentioned to Denis Thatcher, who knew the area, that she was living there. ‘Jackie Killearn still alive!’ he exclaimed. ‘She must be as old as the bloody Virgin Mary!’
Each year, it is this column’s painful duty to remind the public of the Prince of Wales’s prediction, first made in Brazil in March 2009, that we have only ‘100 months left to take the necessary steps to avert irretrievable climate and ecosystem collapse’. This means that the collapse will have taken place by early July 2017, so now there are only just over seven years to go. As I pointed out at the time, Prince Charles also predicts that, by 2050, there will be nine billion people on the planet, mostly consuming at Western levels. It is not clear how this could be so if climate had irretrievably collapsed in early July 2017. Perhaps it is unfair to ask. It is a striking feature of greenery that, although its adherents like making oddly specific predictions, they are undaunted when they do not come to pass. In his brilliant new book, The Rational Optimist, Matt Ridley draws attention to this. In the 1970s, there were 550 billion barrels of oil reserves in the world, we were warned. President Jimmy Carter said they would all be used up in a decade. By 1990, we had got through 600 billion barrels, so, says Ridley, on the eco-account, we were ‘overdrawn’ by 50 billion barrels. And yet, in that year, unexploited reserves stood at 900 billion barrels. If you must walk about with one of those sandwich boards proclaiming ‘The End of the World is Nigh’, it is prudent not to add exactly how nigh you think it is.
The fact that Cambridge University has now managed to hit its target of raising £1 billion of private money is surely one of the most astonishing achievements in the history of British education. But everyone is too busy moaning on about ‘access’ to notice.
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