Warming To It

The first episode of Dominic Sandbrook's Strange Days: Cold War Britain was better than I had expected.

Although he declined to mention that Churchill had invented the nickname of "Uncle Joe" for Stalin, had signed away Eastern Europe including Poland to him, and had lifted both the name and the meaning of the Iron Curtain directly from Goebbels, Sandbrook did make the little-made point that Churchill was half-American.

In fact, Churchill came off the heavily intermarried Whig oligarchies of this country and that, which could no more see the join than the Royal Family before the First World War could see the join between Britain and Germany, or than certain families today can see the join between Britain and Pakistan.

Hence the widespread cousin marriages, unlike most people in Britain or America, unlike most people in Britain or Germany, and unlike most people in Britain or Pakistan, but practised in order to preserve a subculture belonging in each case to both countries and to neither.

Sandbrook depicted a dispute between pro-American and pro-Soviet tendencies in British life, but made no mention of those, especially Tories but also those in the ILP tradition and others, who had grave doubts about both.

He did not locate Suez within the very considerable Americoscepticism at every level of the Conservative Party and of its Scottish Unionist, Ulster Unionist and National Liberal junior partners, to an extent which was simply not permitted, with very rare if any exceptions, among the most senior Labour figures of the same period.

However, Sandbrook did pick up that Britain's nuclear weapons were developed at least as much as a post-War status symbol as for any defensive purpose. Yet he did not seem to notice that the fact that each side was riddled with the other's agents while still managing to survive bespoke the fundamental fallacy of the whole premise that each was under mortal threat from the other.

We may yet come to that, though, as we may yet come to the sheer absurdity of the notion that a Soviet Union which could not transport bread from one town to the next was somehow capable of invading Western Europe, or of launching a nuclear strike against a British or, for pity's sake, an American city. The whole thing eventually collapsed under the weight of its own contradictions, exactly as High Tories had always predicted that it would.

For these were always primarily, and sometimes almost exclusively their points. Most recently, they were revisited and reprised by Andrew Alexander in his America and the Imperialism of Ignorance. His column on the Daily Mail also returns to them from time to time.

All in all, it will be well worth tuning in to Sandbrook again next week.