WHO DO WE BRITISH REALLY THINK WE ARE?
Elizabethans: How Modern Britain Was Forged
Andrew Marr William Collins £20 ★★★★
Andrew Marr’s Elizabethans kicks off with the Queen addressing the nation just as coronavirus hit. In what was widely reckoned to be a vintage morale-boosting speech, she paid tribute to British virtues such as fortitude and ‘quiet, good-humoured resolve’.
But are such things really peculiar to us? After all, people in other countries didn’t immediately break into frenzied wailing when they got Covid.
In a way, this muddle about national characteristics tells us a lot about what it means to be British in the 21st Century. Who do we think we are? What do we stand for? These questions have become a lot harder to answer in the 60-odd years the Queen has been on the throne. Once it all seemed so simple. Morally and culturally, we led the field, or so we liked to think. These days we may be healthier and better informed, but are we really any more broad-minded? Or could it be that our addiction to Facebook and Twitter has just left people – in Marr’s brilliant phrase – ‘unwittingly entombed in a small echo chamber of their own prejudices’?
However much we may have changed, one of the key factors that still determines anyone’s life is plain old luck. Look at the contrasting fortunes of Diana Dors and Ruth Ellis. Both of them were ambitious peroxide blondes from rough backgrounds. But while Dors (pictured, right, in 1957) became a film star, Ellis was the last woman to be hanged in Britain after shooting dead her drunken, abusive boyfriend.
Marr has a great eye for ambiguity. Yes, the anti-porn campaigner Mary Whitehouse may have been a bit bonkers in later life. Yet, as Marr points out, she also campaigned vigorously against the Paedophile Information Exchange – a group seeking to abolish the age of consent – at a time when a lot of people were treating them as a legitimate pressure group. And while we’re now, quite rightly, suspicious of middle-aged men having ‘intimate friendships’ with under-aged boys, could it be that we have also lost something along the way, namely ‘the very notion that it is possible for adults to have healthy... innocent friendships with children’?
Despite bouts of gloom, Marr is a natural optimist. He ends with the story of the footballer Marcus Rashford, who successfully campaigned for free school-meal vouchers during lockdown. However cynical we may have become, there is still everything to play for.