The Middle East seems to be forever a flashpoint for instability in the whole of the world. Much of its instability is down to the presence in the region of the state of Israel. It has been for a long time the target of terrorist outrages, including what is possibly the worst in history, the Hamas attack of 7 October 2023. But it is also itself a regional superpower ready repeatedly to wreak terrible violence on neighbours it feels represent or harbour a threat against it.

At the moment, that’s happening in both Gaza and Lebanon.

In this additional episode to A History of England I look at one of the seminal moments that opened the door towards the foundation of that state. That was the British government’s issuing of the Balfour Declaration, backing the formation of a Jewish state in Palestine, on 2 November 1917.

That led to a lamentable history in which Britain tried to administer the territory until it pulled out and the Jewish state was founded there. The fundamental problem, that it was already the homeland of another people that resented being driven from its homes by Jewish immigrants, was never resolved. The present tensions flowed directly from that failure.

Curiously, back in Britain, one and only one minister in the British government that issued the Declaration stood out against it. And on what grounds did he reject it? Why, because he viewed it as anti-Semitic.

What makes that opposition particularly curious is just who – and what – he was.

Illustration: Map showing Eastern Turkey in Asia, Syria and Western Persia. Royal Geographical Society (Map), Mark Sykes & François Georges-Picot (Annotations). https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:MPK1-426_Sykes_Picot_Agreement_Map_signed_8_May_1916.jpg#/media/File:MPK1-426_Sykes_Picot_Agreement_Map_signed_8_May_1916.jpg Public domain

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Well, we’re living in curious times.

For the first time in four centuries, a member of the British royal family has been arrested in connection with a criminal investigation. Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, the previous Prince Andrew, was already a marginalised member of the family, as result of his association with the American sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, but now that association has led to his potentially facing the prospect of jail itself.

But that’s not where the episode starts. It opens by talking about another of those strange rituals of the British constitutional system, a procedure left over from the distant past, more or less adapted to modern needs. This is the ‘humble address’, once a way for parliamentarians, supposedly (though often not genuinely) loyal subjects of the crown, to address the monarch. In this case, it was a means to force a modern British government – the current one – to make available information about the appointment of Peter Mandelson, the other Brit in trouble over Epstein, as ambassador in Washington DC.

Those two cases, Mandelson’s and Mountbatten-Windsor’s are progressing well towards a destination that doesn’t look particularly healthy for either of them.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the Atlantic, voices are already being raised to ask, ‘if the British can investigate prominent people involved in an essentially American scandal, why can’t a few of the people equally tainted with it over here face the same treatment?’

Let’s see who might be listening…

Illustration: Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor being driven away from the police station where he was taken for questioning after his arrest. Photo from The Guardian.

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This is the last episode in this main series of A History of England. I may add others on specific topics – by all means use the comments to suggest any you’d like me to examine – or in response to interesting new developments.

This episode looks at what has happened since the 2024 election. There’s been a rise in xenophobia that sometimes shades into outright racism. A party of the hard right, Reform UK, is leading in the polls. Labour, in office though perhaps not in power, seems to have lost its sense of direction and has been pandering to Reform UK’s views in the hope of winning back voters it has lost to them, with little sign of success so far. Indeed, its own standing just keeps sliding downwards.

After that, I recap the series, from the days of Henry VIII, showing how England grew from a minor state on the edge of Europe to a leading power. Then, having pushed through the union with Scotland to form Great Britain, it became the ruling power of a major global empire. However, while the empire enriched a minority of people back home, it left the mass of the people in poverty, often in misery. Imperial wealth made individuals rich but not society as a whole.

The twentieth century saw the empire collapse and British society become much more equal. In need of a new role, Britain tried being the partner of the United States and also a major member of the European Union. But the ‘special relationship’ with the US seems pretty well dead in the water now and, in a major self-inflicted wound, the Brexit vote of 2016 took Britain out the EU.

Now with a growing menace to the whole continent, including Britain, from Russia, the Starmer government is trying to put together new alliances without confronting its right-wing critics by working to rejoin the EU. Together with the anti-immigration stance it’s taking to try to woo Reform UK voters back, that policy is making a return to economic growth more difficult than ever. That only stokes the grievances felt by many at home, encouraging the hard right further.

Britain seems to caught in a dilemma of its own making. The Starmer government has adopted policies that are making things worse not better. Sadly, the logic of its position means it can’t change those policies.

Change though, and not the kind of change Reform UK proposes, is desperately needed to get Britain out of the mess that England has led it into.

Quite a dilemma, as I said.

Illustration: The British bulldog confused about the way forward. Image from ChatGPT.

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Following the rather grim comedy of Boris Johnson, the Conservatives gave Britain the even more ridiculous spectacle of Liz Truss. She proceeded to push the British economy to the edge of the abyss, aided and abetted by her Chancellor of the Exchequer Kwasi ‘Kamikwasi’ Kwarteng. Fortunately, her colleagues realised what a disastrous mess the Tory membership had made electing Truss leader, and chucked her out again, establishing a new record, previously held by George Canning since 1827, for the shortest tenure of any Prime Minister in office.

To the delight of the Daily Star, which livestreamed a lettuce and a photo of Liz Truss, to see whether she could outlast the lettuce, it was the vegetable that won.

It was Rishi Sunak who followed her into office, and he worked hard with his Chancellor Jeremy Hunt to get the economy back on its feet. Unfortunately, they went back to the beginning of this long period of Tory rule, to austerity politics. They worked no better second time around than first and only cut the public deficit by a little over half, leaving debt still climbing.

Meanwhile, immigration was raising its head again as a key question. Oddly enough, net migration – people in less people out – had risen since Brexit, which many had backed as a way to limit migration in the first place.

The new election took place on 4 July 2022. It was an election of fragmentation, with the old dominant parties of Labour and the Tories plumbing new depths of their joint share of the popular vote, while smaller parties – the Liberal Democrats, the Greens and the new kids on the block, Nigel Farage’s Reform UK, surging forward.

The success of Reform UK was the most striking. And the most ominous for the future of the other parties.

Illustration: Liz Truss and the lettuce. Photo from the Daily Star

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It’s the time of Boris. This episode tracks Boris Johnson’s character, starting with a less than complimentary report from his housemaster at Eton to this parents, through his time in the rich kids’ Bullingdon Club in Oxford, followed by some disreputable incidents when he was Mayor of London, to his endorsing of claims he must have known were false in the Brexit campaign. This period is capped by his becoming Prime Minister, something he doubtless felt was no more than his entitlement.

The episode then follows his work to complete Brexit, including his attempt to get parliament out the way so it couldn’t block him, an attempt that would eventually be ruled illegal. There was also his purging of the Parliamentary Conservative Party of leading pro-EU voices, making it more Eurosceptic than ever. That was confirmed by the December 2019 election, which he won handsomely, with none of the eleven purged Tories getting back into parliament. With a good majority, he was able to ‘get Brexit done’, his slogan in the election.

Labour under its left-wing leader Jeremy Corbyn, took a hiding, emerging with its lowest haul of MPs since 1935, breaking the dubious record previously set by the previous party leader from the left, Michael Foot, in 1983.

As well as Brexit, what marked the rest of Boris’s time as Prime Minister was a series of scandals, which suggested irresponsible behaviour on his part and a desire to hide information that might confirm it publicly. Eventually, there was one scandal too many and his ministerial colleagues started to resign from government in droves, until he decided the game was up and stood down himself.

Illustration: The Bullingdon Club in 1987, with David Cameron at left in the back row and Boris Johnson, at the right of the row of sitting figures. All are wearing the (expensive) Club clothing. Photograph: Mallams/Lucas Field Media, from the Guardian.

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In 2015, Cameron returned to office with a majority of his own even if it wasn’t particularly huge. At least it meant he no longer needed to be in a coalition with the Lib Dems, who’d taken a terrible beating. Labour too had done badly, losing further parliamentary seats.

Cameron’s government still had to deal with two foreign wars, in Afghanistan and Iraq, though both now involved far smaller numbers of troops, even if the emergence of ISIS in the Middle East might mean more might have to be sent.

A far more immediate problem was the conflict within the Conservative Party, where Eurosceptics were beginning to become increasingly powerful. That was made worse by the rise of the harder right UKIP, actively campaigning for Britain to leave the European Union, in what would come to be known as Brexit. To try to silence his critics, Cameron pledged before the 2015 election to hold another referendum on EU membership, confident that it would vote to stay in.

He was mistaken. A mixture of generalised anger against government leading to a desire to cast a protest vote, together with concerns over poor economic conditions for which immigration was blamed by many, much of it from EU countries, produced a narrow majority in favour of Brexit. Cameron resigned as Prime Minister. Theresa May took over, Britain’s second woman in the post.

Her challenge was to negotiate the Brexit terms with the EU. She tried to strengthen her position by holding another election in 2017 but, rather like the EU referendum, it didn’t produce the desired result. She lost seats and her majority.

She struggled on for another couple of years but eventually gave up and resigned.

It was the dawning of the time of Boris Johnson – the theme for next episode.

Illustration: Boris Johnson by the Brexit campaign bus with its false claim that leaving the EU could save Britain £350 million a week for the NHS. Photo from the Irish Times

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It’s 2007, and Tony Blair is out. In his place is Gordon Brown, who’d proved his capacity as a Chancellor. Sadly, he was now to show that promotion to Prime Minister was one step too many , since he simply didn’t have the skills needed for the top job. He might have won an election in the autumn of 2007, when he had a small poll lead. Instead, his nerve failed him and he called off the election the Labour Party had been preparing. That meant that he took the blame for the world crash that hit the following year, and though he and his Chancellor did well to get Britain back to growth, with the deadline for a new election bearing down on them, they had run out of time to build the party a new lead.

The result of the 2010 election was to return a hung parliament, one in which no party had a majority in the Commons. Fraught negotiations finally led to the formation of a Conservative coalition government with the Liberal Democrats. Dominated by the Tories, it pursued austerity policies to reduce the government deficit and public debt. It had some success in the first of these aims, but none in the second. Austerity created a fairly dismal atmosphere in the country and, for the LibDems, the policy turned toxic when it forced an increase in university fees which the party, now led by Nick Clegg, had vowed to abolish.

When the next election was held, in 2015, the LibDems were severely punished, with their haul of MPs reduced from the respectable 57 won in 2010, to the miserable total of just eight.

Labour had elected itself a hopeless, uncharismatic leader, Ed Miliband, an easy figure for Cameron to beat. Labour lost more seats from its low tally of 2010. Cameron, on the other hand, took his Conservatives to a majority in the Commons. The majority was small but enough to form a new government of Tories alone, with the LibDems once more consigned to the backbenches.

So Cameron took office for the second time. Things looked good for him. Unfortunately, however, an explosion that would bring him down was building within his own party, as we'll see next week.

Illustration: Cameron (left) of the Tories and Clegg of the LibDems, senior and junior leaders of the 2010 coalition government. Photo from the Guardian

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As the title of this episode suggests, this is where we look at how Tony Blair’s reputation was wrecked by the growing awareness that he’d produced infamously bad justifications to launch Britain into war in Iraq. Many people now reversed the vowels in his name, making Blair into Bliar. For a man who’d once assured Britain that he was a ‘straight sort of guy’, being seen as a liar was quite a fall.

Despite all that, Blair had racked up quite a series of achievements. This episode looks at some of them, particularly in education and healthcare. He was, however, very much a ‘yes, but’ Prime Minister: many of his achievements were associated with a failure, either immediately or stored up for the future, which rather qualified how admirable they would ultimately appear. So, alongside his achievements, the episode also looks at how often they were accompanied by a ‘but’.

That and the terrible legacy of two wars, in Afghanistan and Iraq, were the background of Blair’s campaign for the election of 2005. He took Labour to its third victory in a row in that contest, an unprecedented accomplishment for the party. However, while it left his government with a strong majority, the win fell short of what would qualify as a landslide – he couldn’t pull off Thatcher’s trick of winning three straight landslide victories in a row.

What’s more, he was under increasing strain. The shine had come off his government. And Gordon Brown, up till then his Chancellor of the Exchequer, was putting him under pressure to stand aside. After all, Brown had dropped campaign against him for the Labour leadership back in 1994; now it was his turn at the premiership.

Two years into his third government, Blair agreed. In May 2017, he stood down. Gordon Brown at last got his chance to show what he could make of the top job. We’ll see how that went next week.

Illustration: ‘Bliar’ button produced by the Stop the War Coalition, from the Imperial War Museum, which produced the photo.

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When Tony Blair took Britain to war in Iraq in 2003, as part of a US-led and rather limited coalition of nations, it was against the will of large numbers of Brits expressed in possibly the biggest demonstration in British history.

He’d also decided to hold a vote in parliament as to whether to go into the war, something he didn’t strictly have to do since it was a so-called ‘prerogative power’, one of the powers inherited from the monarch though exercised, not by the whole of parliament, but by ministers with no need to obtain parliamentary approval. His decision set a new precedent in requiring parliamentary authority to go to war. He also made it a matter of confidence, so his government would have fallen had he lost.

That didn’t stop a massive rebellion among Labou MPs, when nearly 40% failed to rally to the government’s support. That didn’t bring him down or prevent involvement in the war, because the Conservatives came to his rescue. It did, though, mean that he took Britain into the conflict in Iraq in the teeth of opposition both from around the country and from many within his own parliamentary party.

To push for support, he’d presented parliament with two dossiers detailing the dangers represented by the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. Both have been shown to be shot through with false claims. That meant that the war was fought on false premises.

Such a war, fought on that basis, marked the end of what Blair had once seemed to value, the government’s commitment to an ‘ethical foreign policy’. It’s no surprise that the architect of that policy, Robin Cook, and two other ministers resigned from the government.

It also meant that he as well as the victims of the war would be paying a heavy price for having got involved in it. As we’ll discover in the next episode.

Illustration: ‘45 mins from attack’: headline in the Evening Standard newspaper, in response to the September 2002 dossier on supposed weapons capabilities in Iraq.

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By the latter part of the twentieth century, the world had become unipolar. The Soviet Empire collapsed even more rapidly than the British one had after the Berlin Wall fell in 1989. China was not yet the force it is today. The US was at the pinnacle of its global power.

That made it all the more unbearable that it came under assault within its own borders by the terrorists of the 9/11 attack in 2001. A reaction was inevitable. We saw last time how it invaded Afghanistan, but that seemed barely justified since there’s no evidence of Afghan involvement in the attacks. By 2003, the US as ready to turn its military aggression against another nation in what it called its ‘war on terror’, a strange notion of waging war against an abstract noun.

Concretely, its new target was Iraq. Sadly, however, Iraqi contact with the 9/11 attacks had proved as difficult to substantiate as Afghanistan’s. But the US put together an international coalition for war there, as it had once before in 1990-91, to throw Iraqi invaders out of Kuwait.

This though would be much smaller coalition, with fewer nations prepared to support President George ‘Dubya’ Bush’s new campaign. It didn’t help that it looked suspiciously at least partly aimed at completing the work of his own father, George HW Bush, who’d been president during the previous war on Iraq, by bringing down the dictator Saddam Hussein.

One of the nations right alongside the US was Britain. That would leave a lasting mark on Tony Blair’s legacy. Which might as a result not have been quite as glowing as he might have liked.

Our subject for next week.

Illustration: Government buildings burning in Baghdad following a US airstrike in March 2003. Photo Ramzi Haidar / AFP / Getty from ‘The Atlantic’

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