HISTORY

SIMONHEFFER DECLINE AND FALL

THELASTTHOUSANDDAYS OFTHE BRITISHEMPIRE

★By Peter Clarke (Allen Lane / The Penguin Press 559pp £25)

THEENDLESS FASCINATIONwith the military events that brought about the end of the Second World War has perhaps disguised the importance of the diplomatic and political ones that ran concurrent with them. Peter Clarke’s book, as its title suggests, deals with one particular legacy of the denouement: how Britain’s empire became not just politically untenable (there had been plenty of signs of that in India for the preceding quartercentury) but economically unviable. In a way the title is misleading: there is much less emphasis on the dismantling of empire in the text than one might expect. What is dealt with in much greater detail are the international political processes that drove the final nails into Britain’s coffin as a leading world power, notably the relations between the ‘Big Three’ of Roosevelt, Stalin and Churchill. After Clarke has told that particular story, the decline of Britain as an imperial power comes as no surprise at all. By the autumn of 1944, when the narrative starts (a thousand days before the Union flag was run down over India for the last time in August 1947), Britain is proud, but broke. John Maynard Keynes is in America negotiating, through perilous illness, a postwar international financial settlement that will not implode. Stalin has recently shown his true colours by waiting for the Warsaw uprising to be suppressed by the Nazis, with a savagery breathtaking even by their standards, before allowing the Red Army to proceed and engage the Wehrmacht. Churchill, according to the diaries of those who have to humour him, is steering a drink-fuelled and orotund passage towards eventual victory. Roosevelt, in the last months of life, is trying to let the British down gently about the future of their empire (which America, as part of its goal finally to supplant Britain as a superpower, wishes to see wiped from the face of the earth), and is on a course that even his own countrymen regard as the appeasement of Stalin. On the battlefield in Western Europe there are enormous tensions between Eisenhower, the supreme allied commander, and

Truman: the new MD

Montgomery, the narcissistic, egomaniacal genius who is the unchallenged hero of the British press. For Churchill, his dealings with America are constantly dogged by what he regards as the offensive suggestion that the Empire might have to be downgraded as part of an acceptance of the postwar realities, especially when the war in the Far East is over. There is also, as Clarke illustrates with much reference to the papers of the men concerned, growing hostility in America in general towards the British. Darting in and out of the narrative is the theme of how much, in the end, it actually benefited America that, first, Britain should have stood alone against the Nazis, and then, that America should have expended much blood and treasure on the salvation of Europe. Isolationism was not, after all, a viable option for America even before Pearl Harbor: had it lost export markets in a Nazi-dominated Europe for perhaps decades, and had its own war with Japan to deal with, what we call the postwar period would have been very different. Certainly, as Clarke points out, President Truman was happy for victory to signal the liquidation of Britain’s financial debt to America, on the basis that we had all been in it together: Congress was less so. Even without the American debt, though, Britain was still stuffed. The popular idea that the Empire was in some way enriching Britain, and that the mother country was living off the gains of exploitation in its colonies, is shown by Clarke to be false. Australia and New Zealand actually made money out of the war from services rendered to the Old Country. Churchill’s own commitment to India was shaken in 1945 when he realised that we owed that country £1,200 million in sterling balances for the help its soldiery had given us in preventing them from being overrun by the Japanese. There was, of course, a strong political impulse to grant independence to India, but that was a separate argument. Churchill decided not to grant India dominion status on VE Day, which merely postponed the inevitable by just two years. When, after Attlee’s assumption of the post of Prime Minister, the new government moved speedily to grant independence, the act became a useful cover for the fact that a country almost bankrupted by war, and living on handouts, could hardly pretend to afford the jewel in the crown. And, as power slipped away on the subcontinent, so Clarke illustrates the parallel advance of British impotence in the much smaller, but no less intractable, theatre of postwar Palestine. With loss of money, and loss of material power, came loss of will. These weaknesses, so slowly apparent to the British people

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LITERARY REVIEW August 2007 HISTORY

and even to some of their leaders, were spotted and fed upon by Britain’s allies. Clarke illustrates, in his description of the Yalta and Potsdam conferences, Churchill’s growing inability to be the master of events. The conclusion to be drawn from this, incidentally, is that the real villain of Yalta – at which Churchill was trying to punch far above his weight and was not always succeeding – was the declining Roosevelt. In dictating the terms of the conference and, ultimately, deciding to end it by choosing to leave, Roosevelt had Churchill in particular reduced to the status of observer, or even, at times, supplicant. Yalta, of course, was not so much about the British Empire as about shaping the regard in which Britain should have the right to be held by the rest of the world. The most shameful act to which Churchill put his name, and in which Roosevelt seemed more than happy to participate, was the redrawing of the boundaries of Poland. A huge tract of the east of the country was swallowed up by Russia with the expectation that Poland would be compensated by territory, at Germany’s expense, in the west. There was no historical justification for this, and it led to millions of Germans being expelled from their country at a time when other conditions made such a population movement almost unsustainable. It also helped institutionalise a profoundly undemocratic treatment of the Poles themselves, who had learned several times during the preceding six years what little reason they had to trust or love the Russians. When the time came – when Russia had moved in and occupied Eastern Germany – there was not even an apportionment of land to the Poles in accordance with what had been imagined at Yalta. Russia simply gave the Poles (who were soon, of course, to be one of Russia’s clients) a vast slice of Germany, which resulted in the displacement of even more people than would otherwise have been the case. As Clarke shows, Britain’s humiliation at Yalta was

PAULADDISON

A NATION OF SHOPPERS

A HISTORYOFMODERNBRITAIN

★By Andrew Marr (Macmillan 629pp £25)

HISTORIANS USEDTOthink that Britain was transformed by the great upheavals of the first half of the twentieth century – the two world wars and the Slump. Now they can see that the second half of the century was even more disruptive than the first. Intact in 1945, the British Empire had virtually disappeared by 1970. National sovereignty was abandoned when Britain entered the European Union, and the United Kingdom itself began to break up. At home the postwar moral

hardly consistent with her status as an imperial power. The Potsdam conference, convened in July 1945 just outside the ruins of Berlin, was in some respects even worse. Churchill disappeared halfway through to be replaced by Attlee, who (to Stalin’s shock) had become Prime Minister. Truman – Roosevelt had died three months earlier – and his delegation turned up determined to be firmer with Stalin than America had previously had the will to be, but found it was too late: Potsdam was to be the overture to the Cold War. Britain’s power was deemed to be so minimal by this stage that Churchill was lucky to get an invitation: those close to Truman believed that the only effective business that could be done would be between what would now be the two superpowers, America and Russia. The conference did, indeed, set the tone for a postwar world one of whose realities would be the absence of the British Empire. It is ironic that a victorious power should come off so badly. Clarke writes compellingly and with great wit. Without being unduly opinionated he is no fence-sitter either, and the conclusions he comes to in his epilogue are mostly sound: though I fear he underestimates the force of Correlli Barnett’s arguments about Britain’s self-inflicted economic wounds after 1945. What Clarke calls the ‘transfers’ of money between rich and poor in Britain that enabled the creation of a welfare state did come at an opportunity cost. At a time when Britain had to earn dollars through exporting, there was a remarkable reluctance to invest effectively in the industrial modernisation that would have improved productivity and competitiveness, and by the 1960s the cumulative effects of this had put Britain way behind the powers it had defeated in 1945. Such cavils aside, Clarke tells a sad but inevitable story – and tells it exceptionally well. To order this book at £20, see LR Bookshop on page 37

order was overthrown by the permissive society and the postwar political settlement by Mrs Thatcher. An economy founded on manufacturing was displaced by an economy based on services, a predominantly workingclass nation by a predominantly middle-class nation, a white man’s country by a multicultural Britain. At the end, Elizabeth II was still there, an astonishing survivor from an earlier time. But her reputation was almost overwhelmed by the celebrity cult of Princess Diana, whom Andrew Marr describes as ‘a kind of Barbie of the emotions, who could be dressed up in the private pain of millions’. The outpouring of emotion that followed her death was at odds with almost everything that had been written about the English or British national character in the Forties and Fifties. Were the British losing their identity, or re-inventing it? To cover all these topics in a single volume would be a tall order. Andrew Marr takes his readers on some very enjoyable excursions into economic, social and

LITERARY REVIEW August 2007

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