Shitz’ Spirit: High on propaganda history, columnists are still trying to persuade us that we like to suffer…
Ask people who’ve actually seen war in their lifetimes if they found it “character building”.
Previously: The Prick Hiker’s Guide To The Galaxy: Columnists say, “Don’t panic!” and “Ignore the corruption…”
The Second World War officially ended in Britain on 15 August 1945 — Victory over Japan Day — which came 100 days after VE Day. But for British newspaper columnists, the war has never ended. Just as most seem to have read only one author (George Orwell)1, “the War” — no need to think too much about the ones that came before or since — is the only historical event that matters.
If they’re not wallowing in the myth of Dunkirk or fetishising Churchill, columnists are groping for the propaganda memory of “the Blitz spirit”. It doesn’t matter that historians have time and time again presented more nuanced, more bloody, more brutal explanations of that period; to a columnist in need of a signifier, “the Blitz spirit” is a synonym for that other national myth, “the stiff upper lip”, and they simply refuse to stop regurgitating the same old propaganda.
Today’s Times features the latest execrable example of the “Blitz Spirit” column, delivered by the reliably awful Clare Foges (taking a welcome break, at least, from praising “strong men” like Erdogan and attacking GRT communities).
Under the headline Don’t bet on a hard winter toppling Boris Johnson and following a lede that argues “We have got used to a degree of chaos during the pandemic and many secretly enjoy the chance to show some Blitz spirit”, David Cameron’s former chief speechwriter2 begins:
“Buccaneering”, “Wodehousian”, “swashbuckling”, “swaggering”; there is a section in the journalists’ dictionary for Boris Johnson’s rhetoric and it was mined hard for his conference speech last week. Afterwards there were aides clapping each other on the back, ruddy-cheeked squire types exclaiming that it had been “vintage Boris”, acolytes feeling the same elation as those who witnessed Martin Luther King at the Lincoln Memorial. Johnson would have left Manchester pleased that he had put lead in the party’s pencil, or another of those virility metaphors that he is rather keen on.
There should really be no way back from forcing Martin Luther King Jnr into the same breath as Boris Johnson (the man who wrote of “flag-waving piccaninnies” and “watermelon smiles” in the less-enlightened era of… 2002) but we’ll trudge on through the swamp of Foges’ sentences regardless.
That opening paragraph is part of the immediate reshaping of history designed to turn the Prime Minister’s grimly laughable, light-weight, and contemptuous oratory at the Tory Party Conference into a triumph that reached beyond the confines of the hall where supporters and sycophants whooped it up last week.
Foges continues by quoting her former boss, David Cameron’s grudging admiration for Johnson’s greasy ability to dodge scrutiny and responsibility:
David Cameron once said half-admiringly of Johnson that “the thing about the greased piglet is that he manages to slip through other people’s hands where mere mortals fail” — and in Manchester the piglet was coated head to toe in goose fat. However hard the journalists probed on supply chains, Brexit, petrol shortages, inflationary pressures, the Northern Ireland protocol — shlooop! — away he slipped from difficult questions and awkward truths, lubricated by a lack of shame, a little charm and his rare felicity with the English language.
If the pig analogy is apposite for reasons Foges doesn’t intend — Johnson will fuck anything and is delighted by his own stench — the way she writes about the Prime Minister’s critics says more about the writer than her targets:
Like grim-faced peasants in some medieval fantasy drama they look to the clouds gathering on the horizon and mutter that “winter’s-a-comin’”. They are convinced that once the energy crisis and supply chain crisis feel real, the electorate will turn on the Conservatives. Once voters find their bills soaring and blackouts happening and the supermarket shelves thin on pigs-in-blankets, the scales will fall from their eyes and Johnson’s number will be up. Pre-emptive political schadenfreude abounds.
That’s the general worldview of the British columnist: They know what’s really going on while the “peasants” panic and point like awful auguries at the signs swirling in the sky.
After reaching for another cliché — nodding at The Sun’s Crisis? What crisis?3 headline during the Winter of Discontent — Foges, poorly pretending to not be one of those Tories herself, writes:
I don’t think this is going to play badly for the Tories at all. In fact, rather than decimate the Conservative lead, this winter and all its predicted problems may well shore it up.
The principal reason for this is that “national crisis mode” plays to Johnson’s strengths and Keir Starmer’s weaknesses. The prime minister is good at the rallying cry and the pep talk. If we are indeed heading for more severe shortages, expect several appearances from that Union flag-festooned podium in No 10, Johnson channelling Churchill as he asks us to draw on our reserves of Great British Grit.
Hmmm… how surprising that one of the foxes doesn’t think the harrying of the henhouse is any sort of problem; it’s almost as if she’s a fan of Johson aka the Fantastical Mr Gives No Fucks.
Boris Johnson likes to imagine himself as Churchill — his biography was filled with clumsy attempts at parallels — but he’s not remotely interested in solving crises nor does he have a cabinet of giants to paper over his egotistical errors. Foges picturing Johnson at a Union flag-festooned podium reveals once again how the columnist class privileges tone over content; it’s all signs and signifiers over substance.
Finally, Foges tires of the feckless foreplay and gets to the point promised by the enraging headline:
And — taboo as it may be to suggest — I reckon a large chunk of the population doesn’t just endure national crises like these but rather enjoys them. Yes, tracking down petrol is irritating and no one relishes the thought of bare supermarket shelves, but the truth is that many find the collective experience of a crisis diverting and even fun: the camaraderie, the sharing of complaints, the mild thrill of having to forage for the last bag of penne in Sainsbury’s. When those who were there in the Seventies speak of it, of three-day weeks and candles burning during the blackouts, their recollections are often tinged with nostalgia.
This is suffering cosplay for the classes that have never truly been touched by any crisis. Even in the depths of “the War” which their descendants can never stop talking about, the elite was able to get their treats under the table, using cash to grease the gears of the black market.
Regardless of whether she’s unable to hunt down the Christmas Pudding of her choosing or — as her fellow Times columnist Janice Turner wrote after failing to find her favourite kind of sardines — gets a frisson from pretending she’s a “Soviet housewife”, Foges will not feel the bite this winter.
Foges won’t have to cope with the iron-fisted one-two punch of the Universal Credit cut and the rise in energy prices (which hits poor people reliant on prepayment meters far more), wondering whether to spend money on heat or food, stuck in damp rental accommodation with a landlord who hasn’t deigned to spend more on insulation.
So she can speak to her readers — who are similarly able to see food shortages and energy price rises as mildly-irritating talking points and seasoning for anecdotes at dinner parties — about “camaraderie” and experiencing crisis as “diverting and even fun”. It’s why so many columnists treat politics as a parlour game, a lark between people with seemingly different political views who still end up at the same parties and in the same green rooms.
When Foges finally uses the b-word, it is while simultaneously nodding to the fact that it’s a myth and wallowing in that self-same fiction:
Perhaps this is because there is something in the national character that enjoys the opportunity to be stoical. Eighty years on we still fetishise the Blitz because this displayed what we believe to be our particular British talent for carrying on through adversity. The French may outdo us on sophistication, the Italians on romance and the Americans on razzle-dazzle, but we like to believe that nobody keeps calm and carries on like us, and a winter of missing turkeys, cars running on fumes and gentle chaos is our chance to prove it.
I’ve written this many times before but it bears repeating: “We” is one of the most weasel words in comment writing; “we” is whoever the writer wishes to bring into that circle at that particular moment.
The evocation of the Keep Calm & Carry On poster is particularly telling; that campaign was shelved after the earlier entries in it (especially Your Courage, Your Cheerfulness Will Bring Us Victory and Freedom Is In Peril) after the Ministry of Information4 came to realise that the posters were enraging the public. Why, they wondered, were they the ones whose courage and cheerfulness were going to be drawn upon and who were the “us” that would be brought victory?
The historian Susannah Walker wrote of Keep Calm & Carry On:
The two posters which were displayed – Your Courage and Freedom Is In Peril – were ridiculed by the press, criticised in the House of Commons and mostly disregarded by the public on the ground that they didn’t really know what they were meant to do.
… So why don’t people want to tell this story? I wonder whether, just as there is a myth of the Blitz, which is that everyone kept calm and carried on, there is also a myth of the Home Front Poster, which is that they were all uplifting and inspiring from the very start, and so people were always uplifted and inspired rather than bored and cross and irritated with them (as they were).
And we wouldn’t want the facts to get in the way of that.
Foges is, therefore, part of a great British history of privileging the propaganda ahead of the facts. She leans on the Blitz Spirit myth — despite knowing that it is a myth — because the facts would get in the way of her line.
As I wrote just a week ago when considering the fake history beloved of another columnist, The Daily Telegraph’s Simon Heffer:
[This] half-remembered history of the Second World War, for example, finds no room for the Bethnal Green Tube tragedy of 3 March 1943 when a panic at the station entrance resulted in a crush that killed 173 people. One reason it doesn’t is that news of the event was covered up at the time, with fuller details not released until January 1945 and the results of the official investigation not published until 1946.
The establishment memory of the Blitz is one of the Queen Mother walking in the East End and that famous staged shot of a milkman picking through the rubble, not of the government being forced to open the Tube Stations as shelters, or “Bomb Chasers” who rushed to sites to loot demolished homes.
Beyond the fact that London did not simply “take it” but actually saw crimewaves under the blackout and the institution of the death penalty for looting, columnists rarely bolster their rhetorical flourishes with reference to the Clydebank Blitz or the firebombing of Coventry.
If you speak to those, like my 89-year-old grandmother, who lived through the bombing and the other privations of the war — many of which stretched on long into the 1950s — you don’t tend to find them talking about those experiences with the “nostalgia” that Foges says children of the 70s have for that era’s shortages and blackouts.
The war generations — those who fought it and those who lived through it as children and teenagers — endured it. Those who have leaned on its myths since have been comfortable while pretending to share “the grit”.
Those who truly suffer don’t wish that suffering on others; they hope for things to get better and work to stop the worst from happening again. Columnists like Foges think they are honouring those who lived through the Second World War by constantly evoking it as the height of national character, but by rehashing old lies and arguing that suffering does us good — while not suffering much at all — they are actually insulting them.
When Foges writes…
Of course there will be many who feel the shortages and rising prices acutely; those who have just received a cut to universal credit payments may scarcely be able to afford their current heating bills and will be desperately worried about what lies ahead. But for the majority of middle Englanders (whose support the Conservatives need), this winter’s problems will not bring major privations but minor inconveniences: missing a few items in the shopping basket; topping up on fuel where possible; feeling slightly poorer as inflation does its silent work.
… what she is really saying is this: Yes, people will suffer, but it won’t be the people of middle England, the only people who matter.
Two if you include the Harry Potter books.
She was rather grotesquely nicknamed “the Prime Minister's larynx”.
Callaghan was returning from an international conference. The current Prime Minister is in Marbella, ensconced in Zac Goldsmith’s luxurious hilltop villa.
Technically the posters were commissioned before the Ministry of Information even existed; it only officially came into being after war was declared.