Elizabethans

Another theme will be British family life. Boris Johnson’s mother was an artist, Charlotte Johnson Wahl, who came from a liberal English, American and Russian-Jewish family. When Johnson was young, she suffered a nervous breakdown. She divorced his father in 1979. Later she told a BBC interviewer she thought Johnson’s oft-described childhood ambition to be ‘World King’ was a reaction to that experience, ‘a wish to make himself unhurtable, invincible, somehow safe from the pains of life – the pains of your mother disappearing for eight months, the pains of your parents splitting up’. Conservative moralists who see infidelity and family break-up in the 1960s at the root of many current problems could pull up Johnson’s childhood as an example.

He and his three siblings formed a tough, tight ‘us against the world’ team, albeit riven by personal rivalries. Johnson went to Eton on a scholarship, learning to make potentially threatening boys laugh and causing staff to despair at his reluctance to follow the rules. His housemaster wrote: ‘I think he honestly believes it is churlish of us not to regard him as an exception, one who should be free of the network of obligation which binds everyone else.’ Many acquaintances and colleagues would echo that.

Does it matter, in the wider scheme of things, that Boris Johnson was educated at Eton? In some ways, not very much. A great swathe of the British political class is privately educated in one way or another – and that even included Johnson’s 2019 socialist opponent Jeremy Corbyn. And wherever he acquired it, Johnson certainly had the common touch. From his two elections as London Mayor through to the 2016 referendum and 2019 general election, his bluff directness meant many working-class voters simply didn’t see him as an alien toff.

But on a wider perspective Johnson’s Eton upbringing matters a lot. Despite all the social reforms in Britain during the post-war period, our retention of a deeply divided educational system stands out as marking the modern country. Around 7 per cent of British children are expensively educated in private schools. That is a relatively small number, but they then tend to sashay into plum jobs, partly through the social networks based on those schools. Politics, the Army, the civil service, the media, business and the City, all tell the same story.

As with so many of the political elite, Johnson then went on to Balliol College, Oxford (which will also feature later in this book) where he mingled with among others a predecessor as Prime Minister, David Cameron, and other Tory colleagues and rivals such as Michael Gove and Jeremy Hunt. Long ago, after the prime ministership of another Old Etonian, Harold Macmillan, the senior Tory politician R. A. Butler suggested that the party was run by a ‘Magic Circle’ of Eton friends, which visited much damage upon the party’s democratic reputation. But in some ways Balliol College in particular and Oxford in general provide further tight circles of the clever and privileged. The notorious photograph of Boris Johnson and other members of the restaurant-smashing Bullingdon Club, including his rival and one-time boss David Cameron, had something of the same effect in the twenty-first century as the Magic Circle had in the 1960s. None of this defines Boris Johnson. But it tells us a lot about the sticky persistence of an exclusive class divide in modern Britain.

However, it is the final part of Boris Johnson’s sentimental education that may be the most important. He became a journalist. Throughout the age of parliamentary democracy in Britain, journalism and politics have been deeply intertwined. Many of the great Victorian statesmen formed close friendships with newspaper editors. Some even wrote for the press and, although this was looked down on, by the time Winston Churchill embarked on his career at the very end of the nineteenth century, a bit of journalism on the side was becoming accepted as a way of subsidizing unpaid politics. Since then, journalism has grown in influence, almost beginning to rival the law as a background occupation. As an American columnist once reflected, in the old days journalists had waited at the gates to watch politicians going in to dine: ‘Then we began to dine with them. And then we dined on them.’

In London, Michael Gove was a journalist before he went into politics. So was the Scottish Tory leader Ruth Davidson. Margaret Thatcher’s Chancellor Nigel Lawson was a journalist. On the Labour side, this was likewise true of the shadow Chancellor Ed Balls and his wife, the powerful shadow minister Yvette Cooper, and many more. Boris Johnson, thanks to a personal connection, landed a job on The Times until he was caught making up a quote and sacked. He moved briskly on to the Daily Telegraph, first as a leader writer and then, crucially, as its Brussels correspondent, where from 1989 to 1994 he became a pungent and highly criticized opponent of the EU hierarchy.

From the 1990s to the first decades of the new century, Johnson’s journalism made him famous. He used his deep reserves of education and native wit to make similes skip and metaphors turn cartwheels. He demonstrated a witty, salty, addictive and provocative style that made editors desperate for his copy – admittedly partly because he often filed so late. Johnson himself said his journalism gave him a ‘weird’ sense of power and influence inside the Conservative family. Margaret Thatcher was a fan. But he wasn’t a journalist who stood instinctively with other journalists. He deeply angered many when a recording emerged in 1995 in which he agreed to pass the address of an investigative reporter to a friend of his, Darius Guppy, who wanted to have him beaten up for probing into his criminal behaviour. In due course, Johnson became an editor himself, of the Spectator. By then he had become a staple on popular TV news channels and chat shows, perfecting the cheerfully dishevelled appearance behind which he has always hidden his ambition.

In a broader account of modern Britain, does any of this matter? It does, because contemporary British journalism tells us much about the strengths and weaknesses of contemporary British culture. Its strengths – let’s start with those – are inherently democratic and conversational. As we would expect from a culture which extols the liberal arts over science and engineering, British newspapers – and on rare occasions British broadcasting – produce some of the strongest and most vivid writing anywhere. Clever, voluble, fluent people trade controversies daily. Following Orwell, polemical writers from the left and from the right hone and sharpen their philosophical disagreements into headlines and phrases with the cutting power of Neolithic hand axes. Millions of British people feel more connected to political arguments because of the daily hard work and anti-bullshit thinking done by much maligned journalists.

But admiration of its raucous verbal forum, essential to popular democracy, is as far as it goes. British journalism is notoriously innumerate. It prioritizes the shock factor and polarized arguments over sophistication and nuance. The cheaper newspapers have a disgraceful history of bending the truth in order to score a political point, to indulge in prurience or even just to make a joke. Deadlines and speed of writing are admired over strict accuracy; presentation wins awards which footnotes never do. Too few journalists have any deep understanding of the sciences, medicine or engineering. Detailed inquiry reports and official documents, crammed with useful and enlightening information, languish unread. British journalism is, in short, a slapdash preparation for serious politics. And when Boris Johnson, remarking that ‘They don’t put up statues to journalists,’ moved into politics, he brought some of that slapdash quality with him.

Again, perhaps, so what? His direct, provocative way with words and his clowning – though his schtick always seemed to this writer more that of an opinionated landlord in a chaotic popular pub than a circus act – brought him the chuckling adulation of the Conservative Party and millions of voters who never thought of themselves as natural Tories. ‘Boris’ won; and who can argue with winning?

Electorally, he had a lot in common with his political hero Winston Churchill, still the dominant figure at the beginning of the Queen’s reign. They both produced an instantly recognizable physical caricature – wild blonde hair or cigars, gurning or growling. Both used short, memorable phrases to define themselves. Both were adept at employing humour to defuse embarrassment and unbalance opponents. Both were adored by some but loathed by others. Both were compulsive and speedy writers of quotable prose. Both ended up known almost universally by their first names. What’s not to like?

Historians will note that the great successes based on Boris Johnson’s obvious strengths as a campaigner and national figure – the 2016 Leave campaign and the 2019 general election that completed it – were immediately followed by the coronavirus crisis, which demanded very different qualities both from Johnson and from the British state. This is being written in the middle of things, before the lockdown has ended. It is a bit like trying to produce the verdict on a rugby match (Johnson is a rugby fan) while the game is still going on, a greased ball shooting through slippery hands in heavy rainfall. Nevertheless, the statistics seemed to show that the countries coping best were ones whose political managers had instantly followed scientific advice and ignored populist hostility to new regulations and whose health systems were based on years of patient investment and on carefully accumulated and stored kits for testing and intensive-care ventilation. Britain was not one of these countries.

Johnson, in characteristic style, had begun with boosterish promises that all would be well, and assuring people that he for one would continue to shake hands. His initial instincts were all against forcing people to stay in their own homes, closing pubs and the rest of it. In 1911 Arnold Bennett published a short novel, The Card, whose hero, the rising politician and chancer ‘Denry’ Machin, is said to stand for ‘the great cause of cheering us all up’. That’s Boris Johnson. Yet nothing could be further from cheering than the news he was now bringing Britain. As things became graver, he became graver. After being admitted to the intensive care unit at St Thomas’s Hospital, where his very survival hung in the balance all through one long day and night, he gave an eloquent and deeply moving tribute to the National Health Service.

There was no doubt now about just how serious coronavirus could be. But his beloved NHS was still struggling to acquire enough protective equipment. Johnson’s government had been unable to conduct the kind of extensive testing programmes that had allowed South Korea, Germany and Denmark, for instance, to limit the viral spread and fatalities.

Was there something in all this, that spoke to the weaknesses of the British state and economy, and more generally of its political culture? The Elizabethans were being tested at home; but their government was being tested also by international comparison. Relative death rates are a clear, hard measure of individual national administrations’ success in dealing with a common viral threat. As I say, this is a report being written in the thick of things. Elizabethan Britain may yet come out of this nightmare well. Ministers were not slow to reassure us that we had the very best scientists and health system in the world. But did we have the best industrial pharmaceutical capacity; the best levels of investment; the most robust preparation? Or had we become a little slack, not quite serious enough, even a little slapdash as a country?

In the early summer of 2020, what was perhaps most remarkable in politics was that the great division which had riven Britain apart even before the referendum of 2016 now seemed to belong to a different century. Under a common threat, the bitter tribal hostility between pro-Brexit Leavers, convinced that the country was regaining its glorious independence at last, and defeated, bitter Remainers, who saw in all of this only xenophobia, nostalgia and retreat, was fading as fast as old election posters left out in the sun. Boris Johnson had arrived in office determined, he said, to heal. And he had many of the strengths a healer would need. When he emerged from hospital himself, he made a point of particularly thanking two nurses who had stood by his bed all night during the darkest time – Luis Pitarma, a senior staff nurse from Aveiro in Portugal, and Jenny McGee from Invercargill, New Zealand. The dependence of the NHS, like the rest of Britain, on migrants from the EU as well as from other countries around the world, hardly needed to be spelt out.

Many questions about the quality of modern Elizabethan life and politics, brought into sharp focus by coronavirus, lie behind what follows in this book. Here you will find scientists and inventors who often don’t make it into general histories of the period; industrialists who messed things up or valiantly fought through; the shapers and makers of our modern cult of individualism, and those who battled them every inch of the way. William Langland, the great English medieval poet, described a vision he had in the Malvern Hills as showing ‘a fair field full of folk’. This, I hope, is something similar.

Part One

ELIZABETHANS AT HOME

1

MOUNTAINS TO CLIMB

Tuesday 2 June 1953: Coronation Day, and with London en fête for the twenty-five-year-old Queen, there was only one story in town. Obvious – but untrue. The Times newspaper had a scoop of its own, though this was long before it would do anything so vulgar as to put it on the advertisement-crammed front page. A British team of climbers had conquered Everest and it alone had the story. Never mind that in this context ‘British’ meant a Tibetan and a New Zealander; like the Coronation, this was a moment of imperial pride. It was also a great moment for The Times. But why had that newspaper beaten all its rivals, not just in Britain but around the world? The answer tells us a lot about how we misremember the real character of this second Elizabethan age – the radical variousness, the unexpectedness, of the Queen’s subjects.

This story starts on the previous Friday, 29 May 1953. Two men, hacking through the snow, made it to the top of the world’s highest mountain. One was a tall Kiwi beekeeper with a huge, goofy smile. Edmund Hillary, despite strong pacifist instincts, had served during the war with the flying boats of the Royal New Zealand Air Force. He would go on to reach both the North and South Poles. Tenzing Norgay, who had been born in either Tibet or Nepal and who had lived a life of profound physical poverty as a mountain bearer, was a devout Buddhist who had survived several unsuccessful attempts on Mount Everest during the 1930s; he had originally been picked out by previous British expedition leaders partly for his brilliant and enthusing smile.

Reaching the summit of Mount Everest was, in the early 1950s, an extraordinary achievement. Modern technology and accumulated experience have made it much more common now. Then, it required tremendous physical endurance, mental determination and a great deal of raw courage – as well as a lot of luck. The ‘race’ to the top was a subject of fierce national competition. After a previous failed attempt, the British knew that a French team was next in line to try the following year and, if they failed, a Swiss team the year after that. So all Britain was keeping one eye on this particular attempt. Would they be aware of this crowning mountaineering achievement by the time the new monarch was crowned? Just behind the competition to reach the summit of Everest, there was a second race going on: who would get the news out first?

That was the responsibility of a relatively junior member of the team, waiting at base camp, nearly 18,000 feet up. James Morris was the correspondent of The Times of London and he was all too aware of the danger of being scooped. Had he sent the news openly, the information would certainly have been stolen and probably sold to his rivals by wireless operators working between Tibet and Britain. If he had sent it in an obvious code they would have been suspicious and might well have refused to pass it down the line to London. So Morris had agreed with his editors a fake message which contained hidden meanings. ‘Snow conditions bad stop advanced base abandoned yesterday stop awaiting improvement’ meant that the British team had reached the summit and that Edmund Hillary was the victorious climber. Morris wrote out his message and gave it to a runner – this is thought to be the last time a major news event relied on a physical runner – who in turn passed it down to the Silk Road village of Namche Bazaar, from where it went by wireless to the British Embassy in Kathmandu. Although James Morris didn’t know whether the message would make it through or if it had been properly understood in London, The Times had its story in time for a Coronation special.

Morris was on, if not cloud nine, then somewhere adjacent. As he wrote later:

I think for sheer exuberance the best day of my life was my last on Everest … how brilliant I felt as, with a couple of Sherpa porters, I bounded down the glacial moraine towards the green below! I was brilliant with the success of my friends on the mountain, I was brilliant with my knowledge of the event, brilliant with muscular tautness, brilliant with conceit, brilliant with awareness of the subterfuge, amounting very nearly to dishonesty, by which I hoped to have deceived my competitors and scooped the world … I felt as though I had been crowned myself.

But as the slightly odd comment about ‘muscular tautness’ might imply, this former cavalry officer with the 9th Queen’s Royal Lancers, and increasingly successful Welsh writer, had other things on his mind. He was thinking a lot about his strong male body. It was on Everest that he felt for the first time ‘its full power, as one might realise for the first time the potential of a run-in car’. This wasn’t, however, a reason for uncomplicated celebration. Ever since Morris was three or four years old, when he remembered sitting underneath his mother’s piano while she was playing Sibelius, he had felt he had been born into the wrong body. He should have been a girl.

After years of private unhappiness, and despite a successful marriage and five children, Morris would make the transition from man to woman, first with drugs and then through perilous surgery in Morocco. James Morris, successful journalist, travel writer and historian, became Jan Morris, ditto. Although by that time, 1972, Britain had around 150 transsexual people, Morris was the most prominent and more of a pioneer in attitudes to gender than he had ever been on the slope of the mountain.

Today ‘trans’ rights and gender fluidity are the most fashionable and recent aspects of Britain’s fractious twenty-first-century culture wars. But this is not so new, and to think it is new is to misremember. Morris was not, by any means, the first Briton to change gender, as science made powerful yearnings physically possible. So far as we know, the first Briton to undergo male-to-female gender-reassignment surgery was a racing-car driver and former RAF Spitfire and Hawker Typhoon pilot. Robert Cowell’s war had included some very close escapes before being finally shot down and imprisoned by the German Army in a camp so grim that the prisoners were reduced to eating cats before being liberated by the Soviet Union’s Red Army.

Returning to motor racing after the war, Cowell became increasingly depressed and began to take oestrogen, realizing that his identity was fundamentally female. A young transgender doctor, Michael Dillon, who had made the transition from male to female himself, then performed an illegal castration operation on Cowell. Sir Harold Gillies, a famous plastic surgeon, and cousin of Sir Archibald McIndoe, whose ‘Guinea Pig Club’ was composed of burned and reconstructed RAF aircrew, finally carried out a full surgical operation, giving the war hero a vagina.

It is a curious fact that transsexual surgery, regarded today as being at the cutting-edge of gender liberation, owes so much to the horrors of the Battle of Britain and Second World War fighting generally. Gillies, like McIndoe, had made his name rebuilding the faces of damaged servicemen. In his case, they were mainly veterans of the First World War trenches. By the early 1950s the British certainly knew a great deal about what was then called ‘sex change’, not least because in 1954 Roberta Cowell sold her story to the hugely popular magazine Picture Post, which put her on the front cover, pouting and sultry as Marilyn Monroe.

Making the transition from one gender to another produces a ripple of effects, of course, spreading far beyond the individual concerned – to partners present, past and future, to friends, employees and colleagues, and ultimately to institutions circumscribed by their own rules. Roberta Cowell walked out on her wife (who had been an engineering student and had fallen in love with him before the transition), and in later life she never acknowledged her two daughters. Jan Morris maintained her membership of grand London clubs, whose doormen barely blinked, and won over almost all her friends and employers. These are normal human stories, to the extent that every experience is different in detail. It has been a social change made possible by technology – modern drugs and surgery. But it has been surrounded by ignorance and prurience on the one side and a certain amount of aggressive self-righteousness on the other.

What would the crowds awaiting the Queen in the centre of London have made of it all? Historians sometimes tell us that the Britain of the 1950s was repressed and ignorant compared to today. The shrewdest novelists tell different stories; but at any rate there is nothing so irritating as looking back at previous generations in a spirit of moralizing self-righteousness – what the historian E. P. Thompson called ‘the enormous condescension of posterity’. People observing that Coronation in 1953 could not have known how science was about to reshape gender possibilities, any more than we know what is coming next for us.

Jan Morris later made the point that, in her case at least, transition was driven not by sexual urge but by something more profound. In her memoir Conundrum she said that she had realized that sex was not a division but a continuum,

that almost nobody was altogether of one sex or another, and that the infinite subtlety of the shading from one extreme to the other was one of the most beautiful of nature’s phenomena. Sex was the biological pointer, but the gauge upon which it flickered was that very different device, gender. If sex was a matter of glands or valves, gender was psychological, cultural or in my own view spiritual.

Nuanced, reflective and fundamentally optimistic, Morris was able to survive darkly suicidal moments before confronting what she felt was the unavoidable decision of changing to become a woman. She was able to maintain a spectacularly successful and glamorous career, to stay in an emotionally intense and satisfying relationship with the woman she had originally married as a man, and to keep in touch with supportive and understanding children from that relationship. It is impossible to read her story and think that ‘transgender’ is a trivial or somehow flimsy issue, though it is hardly a majority issue in terms of numbers.

Morris described meeting fellow transgender people all of whom had just been operated on in the Casablanca clinic where she made the change. It reads like the gripping conclusion of a wartime adventure:

we were like prisoners, released momentarily from our cells for interrogation, meeting at last, colleagues known to us only by code or legend. We looked at each other at once as strangers and as allies, in curiosity and in innocence. And we had this in common too: that we were all gloriously happy. Just for those few days of our lives, if never before, if never again, we felt that we had achieved fulfilment, and were ourselves. Mutilated and crippled as we were, stumbling down the corridors trailing our bandages and clutching our nightclothes, we radiated happiness. Our faces might be tight with pain, or grotesque with splurged make-up, but they were shining with hope. To you we might have seemed like freaks or mad people … But for a week or two anyway we felt pure and true …