Brexit & nostalgia

One marker of an insecure nation is the co-option of culture by the ruling regime. By the same token, confident democracies such as the US and Europe follow a policy of cultural laissez-faire. But in the gathering chaos that is Brexit — which deepened this past month with Boris Johnson’s extraordinary breach of the EU withdrawal agreement — the UK appears to have set a unique standard in national hype.
 
Since the fateful Brexit vote in 2016, two films and one TV series have been released that rejoice in Britain’s supposed past glories. They are, in order of appearance: Dunkirk (July 2017), Darkest Hour (September 2017) and Beecham House (June 2019). Strikingly, they are independently produced and the directors and have no known links to the UK government. Yet all three appear to have strengthened, wittingly or unwittingly, the haze of nostalgia that has overwhelmed a certain kind of Briton in a country, a declining power since 1919, that is set to become an irrelevance in international politics after 2020.

 
Dunkirk reprised an earlier exit from Europe, in 1940, when over 130,000 British and French were rescued from the eponymous French port as the German army rapidly cornered Allied forces in the north-east. In reality, Dunkirk was a retreat, saved from ignominy only by the remarkable cooperation of the British public. Thanks to Winston Churchill’s indefatigable propaganda, the operation has gone down in history as a heroic manoeuvre that outwitted Hitler.
 

Director Christopher Nolan (maker of such classics as The Dark Knight Trilogy and Inception) broadly hews to this narrative. So Dunkirk is replete with the iron-jawed patriotism of soldiers and civilians — even the sub-plots are im­b­u­ed with self-sacrifice for King and country and all that. Maybe Mr Nolan’s concern was to recreate the human drama but some nod to historical truth would have been useful; not least Hitler’s decision to halt his Panzer units to refit just before Dunkirk which gave the Allies a chance to escape in large numbers. 

 
Sinister Germans and all, Dunkirk harks back to a triumphal era of World War II movie-making that celebrated only the victors (that is to say the British and Americans). Still, the film made the British feel good about themselves when the consequences of Brexit were becoming evident, so Mr Nolan was made Com­mander of the British Empire in 2019.
 
Bollywood-style mawkishness aside, Dunkirk mostly stuck to the facts. The same cannot be said of Darkest Hour, despite a virtuoso performance by Gary Oldman as Churchill. 
 
The film recreates the critical days after Churchill’s appointment as prime minister, when the Germans had attacked France (it may be no coincidence but Churchill has become the idol of hard-line Brexiteers). The film focuses on the debates in the war cabinet over sending out peace-feelers to Hitler. In Darkest Hour you get the impression that Churchill stood alone in his opposition to Hitler against a faint-hearted cabinet. The reality was more nuanced. Foreign secretary Lord Halifax (a former Viceroy of India) supported peace feel­ers and an armistice. Neville Chamb­er­l­ain, who had been replaced humiliati­n­gly as PM by Churchill, supported Halifax but recommended that the Allies should fight on. The two Labour cabinet-members, Clement Attlee and Arthur Greenwood, backed Churchill, support that was critical for the new PM. But in the film, Halifax and Cham­berlain are portrayed as pantomime villains plotting Churchill’s downfall and Attlee and Greenwood as insignificant participants in the deliberations.

 
These inaccuracies could be forgiven in the interests of dramatic licence. But Darkest Hour exceeds all bounds of credibility when it has Churchill riding the London Underground to gauge public opinion. There is no record of his ever having done so. The screenwriter admits to taking liberties with the facts, but he surely carries it too far when he has Churchill trading Shakespearian quotes with a man of African origin. We get the message, the British Empire made London a multicultural metropolis but racial tolerance, even in the 21st century, is another matter. Anyway, a politician who described Indians as “a beastly people” is unlikely to have schmoozed with a black man.

 
Empire is the subject of the talented Gurinder Chadha’s six-episode Beecham House, an appalling cross between The Far Pavilions and The Jewel in the Crown.  Set in the Delhi of Shah Alam (he whose writ ran as far as Palam), it centres on an Englishman who cares deeply about India unlike the perfidious East India Company from which he resigned as conscientious objector. The “good colonial Briton” is a familiar theme among some British academics. It’s another way of whitewashing the Empire. But where Niall Fergusson and David Gilmour may have succeeded, Ms Chadha fails. Thank goodness ITV has not renewed for a second season.