Empire_ What Ruling the World Did to the British - Jeremy Paxman [145]
But the British have not found their one-time imperial identity at all easy to deal with. When the end of empire came, the easiest response for the British was to laugh at it. Beyond the Fringe, Private Eye and – with That Was the Week That Was – even the one-time imperial megaphone, the BBC, were delighted to oblige. Many of the leading perpetrators of the 1960s satire boom had been at schools intended to produce people to run the empire – Peter Cook claimed to have considered following his father into colonial officialdom in Nigeria, until he discovered that ‘Britain had run out of colonies.’
In one sketch Cook interviewed Jonathan Miller as the Duke of Edinburgh, returning from attending Kenyan independence celebrations:
PRINCE PHILIP: I was there in a symbolic capacity.
INTERVIEWER: What were you symbolising?
PRINCE PHILIP: Capitulation. Mind you, of course, I was very well received. Mr Kenyatta [first leader of post-colonial Kenya] himself came to the airport to greet me and shook me very warmly by the throat as I got off the plane.
INTERVIEWER: Of course, Mr Kenyatta was at one time imprisoned by the British, wasn’t he?
PRINCE PHILIP: Yes, well, that was when we thought he was a Mau-Mau terrorist. Now, of course, we realise he was a freedom fighter.
The satirists were lashing out at a world for which they had been told they had been educated, but which demonstrably no longer existed. They had breached a dyke, and pretty soon you could make any joke you liked about empire. Too many awkward questions otherwise.
It was coincidence that the withdrawal from empire marched in step with the increasing influence of the mass media. Could the concept of imperial rule have survived the scrutiny of the mass-media age? It seems unlikely. It was essentially a project which belonged to the ruling class, and the central ideological pretence of the electronic media is their claim to empower the masses. For sure, the empire glorified chancers, from pirates of the Caribbean to Henry Wickham, the ‘father’ of the colonial rubber trade: those who did well became rich and were garlanded with medals and knighthoods. But the tone of empire – the importance of the Crown, the significance accorded to local princes and tribal chiefs, the imperial honours system, the hierarchies of command and the very language of power – fixed it in a time before true democracy. It had been driven by a mixture of motives – greed and need, plan and accident, racial prejudice and missionary hope, strategic ambition and cynical calculation. But, however and whyever it grew, its subversive flaw was that, while the British boasted of their own long-held independence, the empire was built upon denying that very thing to others. As Lord Salisbury, the Conservative Prime Minister, Foreign Secretary and Secretary of State for India, once remarked, ‘if our ancestors had cared for the rights of other people, the British empire would not have been made’. In that sentence he encapsulated the moral problem at the heart of imperial history. It promised freedom by denying it, and claimed to promote good government by rejecting self-determination. When in its later years it attempted to refine its purpose as a mere exercise in trusteeship, the British Empire acknowledged the seeds of its own irrelevance.
In the growing indifference of the early twentieth-century British to their empire, one senses how they had seen through the whole thing. At the end of the Second World War – a war fought ‘for freedom’ – they were given the opportunity to express a view on the empire and decided that they were simply not interested in continuing with it, thank you. In 1968, when Harold Wilson’s Foreign Secretary told the US Secretary of State that Britain could no longer afford to maintain a military presence east of the Suez Canal, the American was appalled. He could not, he said, believe