The age of the spin-doctors: blair or blair?(Andrew Marr and British history)

HERE IS ANDREW MARR'S legend of British history since the Second World War. There have been two true leaders--Clement Attlee and Margaret Thatcher. They radically changed the United Kingdom. The others (Macmillan, Heath, Major among the Tories and Labour's Wilson, Callaghan and Blair) cannily drifted with the tide and are at least partly responsible for the contemporary malaise--that "philosophical or religious emptiness that marks us off from earlier times".

But Man" is not without hope. His last words, on page 602, are: "we British have no reason to despair, or emigrate ... to be born British remains a wonderful stroke of luck". He has a cure. It is the renunciation of spin and the revival of candour in public life. Marr is a leading British journalist and former political editor of the BBC. Is his narrative sustainable?

THE PROLOGUE to Marr's historical drama is an epic moment in the old House of Commons. It is the afternoon of May 28, 1940, in Prime Minister Churchill s office. At issue is whether the British government should cut a deal with Hitler, whose army is in Calais. The British public is divided. Some politicians want a deal. The Americans think Britain will surrender. But Churchill, supported by the Labour leader Clement Attlee, prevails. There will be no surrender. The Battle of Britain begins. "From that decision on that day, everything follows." It was a glorious and nation-shaping episode, Churchill's finest hour and Britain's.

Five years later, at the moment of victory, the British people sacked Churchill and voted in the Attlee Labour government. On the floor of the House of Commons the Labour MP's belted out "The Red Flag". A new battle of Britain began.

The country was broke. It could barely feed its people. It begged for an American loan and the one it got was on the harshest terms. (The negotiations in Washington helped kill John Maynard Keynes.) But the Attlee government was still determined to build, if not a New Jerusalem, at least a welfare state and a Keynesian social democracy.

It scrapped most of the Royal Navy. (Australia picked up a couple of aircraft carriers on the cheap.) It abandoned the Indian empire (with a million killed following the creation of Pakistan). It nationalised iron and steel, coal and rail. It dramatically expanded public housing. (Soon there were proportionately more families in state houses in Britain than in communist eastern Europe.) It also created the National Health Service, free at the point of use--intended as a reward, Marr says, for the sacrifices of the war.

But if it was a tired and hungry country, it was still proud. It patronised everyone (not only Australians). It had won the war while most Europeans had collaborated with Hitler. It was still determined, despite the horrendous cost, to maintain an independent defence policy based on its own nuclear bomb. It went to war again in Korea. It all ended in 1951 with a great arts carnival (the Festival of Britain) and electoral defeat. It would be a generation--twenty-eight years--before Britain got another strong leader.