The same Winston Churchill, always longing for a fight, and in love with Dreadnoughts, was probably involved in the crazy decision to send two giant battleships, HMS Barham and HMS Ramillies, to the same estuary during the General Strike of 1926. Again, they never actually did anything. Merseysiders are, I would guess, quite proud at having been taken so seriously, though there is no evidence that the tactic made any difference. One has to wonder what would have happened if their ships’ companies had been ordered to open fire on Liverpool. I guess it would have gone badly for whoever gave the order. The famous Kronstadt sailors, who helped out in Lenin and Trotsky’s Petrograd putsch of 1917, may have been fooled by the Bolsheviks at the start. But they rebelled against them in 1921 when they found out what Lenin was really like. And it was to Trotsky’s lasting shame and disgrace that he massacred them that March.

Our own Royal Navy is famous for its mutinies, in HMS Bounty in 1789, at Spithead and the Nore in 1797, and most recently at Invergordon in 1931. It is a curious organization, its hammocks once filled by the cruel Press Gangs kidnapping innocent men and forcing them to sea and possible death, its discipline for many years enforced by the cruel cat o’ nine tails and the occasional shooting of an admiral to encourage the others. But it stood between us and the world, without trying to take over the state, and it was very beautiful, and many of us loved it. In London and the big seaport cities, bluejackets in their Edwardian uniforms were still a common sight in my childhood. They were reassuring, not overbearing. Since 1901, when horses failed at the task, Navy men have pulled the gun carriage on which Royal coffins (and Churchill’s) have rested at state funerals, an extraordinarily moving sight. These were our defenders, upon whom, as Charles II’s Articles of War first proclaimed, “under the Good Providence of God, the safety, honor and welfare of this realm do chiefly depend.”

In an era when soldiers were often despised, or even feared, sailors were not. Think of Kipling’s 1890 poem “Tommy”, intended to change the drunken delinquent reputation of Queen Victoria’s redcoats:

For it’s “Tommy this, an’ Tommy that, an’ Chuck him out, the brute!”
But it’s “Saviour of ‘is country” when the guns begin to shoot.

In George Orwell’s perfect novel Coming Up for Air, Edwardian civilians are appalled when a young man signs up for the Army: “‘Well now! Listed for a soldier! Just think of it! A fine young fellow like that!’ It just shocked them. Listening for a soldier, in their eyes, was the exact equivalent of a girl’s going on the streets.”

But sailors, possibly because they were at sea so much, were idealized as “hearts of oak” manning the wooden walls (and later the steel walls) of England. And the same was true for officers, credited above all with the great victory at Trafalgar in 1805, which secured national safety and prosperity for the rest of that century. They had a reputation for taciturnity and bluffness, which never does anyone any harm, and they often lived up to it. The fictional Jack Aubrey, in Patrick O’Brian’s witty and clever books about the Napoleonic wars, is a perfect rendering of this type. They tell terrible jokes. They don’t say much, just “Kiss me, Hardy” (Nelson as he died); “There seems to be something wrong with our bloody ships today, Chatfield” (Beatty at Jutland, as British warships repeatedly blew up under German fire); and “Continue to engage the enemy” (Warburton-Lee at Narvik, dying on his bridge after smashing up Hitler’s destroyer fleet and so making a cross-Channel invasion impossible).

And so the word “Navy” had, for many years, a useful commercial magic if you were selling something a bit manly and bluff, such as Navy Cut tobacco and Navy Rum, or even Senior Service cigarettes. But it did not have the yelling, martinet character of the Army. I have never yet seen a naval officer’s uniform that fits properly, and when sailors are marched aboard their ships (does this still happen?), the drill is far from pernickety. Close contact with the Navy — both my parents were in it, and so were most of their friends, some of my schoolteachers and many of the parents of my schoolfellows — revealed a dry, faintly sarcastic view of the outside world which had never been to sea. Even my mother, an ocean-going snob who would die of shame if she heard me use the word “toilet”, had mastered the sarcasm of the fleet. More than once I jumped with surprise when I heard her icily remarking about some inadequate if feeble attempt at recompense. “Well, that’s damned nice of him”, she’d say, which, for a Fifties married middle-class woman in a respectable suburb, was going it a bit.

This reputation was kept alive just a little longer by two films. The first, The Cruel Sea, is one of the best movies ever made and shows, among other things, how the spirit of the Navy, stretching back through centuries, embraces and takes hold of ordinary men and turns them into something very nearly heroic. The other, In Which We Serve, features a speech by Celia Johnson, playing a naval wife, and explains the privations of this role. It can reliably reduce me to tears, and not just because of the way she says “sloop”, so upper-middle-class that nobody could get away with it nowadays. During one scene, at a 1939 Christmas dinner, she is wearing a small brooch, in a shape worn by my mother and known to her as the “Crown of Neptune”.

Few will ever notice this, but the little shiny badge betokened membership of a secret society. It was a sign to other such navy wives of a great unknown sisterhood, familiar with the grim features of married quarters and rented lodgings in glum seaports or remote colonial stations, the endless disruption of life by emergencies and distant postings, the miserable pay, and the infuriating tussle with their great permanent love rivals: their husbands’ ships. In Which We Serve also features the glorious Navy Prayer, one of the Church of England’s “Forms of Prayer to Be Used At Sea”, written when the Navy was recognized as an indispensable part of the nation. It is a plea for a safe return from danger, and opens with the words, “O Eternal Lord God, who alone spreadest out the heavens, and rulest the raging of the sea, who hast compassed the waters with bounds until day and night come to an end…”

And this is one of the beauties of the Navy which once endeared it to so many. For it was beautiful. Great warships, which we no longer possess, are beautiful, as such engines of destruction should probably not be. The boxy, enclosed modern vessels of today’s piddling navies lack this magic, as do the two giant car parks we call aircraft carriers. But in the early Sixties, I couldn’t get from my home in the village of Alverstoke to Portsmouth without crossing the harbor by ferry, under the immense 15-inch guns of the last British battleship, HMS Vanguard. There is something uplifting and thrilling about great guns, and the swooping lines of the ship itself, 814 feet long, that expressed power as few other works of man can do. It made our hearts swell a bit, to know we possessed such an instrument. And many hearts, including my own, have shriveled, as that lovely fleet has melted away.

Of course, all this is also wrapped in England’s deep love of the sea. One sign of this can be found in Arthur Ransome’s books about children sailing in the Lake District. It is now impossible to imagine the hold these stories had on hundreds of thousands of English childhoods, lived far from the shore. Michael Frayn, who grew up in the Surrey suburbs, has confessed that he read them over and over again, and tried to write one of his own. Eventually, the children in the series escape from their lake and actually go to sea, in reality and in fantasy. Towards the end of Peter Duck, one of the strangest of these remarkable novels, the children sing their way up the Channel to the words of the sea shanty “Spanish Ladies”, a favorite of my naval father, marking the ancient landmarks known to homecoming Englishmen since the time of Grenville and Hawkins:

And the First land we made, it is called the Dodman,
Next Rame Head off Plymouth, Start, Portland and Wight;
And we sailed by Beachy, 
By Fairlight and Dungeness,
Until we brought to by the South Foreland Light. 

Those who still savor the “inshore waters” part of the Shipping Forecast, as I do, were probably brought up in a maritime Britain, where there was still a bit of salt in everything and the sea was a friend and fortification, not, as it seems now, a door left wide open. Modern Britain is now so turned away from the sea that it brings to mind a passage in C.S.Lewis’s Prince Caspian, one of the Narnia books. The new rulers of Narnia fear the sea and what might come over it, and have deliberately allowed thick woods to grow along the coast. Lewis, who also grew up in more naval days, though he lived far from the sea, understood, like any British person of his time, that the ocean is a source of power and inspiration and a great highway to the world and all that is in it. But only if you have a Navy.

Hanging people by the neck until dead, or whatever method you use, is a genuinely interesting subject and raises more profound issues than most of the controversies of our time. Yet it is usually embraced or dismissed amid a blaze of rage. Your view of it defines you, though not necessarily in the way you hope. My reluctant sympathy for the ultimate deterrent, forced on me by experience, facts and reason, has made me personally unacceptable in civilized society for decades. That has given me plenty of extra time to read, or admire the sunset, when I might otherwise have been eating agreeable soufflés and quaffing fine clarets with the liberal elite.

It is a topic of extraordinary power, but you will not win the debate by being right. I once checkmated the then Director General of the BBC, Mark Thompson, in an argument about broadcasting impartiality. I said that the BBC did not employ a single journalist who could have given a hostile interview to the noted anti-death-penalty campaigner Clive Stafford-Smith. He could not contradict me, and I can think of no better illustration of the Corporation’s profound, unalterable bias. This itself is evidence of the unreasoning nature of the abolitionist position. If it were just a debate, then the BBC would hire people on both sides of it. But my logical, factual victory made no difference at all, either to Mr Thompson or the BBC. They continued to think that I was a cruel, unjust yahoo and that Mr Stafford-Smith (who is indeed a lovely man) is a noble humanitarian.

On the other hand, I probably have more supporters among the non-BBC classes — though they are not all that much use to me. They are as emotional and irrational as the BBC liberals. Many of these are the young, assumed for so long to be hopelessly soppy. They are uninterested in old-fashioned Christian thought, and have become practical and tough. A recent opinion poll by More in Common showed that support for capital punishment is now stronger among 25 to 34-year-olds than among 65 to 74-year-olds, and more common among supposedly liberal women than among men. But are these people actually my allies? One in three of them also want the police to be armed, something I view with horror. They do not want the sort of England that I do. They just want eyes for eyes and teeth for teeth. They have entirely missed the point. Properly-conducted capital punishment makes a country less vengeful and more gentle.

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So. Farewell then conservatism

By Peter Hitchens

I can just remember this country when it was an actual matter of national pride that our police were unarmed, in contrast with both the French and the Americans, the only countries which seriously sought to challenge us as “top nation”. I can also remember it as a place of gentleness and safety which would astonish the modern young. There is little doubt in my mind that it was the threat of the noose that allowed our police to remain weaponless for so long. Parliament has never actually decided to give the police guns. It lacks the nerve to take responsibility for such decisions. Instead, ministers, civil servants and police chiefs have quietly created a semi-armed constabulary, and if tasers had not been invented, I suspect most officers would now carry pistols. This has quite predictably created a new informal death penalty — but one without charge, trial, appeal or the possibility of reprieve, carried out by frightened men and women in a microsecond of fear and doubt.

Probably the single worst instance of this was the 2005 shooting of the totally innocent Brazilian electrician Jean Charles de Menezes, now painfully dramatised in the TV series Suspect. To this day, the British state has totally avoided taking responsibility for this horror. It was exactly that responsibility MPs were trying to escape when they abolished a proper lawful death penalty, by sneakily voting for a purportedly Private Member’s Bill to abolish hanging. The Bill in fact received vital support from Harold Wilson’s government whips. But the pretence meant that it was never put before the voters, either before or since.

The state’s view of the death penalty shows more clearly than almost any other policy what kind of civilization we live in. By the way, I am not here discussing the death penalty in the United States, an empire haunted by its history of slavery and violence, where capital punishment is mainly a political fiction, espoused by candidates in the hope of appearing effective and resolute in the face of crime and disorder. Yes, people are occasionally executed there. I have seen this happen, twice, and it is a profound and disturbing experience.

But in both cases, the crime was many years in the past, and the killer might well, in slightly different circumstances, have lived on for many years. I can’t see how these events, so totally separated from the murders that led to them, could be expected to deter anything. Texas, one of the few states which genuinely applies the death penalty, suffered 1,322 homicides in 2018. It executed 13 killers that year, mostly years after their crimes. Other US states which formally have the penalty on their books seldom or never impose it. Your chances of actually being put to death for a horrible murder in the USA are only slightly higher than your chances of being carried off to another galaxy by aliens in the middle of the night. Most of those executed in the USA have been waiting to die for so long that they have forgotten what they did.

No, I am interested in Britain before the mid-Fifties, when the death penalty was eviscerated by Parliament.

It carried on half-heartedly for another few years, but Britain’s governing class had lost the will to punish, and by the time hanging was actually abolished, in 1965, it was an ineffectual remnant. People think they know that murder hasn’t really increased all that much since abolition 60 years ago. They are wrong. The number of homicides went up from around 300 per year in the early Sixties to around 700 a year in the first years of the 21st century. But it isn’t quite that simple, and in any case it was never just murder that the noose was supposed to deter. It was certain types of murder, generally the murder of strangers by thieves or rapists seeking to ensure there were no witnesses to their crimes, and certain actions, especially the carrying of firearms or knives, which might lead to murder. There are several different ways of classifying homicide, and the courts have shown a growing willingness to accept guilty pleas for manslaughter rather than to go through a long and expensive trial on a full murder charge.

There will always be murder, though it will sometimes be called by other names. In the modern era of hanging, we had remarkably few executions, an average of 13 a year from 1900 to 1964. We also had few homicides, an unarmed police force and very little armed crime or knife violence. No longer. Importantly, it is not necessarily murder which the death penalty prevents. Some murders are so utterly irrational that no deterrent could affect them. But the extent of the increase in violence has been concealed by the huge improvement in trauma treatment in our hospitals. Thanks to greater skills, better equipment and techniques, hundreds each year who would have died, especially of stab wounds, now survive.

One survey of the crimes of attempted murder and wounding to endanger life concluded that Britain’s murder rate would be at least treble what it is now but for improvements in medicine and the growing skills of surgeons and paramedics. This was some years ago, but is still in my view valid — almost all crime statistics in this country are now dubious and affected by various and ever-changing political targets, and by the increasing unwillingness of the police and courts to get involved in crime if they can possibly help it. Many people who are now charged with attempted murder or wounding would, within living memory, have been facing capital murder charges, as their victims’ lives would not have been saved. So if we still had the NHS of 1955, I suspect we would have a homicide rate comparable to that in the US.

The firearms control expert Colin Greenwood has noted another interesting fact. In 1948, and in 1955-57, hangings were suspended because Parliament was debating the abolition of the rope. Greenwood found a leap in armed and violent offenses in 1948, followed by a return to previous levels when the suspension ended. The 1957 suspension (which ended with a much more restricted death penalty) was followed by a similar leap, a much smaller fall when the law came back into force, and a generally higher level of such crimes thereafter. There was then a sharp increase after abolition in the mid-Sixties, which has not abated since.

All of this is utilitarian, and there is nothing wrong with that as far as it goes. Utilitarians really have to support capital punishment, unless they close their minds to the facts. Many modern liberals will be shocked to discover that a man they much admire, John Stuart Mill, made a forceful speech, in April 1868, in favor of the death penalty for aggravated murder (what I should call heinous murder). Part of his reasoning was the appalling cruelty of long imprisonment, the only realistic alternative. I particularly share his horror of the living death of life imprisonment, still offered by reformers as a “humane” choice. As he put it: “I defend this penalty, when confined to atrocious cases, on the very ground on which it is commonly attacked — on that of humanity to the criminal; as beyond comparison the least cruel mode in which it is possible adequately to deter from the crime.”

There is a deeper reasoning which Mill would not have troubled with. But, as a Christian believer, I have to. And it is neatly wrapped in the 37th of the Church of England’s 39 Articles, “Of the Civil Magistrates”. It notes that “The Laws of the Realm may punish Christian men with death, for heinous and grievous offences”, adding “It is lawful for Christian men, at the commandment of the Magistrate, to wear weapons, and serve in the wars.” This seems to me to accept (as I do) that the arguments for the death penalty are more or less the same as those for just war: it is a horrible thing, but sometimes necessary.

Suggested reading

The death penalty degrades America

By Freddie deBoer

If you seek office and the power that goes with it, your most pressing task is to stand between your fellow countrymen and evil. To do that, you must maintain armed forces capable of lethal violence and ready to inflict it. If you lack the courage and resolve to do this, then do not seek office in the first place. You are not qualified for it. The apparatus of the death penalty has exactly the same purpose, to defend the weak and good against the strong and evil, by placing a sharp sword in the hands of justice. This point also disposes of the most popular argument against the death penalty, the fear of executing the wrong person. This is indeed a strong point. It is why, now that our courts have been turned into a shameful politicized and emotionalized travesty of justice, I could not possibly support the return of the gallows until major reforms have taken place.

The most important would be to end majority verdicts, a grave weakening of jury independence. Jurors should also be subject to stricter qualifications, perhaps educational, perhaps based on experience of life — 18 is certainly too young. Judges need to be more willing and more free to halt trials where they believe the prosecution is employing emotion rather than evidence. The appalling evidence-free condemnation of the nurse Lucy Letby to a slow living death demands a sweeping upheaval of police and courts which would take years to achieve.

But that is a particular point, not a general rule. In general, a well-ordered justice system, watched over by a free independent press, would rarely execute an innocent person, especially with the safeguards provided by modern science. But do those who claim that the fear of killing one innocent person is enough to disarm the state really mean what they say? This is a pacifist argument, and I would respect it if those who made it admitted that its logic means leaving the country defenseless against any enemy, and accepting the consequences — subjugation, impoverishment, extinction of liberty — which would follow.

But few are so principled. Worse, many modern liberals, while denouncing capital punishment, are all too keen on idealistic foreign adventures in which innocents die. I think of the 1999 bombing of Yugoslavia, the lawless 2003 invasion of Iraq, and David Cameron’s allegedly benevolent bombing of Libya in 2011, though the pretext for that has long been exploded. You might not like to read this brief and terrible description of a scene in Libya, after a Nato bombing raid, written by that very fine reporter Martin Fletcher. “In a hospital at Sabratha, 50 miles west of Tripoli, lay 11 corpses, perhaps more,” Fletcher wrote. “Their state was such that a precise count was impossible. Three were identifiably young children, though little more than the head of one remained. One journalist fainted at the sight.”

But this was done on the watch of a prime minister who once said of capital punishment: “There have been too many cases of things going wrong, of the wrong people being executed, of evidence coming to light after the execution, and sometimes there is just too much of an element of doubt. And I just don’t honestly think that in a civilized society like ours that you can have the death penalty any more.” And yet he started a war of choice, to give his conscience a bit of exercise in a foreign field. These people do not really mean what they say. Innocents may die, as long as they are far away. They can also die, as Jean Charles Menezes did, at the hands of armed police, and nothing will happen.

In fact, conservatism — not to be mistaken for its loud, overdressed cousin, the Conservative Party, which somehow lives on — will probably not even get a proper funeral. Its passing will not be marked by sonorous gloom and penitence, and stern dark poetry borne away on the wind at the muddy edge of a deep, sad grave. Nobody can stand that sort of thing now. It will get a cheerful informal send-off with jokes and applause. After all, it won’t be there to hate it. I shan’t be there either. There will be no call for me.

The past few weeks have totally liberated me from a last and lingering temporal duty. I thought I had it, but it turns out to have been illusory. I thought that there were still quite a few people who actually wanted and liked conservatism. But in fact, there are hardly any. The other day I was asked to define the word, on Twitter, and came up with something like “Love of God, love of country, love of family, love of beauty, love of liberty and the rule of law, suspicion of needless change”. Given more room I’d have added all kinds of preferences for poetry and sylvan beauty over noise and concrete, for twilight over noonday, for autumn over summer and wind over calm, for the deep gleam of iron polished in use over the flashy sparkle of precious metal.

But you probably know what I mean. And all my life these things have been slipping away from me. I am using them as metaphors for conservatism in politics, in education, literature and music as well. My problems arise from the fact that I missed the last train of the old life. But I saw it go. I arrived, out of breath, on the station platform just in time to see it depart.

I saw official London when it was still black and battered, a great imperial capital. I saw the Church of England when it still possessed majesty, dominion and power. I saw, on a sultry August day in 1960, the final astonishing relic of British global naval might, the Royal Navy’s last battleship, towed to the breakers, a modern version of Turner’s Fighting Temeraire. The scene was made more melancholy when the colossal vessel, reluctant to die, grounded on the Portsmouth mud. A great lump rose to my throat, and I still feel a sense of deep half-understood loss when I recall it.

But the nation swiftly got over it, as it had got over the Suez failure in 1956 and our (still unrepaid) default on our First World War debt to the USA in 1934. I felt and heard and lived amid a completely different set of rules from the ones which now exist. British people of that time had been formed by a completely different set of morals, manners and standards. I remember how they spoke and carried themselves, how they expressed disapproval, how even in their hours of relaxation they filled each moment with purposeful activity.

And for many years I thought I might persuade others that it was a pity this rather admirable society had gone and that it might be worth rescuing, and even restoring. But life without these old restraints was much more fun, especially if you were reasonably well off, than it had been before. It would take many years before the social costs of our weakened morals would begin to show. It is fascinating that the Conservative Party never made any serious attempt to reverse or even moderate the social revolution of the Sixties. It turned out that easier divorce, feebler criminal justice, devalued examinations and the rest were actually quite popular.

The most successful song in the music charts in 1967, the supposed Summer of Love, was the appalling dirge “Please Release Me” by Engelbert Humperdinck. It kept the Beatles’ release of “Strawberry Fields” and “Penny Lane” (on the same disc) off the number one slot. It was inescapable. It was an anthem to divorce, which everyone knew was about to become vastly easier the following year. In a similar betrayal of the rules that had created it, the British middle class positively loved comprehensive schools, or thought they did, because they no longer had to worry about their children failing to win places at the much better grammar schools. Again, they found out later that many of the new schools were really not very good. A softer, more absent police force was also welcome in a world where illegal drugs were increasingly common in the schools and homes of the well-off. Easy abortion, likewise, was welcome if the alternative was a shotgun marriage. It was around this point that official Christianity, much like the Tory Party, began to make more and more compromises with the modern world — leaving first the Roman Catholic Church and then only its more determined core to defend principles which had been non-negotiable throughout Christian Britain 50 years before.

Until quite recently, this country boasted a kind of half-timbered theme-park nostalgia for some aspects of itself, but this was pretty shallow. Nobody really misses all those horse-brasses and toby jugs that used to clutter our pubs, and the hunting enthusiasts — when it came to it — could find little support when the Blairites spitefully banned their picturesque if bloody gallops across the countryside. Great aristocratic houses are all very well for a day out, and I still share Evelyn Waugh’s melancholy over their wanton destruction. But they are slipping out of the national consciousness, their original purpose a mystery, like most of our history.

Suggested reading

The gravediggers of British conservatism

By Aris Roussinos

It is almost funny that conservative media protests against the political correcting of the National Trust and the destruction of statues for dogmatic reasons. Alas, most people under 30 have no idea what the fuss is about, as nobody has told them any history. The parish churches of England are an unmatched storehouse of beauty and I fear for their future as their congregations wither. For what does any young person make of them? They are written in a language as unreadable as Assyrian, and the stories they tell are of long ages of which most of us know nothing and, I fear, care less. Thus, the English countryside is a beautiful effigy of its former self, preserved by the last generation which understood it, but not at all guaranteed to survive much longer.

The man who strove hardest to preserve conservatism was the late Sir Roger Scruton. His experience is instructive, especially the way the Conservative Party turned savagely on him when he was falsely accused of some Wrongthink or other by a Left-wing magazine. This was typical of that party, happy to wear Sir Roger in its lapel as a trophy, but terrified that he might actually do something dangerous.

Sir Roger’s life perhaps provides us with a clue as to what will happen in the end to conservatism. For his greatest achievement was to go to the aid of Czechoslovak dissenters under icy Communist rule in the Eighties. He and a band of equally brave men and women travelled dangerously to Prague and other Czechoslovak cities, smuggling unobtainable books, giving tutorials in philosophy, and otherwise aiding the survival of free thought in those sad regions.

Nobody knew then that this great castle of lies would fall so soon. Oddly when it did, conservatism did not really prosper much. One of the successes of Communism was (with few exceptions) its systematic blocking and poisoning of the wells of Christianity from which true conservatism springs. The peoples of the USSR and Eastern Europe did not want to be free in the old-fashioned English way espoused by Roger Scruton. They wanted to be free in an American Way. So, we had a double paradox. The collapse of the USSR freed the Western Left, which in Western Europe and North America could no longer be accused of sympathy with the enemy. But it did not liberate conservatism in the former Soviet Empire, a conservatism which now barely exists.

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The McSweeney Project

By Tom McTague

The nearest thing to it, and it is not very near, is the populist nationalism now so strong in Poland and Hungary. And perhaps it will not be long before these countries are sending us civilising missions of philosophers, and parcels of books, to see if they can revive or sustain the sinking fires of Christian conservatism in England. I doubt it. For we too, in the form of Noisy Nigel and his raucous followers, have decided to prefer the populist and nationalist path to the conservative one.

Why wouldn’t we? Surely the foundation of our world, in the unchosen but indispensable alliance of the free world with Stalin in 1941, was the end of all serious hope of conservatism or of any kind of true principle. Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour trilogy is the only serious work to have dealt with this, and even Waugh recoiled from taking it to its conclusion.

Its first volume, Men at Arms, begins with Guy Crouchback, last of a long line of Roman Catholic squires, deserted by his flighty, pleasure-seeking wife, exiled in Italy, too old for normal military service — but greatly moved to righteousness by the Stalin-Hitler pact of August 1939. Here at last, he feels, is the modern world in arms. He can honourably take up his sword against it. There is a touching scene in the church of the Italian town where he has been living, where he visits the tomb of an English knight, killed in some forgotten act of chivalry while on his way to the crusades. He never imagines, during his training and early service, that by the end of the war he will be Stalin’s ally.

Towards the end of the trilogy, in Unconditional Surrender, a Jewish refugee — who Guy is unsuccessfully trying to protect — reproaches him with his early illusions. She says to him that there had been a general will to war in 1939, a sort of death wish.  “Even good men thought their private honour would be satisfied by war,” she says.  Guy, by this time utterly without illusions, replies: “God forgive me. I was one of them.”

I have always thought that the book should have ended there. But it plods on into a sort of happy ending with English middle-class life seemingly restored. So it seemed to be. But there was, as we now see, no substance to it. There was no call for it.

I have never heard a more dismal, pessimistic noise. It sounds like a great sea creature coming to the surface and dying, just over the horizon, a miserable thought. And quite right too. How much more fitting than the silly tipsy cheering of the shivering crowds in other cities, as they watch the futile fireworks and toast the turn of the calendar. Towards what?

There are people who, around this time of year turn out lists of wondrous material achievements and supposedly pleasing prospects which lie before us. There will be more electric cars, apparently, as if that is a good thing. On the contrary, innocent pedestrians and cyclists, such as I am, fear these silent killers. Their sole function, it seems to me, is to make motorists feel less selfish because the filth and noise these things create have been outsourced to a distant power station. Even the revival of the railways, which I at first welcomed, turns out to mean that travelling by train is more and more like travelling by air.

Now, when I make these accurate points, people accuse me of wishing to go back to the 1950s, a decade which — to me — has all the allure of an overflowing ashtray next to a plate of bad food. I have no such desire. I do not wish on New Year’s Eve to be transported back to the age of custard, chilblains and Giles cartoons. What I feel, when I pause to think of what lies ahead, is that we have an unerring ability to choose the wrong future. Architecture, of all the arts, seems to me to mock at us for this mistake. For it is the most powerful art of all, and it also persists long enough to remind of us of what we used to be and what we might have been.

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The War was not Our Finest Hour

By Peter Hitchens

Wander, as I love to do on autumn days, through the great cities of continental Europe, and you will begin to sense something very disturbing. Of course, there is plenty of loveliness in their ancient quarters, though it often finishes abruptly, up against some modernist cuboid or a swooping, perpetually growling  motorway junction. And there is, increasingly, a frenzy of newness, as if there is a collective will to obliterate as much of the past as possible.

In the Netherlands, especially, there seems to be an almost hysterical desire to build tall, straight, featureless boxes at every opportunity. The Hague seems to suffer from this worse than anywhere else. How ruthless and crude it all seems in a city which once breathed Edwardian calm, with its stately parks and its foolishly optimistic Peace Palace.

But there is still an era in between, and this is the one which distresses me, because it is the relic of a future we nearly had, and which we threw away. The colossal Central Station at Antwerp, dating from shortly before the Great War, is perhaps the most moving example of this. It has opulence, grandeur and calm. It assumes that the world will remain solid, prosperous and peaceful. And, in its portly, slightly constipated way, it is exactly what all those ruthless, clean-lined tower blocks of today are not.

It is the inheritor of the old world of narrow streets, arches, spires and pinnacled towers, in which it was built. It respects the language of their architecture, one of a continuing Christian order and hierarchy. So, come to that, do the lovely millionaire’s mansions of Moscow, many of them preserved as embassies, and enough to make you weep at a world so irrecoverably lost amid Soviet new barbarism and Oligarch’s Baroque.

So do the light-hearted pinnacles and curves, still to be seen in Barcelona, of such Catalan geniuses as Antoni Gaudi and Lluis Domènech i Montaner. How might it have been if such minds — and the ideas that went with them — had dominated the building of the 20th and 21st centuries, not the thudding brutalism of Corbusier and Goldfinger, and their stark successors? Modern did not have to mean ferro-concrete. It just turned out that way.

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By Peter Hitchens

How different the world before 1914 was. It is a punctuation point as stark as the Fall of the Roman Empire. Before: curves, Degas, detail, shadow, mystery. Afterwards: eye-searing light, straight lines, Otto Dix, unconcealed power and no mystery at all. Power needs no mystery. On the contrary, it is keen to be recognised as what it is, straight away.

From Antwerp’s great cathedral of railways, doubtless once perfumed with good cigars and strong coffee, one could have travelled, in carriages of polished wood, brass fittings and deep cushions, to any number of ancient, unspoiled cities, in which patient, cautious statesmen made their careful plans in high-ceilinged offices looking out on to broad boulevards traversed by trams, offices so quiet that you could hear the rustle of the ashes shifting in their open fires.

And they planned war. Had they not done so, I am sure that most of the great developments of modern science would have come about, perhaps in a different shape, perhaps a little more slowly. We would have had another sort of modern world, more civilised and more worthy of optimism, than the rackety arrangements we have now. We might have no television, but some other gentler invention. The self-evidently crazy idea of mass car ownership, the foundation of Fordism, might never have taken root. Why, social democracy might actually have been made to work and Russia could have become a liberal democracy.

But they chose war. And it was that war which ended all possibility of the future which we might have had. War took us from stately, mannered opulence to bare, arrogant expressions of strength and money. It ended the slow amelioration of old-fashioned social democracy and gave us Bolshevism. It obliterated conservatism and gave us fascism and National Socialism. And in the end it brought us to the deliberately materialist modernism of the European Union and the secular worship of material progress above all things, which we have now, and perhaps for a while longer.

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The change in architecture, art, literature and music, which accompanied this transformation, tells us that there is no way back. We have, more or less, recovered materially from the disaster of 1914. But our ideas have not. We can no longer believe in the things we believed in before 1914, because they were discredited by war and what followed.

Above all, the supposed repression brought about by religious belief has gone.  None of us, now, could bear to return to it even if we were offered the chance. Stefan Zweig’s World of Yesterday actually sounds rather appealing to me at this distance. I would in theory be glad if coarseness and violence once again became as shocking as they were to Zweig’s generation. But would I really be able to bear the stifling obedience to adults, the formality of dress, the interminable Sundays, the long postponement of pleasures during a lengthy and rigid education in which you could actually fail examinations?

The spirit which made all this possible, and which sustained the other many self-restraints which kept the peace, has gone. The simplest way of expressing this is that I would love to know great acres of poetry and Shakespeare by heart, and to be able to quote at will from the works of the classical thinkers. I would love to know Ancient Greek. But I would not love the self-discipline needed to do these things. I have simply not been brought up to such tasks, and the world around me, shouting for my immediate attention, will not let me pursue them.

But no amount of complacent or optimistic statistics about any coming year will ever persuade me that what I have is better than what I might have had, if we had chosen another future in 1914.

The rankings suggest a pattern: that in our tougher, fiercer, poorer regions support for such freedom is strongest, whereas in the tree-shaded southern and midland suburbs (and also, oddly, in Scotland, which is, for the most part, not very soft and bosky) it is at its weakest. Why ever would this be? By all means ask a statistician, or a sociologist, for the answer. But I have a different theory: let me explain it to you.

Rudyard Kipling, in my view rightly, put a lot of our national class division down to the deep remaining bitterness between the invaders of 1066 and their resentful subjects, and to the lingering Saxon belief in ancient liberties once held, now lost, and one day to be restored, in what has often been a common belief in this country.

It peeps out from the Robin Hood legend, of an exiled nobleman beloved by the people, but driven from his true title, and from many ancient local stories of poachers who are really the true owners of the land from which they are now driven by gamekeepers. One such tale, of a sort once common in country districts, lies at the heart of M.R. James’s troubling ghost story “The Mezzotint“, about a picture which comes alive, and shows a terrible dynastic murder in progress, far away and a long time ago.

In Kipling’s clever poem “Norman and Saxon” a dying Norman baron is warning his arrogant young heir to be careful when dealing with his Saxon peasants.

“The Saxon is not like us Normans. His manners are not so polite.
But he never means anything serious till he talks about justice and right.
When he stands like an ox in the furrow — with his sullen set eyes on your own,
And grumbles, “This isn’t fair dealing”, my son, leave the Saxon alone.

“You can horsewhip your Gascony archers, or torture your Picardy spears;
But don’t try that game on the Saxon; you’ll have the whole brood round your ears.
From the richest old Thane in the county to the poorest chained serf in the field,
They’ll be at you and on you like hornets, and, if you are wise, you will yield.”

Arthur Conan Doyle touched on something similar in his glorious but largely forgotten historical novel The White Company (words most people now associate with a firm that makes bedding).

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The book’s hero, Alleyne Edricson, is heir to a great Saxon noble name, now down on its luck. But “he knew enough of the ancient greatness of his own family to be aware that the time had been when they had held undisputed and paramount sway over all that tract of country. His father could trace his pure Saxon lineage back to … the time when the Norman first set mailed foot upon English soil.”

With their lands seized and confiscated over 300 years, their wealth and power had dwindled to a crumbling manor, two small farms and a wood full of pigs. But even so, “above all, the owner of the soil could still hold his head high as the veritable Socman of Minstead — that is, as holding the land in free socage, with no feudal superior, and answerable to no man lower than the King”.

My grandfather, a proud son of Portsmouth with a rolling, deep, soft Hampshire burr that I seldom hear nowadays, often seemed like one of Doyle’s untameable Saxons (though the name Hitchens actually originates from Cornwall, whose inhabitants have an even more ungovernable pedigree).

More than once I heard him rumble, when he heard or read of some aristocrat claiming that his forebears had come over with the Conqueror: “Yes, and my ancestors were here on the shore, waiting for them.” He was not entirely joking. I don’t think he was any kind of socialist, though he worshipped the crippled cobbler John Pounds, who had founded some of the first schools for the children of the poor, in the desperate, squalid backstreets of Old Portsmouth.

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But he was a pioneer of the National Union of Teachers, and held to the same sort of blood and fire Protestantism that helped Cromwell’s Ironsides to sweep through their decadent foes like a sickle through the wheat. I have little doubt which side he would have taken at Edgehill or Naseby. He never read a work of fiction, so far as I know, in his life; the Bible contained all the stories he needed.

From this fierce, cross-tempered, deliberately eccentric old patriarch, as I believe, I have inherited things which came to surprise me in later life, especially a furious prejudice in favour of liberty, an inability even to understand those who would give it away, and an accompanying suspicion of authority. I know jury trial is good. I know the presumption of innocence is beyond price. I loathe the sight of an armed police officer. I watch TV reports of police smashing down people’s doors (however wicked they may allegedly be) with suspicion and shock. I can easily provide good reasons for these positions.

But I do not really need them, except in attempts to persuade others. And I can rather easily tell when these others are not interested. These legacies only really flowered in my mind as I came to maturity. My education and upbringing provided the knowledge and understanding. But my first encounter with Macaulay’s History of England awoke something in me which was not theoretical.

As I read his account of the great defiance of 1688, I remembered that Liberty was my inheritance. And now I had to pass it on unharmed. Much as I hated the prospect, after a lifetime of comfortable cowardice, I might even have to take risks to do so. The piston and the cylinder already existed, but a profound cultural heritage filled it with the steam which actually moved the mechanism.

Talking of cultural heritage, I will mention here a curious experience which causes me to think that we inherit more than we think from our forebears. Some years ago I was privileged to spend a night aboard one of the warships of the Royal Navy, in which my father spent 30 years of his life. Between waking and sleeping, I heard the call to hands at the change of the watches, broadcast over the ship’s Tannoy quite softly. I knew, factually, that I had never heard the words before. But simultaneously, I also knew, instinctively, that I had heard them before in exactly the same order and intonation.

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I wonder what else, among my thoughts and desires, comes down from farther and farther back, so far back its origin can only be guessed at until its origin can no longer be seen. As Thomas Hardy described it in his extraordinarily moving short poem “Old Furniture”:

“Hands behind hands, growing paler and paler,
As in a mirror a candle-flame
Shows images of itself, each frailer
As it recedes, though the eye may frame
Its shape the same.”

Well, if it has happened to me, why not to others? How far does it go back? Is there some inherited division? Has it faded in the South, among the Normanised middle classes, descendants of those who made their peace with the invader, and persisted beyond that persistent line of division that still runs from the Mersey to the Humber? On its far side are the lands subjected to the Conqueror’s terrible “harrying“, a repression as bloody and merciless as anything in the Thirty Years War.

I expect most educated people of my generation are embarrassed by Wordsworth’s talk of the “Flood of British freedom” which “to the open sea of the world’s praise, from dark antiquity hath flowed”. And since the massacre of the grammar schools, I do not suppose it is very well-known among the bleak, salty and wind-scoured housing estates of, for example, Hull. A pity.

But something else has perhaps been passed on, and survives, even if it does not rhyme or scan. And perhaps it may save us yet from the enemies of free speech and thought, though I must admit I have yet to see any sign of it.

We conducted it in a chivalrous fashion. And We Won It. Knighted historians have denounced me for saying so, but the common idea of that war in modern Britain is a vague belief that we went to war in 1939 to save the Jews of Europe.

Of course no historian says this. Nobody who knows anything at all about the war could possibly believe it. As it happens, we did not in fact save most of the Jews of Europe, or make any great efforts to do so once we knew they were being murdered. But then, most people don’t really know anything about the war.

Where was Narvik? Did we really attack the French fleet? Why did Danzig matter? What are the Ardennes? What happened at Tobruk? How on earth was HMS Hood sunk so easily? Why did the USA take so long to enter the war? Why weren’t we invaded in fact, as we have been so many times in fiction?

How come we ended up in alliance with the monster, Stalin, if our cause was freedom and civilisation? Why did we send all our gold to America? Did we get it back?

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The whole story is a bafflement of obscurity and confusion. Most of us just know the legend, which more or less requires us not to think, or study the matter. Let’s just have another book about codebreaking geniuses at Bletchley Park or brave Special Operations Executive agents parachuted into occupied France.

Or perhaps another film about the Dunkirk evacuation, which entirely glosses over why our army, bereft of equipment worth billions, was standing up to its armpits in salt water on the French coast. And the newspapers print the legend. And the publishers print the legend. And TV shows the legend.

TV’s latest excursion into this Churchilliad is a drama called World on Fire. It features a number of plucky and intrepid characters, several of them quite Left-wing — for this is after all an anti-Nazi war, which was therefore surely Left-wing. But here come the contradictions again, which I doubt the BBC will bother with very much: it was not so Left-wing at the start, if you happened to be a Communist, hamstrung by Stalin’s 1939-41 alliance with Hitler.

And much of it is set in Poland, at that time a military dictatorship which had recently taken part in the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia, and where anti-Semitism was common, even if not officially encouraged. We are invited to sympathise with one character’s fury at Britain’s inaction as the Nazis prepare to invade. Yet most British people at the time were baffled by our alliance with Poland, and Britain never had any intention of doing anything serious about it, lacking the offensive forces needed to do so.

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The historical vagueness and confusion in the scenes which follow is astonishing. I doubt whether one in a hundred of those watching could find Danzig on a map, or know why its Polish Post Office was so important in 1939 (A clue. Danzig at that date was so overwhelmingly German by population — 98% — that the Polish Post Office was one of the very few pieces of Polish real estate in the city).

I personally was puzzled to see, in late August 1939, young Polish men shown apparently volunteering to join their country’s army in its hour of need, as they would already have been under arms. Poland, which though poor and poorly-equipped and not as big a military power as it liked to think, was not unwarlike, and had maintained a two-year compulsory military service requirement since the 1920s.

This misty lack of clarity about checkable facts is, in my view, a direct result of the wilful ignorance we have imposed on ourselves, rather than make an honest examination of the origins and aims of that war. Asked why we signed a treaty with Poland, I doubt one British person in 100 could tell you. Asked what British troops were even doing in North Africa, where there was so much fighting, they cannot really explain.

You will hear stuff about the need to defend the Suez Canal, in fact rendered almost useless throughout the war by our inability to control the Mediterranean. Or there will be the need to defend “the oilfields”, by which is meant those in Iraq, a vast distance from North Africa.

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In fact, how is it that a war which began very much in the heart of Europe so quickly spun into lots of small pieces on the far side of the world? Why, for four years of a six year war, from Dunkirk to D-Day, were British soldiers not in direct contact with the main body of the main enemy, Germany?

Why, if the peril of invasion was so great in 1940, did that invasion never happen? Would you be surprised to know that in 1940 Germany did not possess, or build, a single landing craft? Or that its naval chiefs were strongly against any attempt to mount such an invasion, which was never seriously prepared?

We rightly condemn the horrors of the Blitz, especially on poor Coventry. How come almost nobody has heard of any German city bombed, in a morally dubious way, by the Allies — except Dresden in February 1945, which even the most bellicose person accepts may have been going a bit far? In fact from 1943 to 1945, we deliberately bombed working-class German civilians in their homes in dozens of German cities, killing hundreds of thousands.

As for our endorsement, at Potsdam, of a colossal and extremely violent ethnic cleansing of central Europe after the war, it is perhaps the least known major event in human history. To know of these things is to be unable, any more, to listen to the legend in the same way.

Yes, it was good that we won and they lost. Yes, our enemy represents an appalling unequalled evil. No bad deed done by us could possibly obscure or cancel the evils of the Third Reich, or be equated with them. But the unique evil of the Nazis does not wholly blot out lesser evils on our side.

This bleak realisation has been a loss for me, for as a child I loved the legend, and kept a place for it in my heart well into adulthood. It was only when it was repeatedly used as a sort of exemplar for modern wars of choice that I began to wonder about it.

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In the end I grew tired of being told that every crisis was a new Munich and every petty foreign despot was a new Hitler, from Manuel Noriega to Slobodan Milosevic and Saddam Hussein. I grew even more tired of being told that people such as Anthony Blair and George W. Bush were the inheritors of Winston Churchill.

And I grew sick of being told that, as an opponent or critic of voluntary war, I was the modern version of Neville Chamberlain — or worse. And because I was dismayed by the use to which the legend was being put, I eventually examined the legend and found it wanting.

But we are on the dangerous edge of things here. If you mention doubts about the World War Two myth, you are quite likely to be falsely accused of several severe misdeeds. You will immediately be told that you are a defeatist who thinks we should have made peace with Berlin in 1940. I am no such thing, and have never written a syllable to suggest that I am. Yet I find that people just assume it to be so, of anyone who departs from the cult of unmixed heroism and virtue. As it happens, I think Churchill’s greatest action was to refuse to talk to Hitler in 1940, and I believe that a peace with the Third Reich would have been a crime and a mistake.

I am filled with admiration for those who fought and took appalling risks to fight the war. I should be, as my father was one of them, spending long months on the “Worst Journey in the World”, the Russian convoys between Scapa Flow and Murmansk. Knowing what I know about that theatre of war (my father seldom spoke about it, but suggested some reading so that I could learn from others), I doubt whether most present-day British people (including me) would even have been prepared to set out, let alone endure what happened on the way.

Though my father died more than 30 years ago, I recently devoted some months to obtaining the British medal which was eventually issued to those who took part in this very severe theatre of war. It arrived, at length, in a cheap plastic case, very inferior to those in which modern civilian honours are presented. This seemed in a way to symbolise the contrast between the grandeur of what we believe and the pinched, stretched and weary truth about what actually happened.

Peter Hitchens is a columnist for the Mail on Sunday and author of The Phoney Victory: Britain’s World War Two Illusion (Tauris)

Jonathan Swift said you couldn’t reason a man out of a position he hadn’t been reasoned into in the first place, and this is why most politics is tribal, not rational.

So it is with me, though I have built a reasonably sound superstructure of reason on the bedrock of my immovable love of certain, unchanging things. What has always, ultimately, been my politics was absorbed like the lore of a tribe, not taught to me or even suggested to me, or much discussed — just known, very deep down, as essential and desirable. Every political organisation I have ever joined has been, by comparison, cardboard, fraudulent and unsatisfactory, like a cheap hamburger.

For me, my politics came as a succession of heavy, deeply moving images of what sort of country I lived in — serious, warlike, chilly, full of the potential of power or even violence but, in reality, often almost silent. The sleek, fierce warships I saw at Rosyth aged, perhaps, three; the heroic engineering of the Forth Railway Bridge; the compact, hissing power of steam locomotives, all under dark skies, and all in a cold climate.

And then, I piled on top of that the world I met in various preparatory schools, one of them a choir school: the chilly beauty of the choir at evensong, the potent silence of a cathedral holding its breath between prayers, the arches reaching upwards into shadow, the strange and alluring mixture of magnificence and austerity that Protestantism brought. “Father, hear the prayer we offer. Not for ease, that prayer shall be, but for strength, that we may ever live our lives courageously.”

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And, from there to Tennyson and Newbolt. Once I knew, almost by heart, Tennyson’s long poem about Sir Richard Grenville’s little ‘Revenge’ sailing into the midst of a Spanish fleet which towered over her, and fighting to the very end, against appalling odds, to destroy those “Inquisition dogs and the devildoms of Spain”. And Newbolt’s Drake’s Drum — with its legend that in England’s peril the drum would sound and Sir Francis would rise from his salty sea grave, his hammock his shroud, “slung atween the roundshot in Nombre Dios Bay” and return to “drum them up the Channel, as we drummed them long ago” — made more real to me by living in deep Devon lanes a short walk from Buckland Abbey, where the alleged drum still hung.

A little later, I was allowed to stand on the very spot where Nelson had fallen on the deck of HMS Victory, at Trafalgar in 1805, and was not spared a visit to the dark place far below, where he had died, as the surgeons did their savage work on wounded seamen all around him, on a deck painted red so the blood would not show so much.

Then along came Macaulay, and Horatius at the Bridge and “How can man die better than facing fearful odds, for the ashes of his fathers and the temples of his gods?” How indeed? It remains a good question, though I no longer hope at all for the chance to see if it is true.

“Britons sing!” I and my schoolfellows on our West Country hilltop would pipe to the tune of Jeremiah Clarke’s Trumpet Voluntary, as the Atlantic rains dashed against the windowpanes. “Britons, sing, that all the world shall know we are free! Trumpets! Fling the Challenge over the boundless sea!”

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Note that part about freedom. We really were brought up to believe we were the freest people on earth. We were proud of that, proud that our police were unarmed and our courts were fair, even when we had only a faint idea of what these things really meant. There was something after that about “Christian service and true chivalry”, but in many searches since I have never been able to find the original words of this song, which I may well have been one of the very last people to sing, and which may well now be illegal.

We were not in the least embarrassed by these sentiments. The dormitories in which we slept were named after seadogs, the more senior, the more majestic. I can still remember the order of them, from Blake through to Nelson. We had not heard the word “Profumo”, not yet, and we had been mostly protected from the implications of Suez, though I sensed a weakening in authority, of which I was quick to take advantage in a thoroughly Leninist way (“Insert the bayonet. If you meet steel, withdraw and try elsewhere. If you meet mush, push harder.”).

I remember also, for the first time, holding a golden Sovereign in my hand and being troubled by the thought that a society in which such coins had (almost unbelievably) been normal daily currency might have been better in some ways than one which relied on scruffy rectangles of paper. I longed for the solidity which my tribal upbringing seemed to rely on, but which was visibly crumbling around me.

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Avoiding my headmaster’s incessant and urgent suggestions that I should expose myself to fresh air and exercise, of which I already had quite enough in my view, I hid from sight in the unfrequented school library, where nobody ever looked for anyone (we were expected to grow up to be naval officers or gentleman farmers, not intellectuals). And so I absorbed a whole version of history through the unequalled cartoons of Sir Bernard Partridge.

It was then that I became quite sure that we had lost a world of immense stability and peace in 1914, and that what had come after (and what I now lived in) was a shabby, gimcrack imitation of it, lit by a harsh and glaring light, and invaded by tinkling music and braying voices. And I have spent much of my life being told I think the 1950s were a golden age. The 1950s? That tatty, threadbare, apologetic, smelly era — golden?

So I was not a Tory, or even a conservative: I was by nature and upbringing an actual reactionary — as it happened, the perfect preparation for my long later years as a homicidal Bolshevik. The same almost berserk passions were engaged (Bolshevism is thoroughly Edwardian in so many ways) in pursuit of a distant, supposedly beautiful ideal. Since the end of that, I have never really been able to stomach the insipid potions of supposed ‘mainstream’ politics, which, set beside the deep passions of my reactionary and revolutionary phases, are much as non-alcoholic lager would be after a generous measure of Calvados. Why even bother?

Someone should have taken me in hand, I suppose, and given me a normal modern upbringing, all about shiny new hospitals, equality, and the United Nations. But they came too late. I had already heard the distant trumpet call of a much more seductive, much older world view. And I am glad of that. I wouldn’t have missed any of it, and if now I can laugh cheerfully at the absurdities of our politics, tiny figures scuttling through cavernous halls built for much greater men, it is because for a few short, dreamy years I was given a glimpse of a lost past, just before it vanished forever. And from then on I knew what I liked.

There are lots of reasons a country might need a new capital. Perhaps the old one has been split in two and surrounded by someone else’s territory, as Berlin was, in the Cold War days when little Bonn was the chief city of West Germany. Perhaps you have to make an impossible choice between two rivals who will both be furious if you pick the other – which I believe was the reasoning behind making Canberra capital of Australia. Maybe you just don’t want your enemies to be able to find it, the plausible excuse for Canada’s choice of Ottawa and Burma’s relocation of its government to Naypyidaw.

Or perhaps you fear the mob, as the USA’s founding fathers were said to have done when they shifted their capital from Philadelphia to a swamp on the Potomac, and equipped Washington DC with wide and sweeping avenues which could easily be swept clean of trouble by a whiff of grapeshot. Similar allegations have been made about Astana, the spooky, very spacious and wind-scoured city on the plains of Kazakhstan, safely out of reach of any sort of People Power revolt, because the People would take so long to get there.

But the reason for moving our national capital to Portsmouth would be more subtle. There are plenty of great cities in the United Kingdom that would serve as fine capitals – picturesque and ancient York, full of history; majestic Liverpool with its two cathedrals and its face turned towards the Atlantic; graceful Dunfermline with its ruins, towers and spires and its plentiful memories of kings. It even crossed my mind to suggest Swindon, perhaps the place I know that is most typical of modern England, and where I once spent three very educational formative years.

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But after some thought I have settled on battered, warlike Portsmouth with its constant reminder of our seaborne heritage, and its harsh and unpretty edges. In Portsmouth you cannot ever forget, even in the supposedly soft south, that plenty of British people have lives that are far from being easy or affluent. I have settled on it because I love that old and often ugly city in spite of itself, and because I don’t think I know anywhere more concentratedly British, in the way that we used to use the word before devolution got a grip on us.

It is also because our legislators and civil servants would be bound to behave and think differently (and better) if they found themselves in those surroundings. Perhaps foreign diplomats, too, might learn a thing or two about Britain that modern London could never teach them.

And above all there is the sea, ever present, never resting, with its great double tides constantly sweeping round the Isle of Wight. For the sea is the foundation of our constitution. Without it we would be just another piece of the continent. With it, we have had a thousand years of peace and safety in which to develop our unique laws, from Habeas Corpus and Magna Carta to the common law and jury trial, which are the real safeguards of our liberty.

And it is not just the sea, but our readiness to defend our control of it, and to fight those who would seek to attack us across it, that has preserved our freedom. Every day in Portsmouth you do not just see, hear, feel and smell the sea – sometimes glittering, more often sullen or angry. You also see the things that have made it a safeguard rather than a threat – the lovely warships that, in a long historical procession going back centuries have slipped out of the narrow harbour entrance to maintain our naval power.

Hardly anyone can see these majestic shapes and be either unmoved or uneducated by them. And in Portsmouth Dockyard sits one of the greatest monuments of our country, HMS Victory, Nelson’s flagship at Trafalgar, one of the most concentrated sites of national history outside Westminster Abbey itself.

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Here too are fortifications, power solidified (or in some cases folly solidified): Henry VIII’s Round Tower, and Palmerston’s ring of Victorian forts, indestructible to this day, crouched on Portsdown Hill above the town, and dotted along the coastline and in the sea itself. They were built at colossal expense to preserve the city from an imaginary French invasion, the Trident of their day.

It is still hard to walk far in the old heart of the city without being reminded of the merciless German bombing of 75 years ago, which killed so many and destroyed so much, and ought not to be forgotten entirely, ever.

But Portsmouth is not just guns and history. It is literature and education too. It is the birthplace of Charles Dickens and of that very different author, Olivia Manning. Jane Austen and Henry James did not like it, which is perhaps why I do. It was the scene of Rudyard Kipling’s dreadful boyhood and of H.G. Wells’s hated years as a draper’s assistant, experiences which spurred both men to great things. It was also where Sherlock Holmes first sprang into the mind of Arthur Conan Doyle, a newly-qualified doctor who invented the great detective as he waited in vain for patients to appear at his Portsmouth door.

Well, let us be technical: the door was in Southsea, Portsmouth’s more elevated twin sister, with its esplanades and piers, only minutes away from the seaport’s raucous pubs and tattoo parlours. Of course it is in Southsea that the politicians, civil servants and diplomats would inevitably fetch up – but proper, grubby, hard-edged Portsmouth would never be far away.

And it was where that great man John Pounds pioneered schools for the children of the poor – a task that has gone into reverse a bit in recent years and needs some new impetus. More people should have heard of him.

Yes, let them go there.

Peter Hitchens is a columnist for The Mail on Sunday