That, coincidentally, is the nostalgic-sounding title of Peter Laslett’s great work: The World We Have Lost, published in 1965. Nostalgic only to a point: Laslett tells us at the outset that the world we lost with the arrival of industrialization was “no paradise, no golden age of equality, tolerance or loving kindness”. Daily life was as painful as it was tedious. The simplest things required painstaking effort: “drawing the water from the well, striking steel on flint to catch the tinder alight, cutting goose-feather quills to make a pen, they all took time, trouble and energy.” Nor did the Industrial Revolution bring with it oppression or exploitation: all that “was there already”.

The majority was illiterate, and therefore excluded from political and intellectual life. What is worse, early-modern parish records, which Laslett and others had pored over relentlessly, revealed plenty of parents who had themselves signed the marriage register, but whose children were unable to do so: there was no guarantee of linear improvement across the generations. True, pre-industrial life left a greater role for the family, but this should not elicit any pangs of nostalgia either: the family was not only a “circle of affection” but also the “scene of hatred”.

Vestiges of that world can still be found all around us. Its nastier aspects, like the dark side of family life, have been “half-remembered” in fairytales. One crucial feature of pre-industrial society, its obsession with rank, was better preserved in our country than almost anywhere else: “the British go on awarding the symbolic titles”, knighthoods, peerages, and all the rest, as much now as in the 17th and 18th centuries. 

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On publication, The World We Have Lost earned Laslett plenty of enemies. The early-modern historian Lawrence Stone called it “slipshod, muddled, pretentious, and unscholarly”. Marxists especially despised his effort to “entomb” the very idea of a 17th-century “English Revolution”: E.P. Thompson, in his affectedly parochial fashion, sneered at his interest in historical demography, the science which “has of course come from France”. The World We Have Lost was a defense of this foreign science from its many detractors, complementing its new major English center which Laslett helped found, the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure. 

Laslett himself seems a figure from a world we have lost. At one point, on the fraught question of whether people used to, or even could, have sex in private, he says: “those with experience of living within severe spatial restrictions, such as a man who served as I happen to have done in a grossly overmanned naval vessel, will know that privacy is not entirely a physical affair.” He had an eclectic career of the sort that feels impossible today. During the Second World War, he mastered Japanese at Soas, after which he worked at Bletchley Park, decoding Japanese intelligence. 

As with many of the great intellectuals of his generation — here, too, glimpses of a world we have lost — Laslett had one foot in academia and one in the BBC. His broadcasts on the BBC Third Programme were an important part of his academic strategy; it was there that he issued his call to arms to Britain’s antiquarians to dive into their wealth of local source material, and thereby to construct a vivid picture of the social structure of early-modern England. The French demographer Louis Henry called Laslett’s amateur army “le secret weapon anglais”. Many chapters of The World We Have Lost were initially written as radio broadcasts. Later editions are full of gratitude, and well-earned nostalgia, for the BBC at the height of its Reithian powers.

The “We” in Laslett’s title refers to the English. Although he emphasizes the contrasts between our world today and the one we have lost, he dwells on the few points of common ground. We know what a culture is by observing its habits and customs; we know what English habits and customs are by testing their consistency over time. One defining characteristic of Englishness is the small, nuclear family. This, Laslett was adamant, was not an invention of industrialization, of modernity; in fact in England “there was actually an increase in the tiny proportion of more complicated households in the period of economic transformation”.

Laslett’s later involvement in the University of the Third Age owed something to his belief in the “null hypothesis”, that family organization in England was “always and invariably nuclear unless the contrary can be proven”. He disliked the suggestion that “lonely old people” ought to be “restored to the family, where they belong”, because this was no real “restoration… in the sense of returning to the historical past”: it had never really been customary among the English for the elderly to live with their children.

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Likewise, Laslett identified a consistent English custom of marrying relatively late, in the mid-Twenties. When Shakespeare had Lord Capulet say that Juliet “hath not seen the change of fourteen years”, he was indulging in his imagination and nothing more. Laslett even broaches the possibility that late marriage proved the key to English prosperity, without which the “coming of industrialization… might never have occurred”. The book, and others like it, are therefore of much use when attempting to answer the vexed question of what it means to be English, in a historically grounded fashion.

With the rise of generative AI, one often hears that we are on the cusp of something analogous to the Industrial Revolution. As the English did, or had to do, in the Industrial Revolution, so too are we now forced to ponder what types of labor will endure, and what will fast become redundant. Since so much is downstream of labor, we must consider what changes the coming decades herald for things as basic to us as our households, our families, our social structure.

Already, even without AI, there have been some profound shifts. One of the characteristics of pre-industrial society, as Laslett says, is that the household was the primary locus of economic production; and so it was, thanks to Zoom and furlough, during the coronavirus lockdown. ChatGPT, some say, threatens literacy, or at least makes literacy less essential for social functioning, and Laslett paints a vivid picture of what the illiterate world of our past looked like. Laslett shows us just how much things can change, and how lost our lost world really is. But he also shows us those features of English life which have remained more or less constant for the last thousand years, and which we thus have reason to expect will stay with us. Nostalgia is not usually subject to reason; reading Laslett will hardly cure us of all our dreams of simple, old-fashioned living. But trying to imagine the world we have lost, as it actually was, will temper that nostalgia, and make us appreciate the world we have now. 

Though most Chinese viewers have apparently treated the sight of an elderly man painstakingly making ham and tomato sandwiches as a kind of inadvertent food horror, some have exoticized it as something more glamorous. “Middle-class” supermarkets in China are now stocking “Old Dry” sandwiches in Keith’s honour. For others, his daily battles with inexplicably pallid ingredients have come to exemplify the Sisyphean struggles facing humanity. 

Said one commentator: “We watch him struggling to saw apart two slices of dry bread, as hard as weapons-grade steel, slicing off a few thin streaks of yellow from a block of hardened butter, and then placing two slices of pre-smoked salmon on top… He bravely faces all of life’s blows.”

By a process of extrapolation, this image of “Old Dry Keith” seems as good an answer as any to all the current hand-wringing about who the English “really” are, though it is understandable that few tourist boards would wish to put it on a poster. For it affectionately describes someone most of us know: a hobbyist distracting himself from the mediocrity of life by finding solace in a few modest pleasures, inexpertly but enthusiastically pursued. Think of the love affair with the garden shed; Basil Fawlty trying and failing to listen to Brahms; teabags placed in a plastic bag in the holiday suitcase. As Bill Bryson observed, albeit of the British generally: “[They] are so easy to please. It is the most extraordinary thing. They actually like their pleasures small.”

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Admittedly, this version of us reads a bit like one of the narratives of self-deprecating mundanity gathered at Very British Problems, and for that reason will appear disappointingly anticlimactic to many. A recent, much-mocked, attempt to summarise “Britishcore” in The Guardian left commentators thirsting for a less self-abasing, more red-blooded story of who “we” are. (I say “we” for the sake of argument: I was born and raised in Scotland to English parents, making my grasp on the contours of my own national identity as slippery as it gets.)

The consensus seems to be that there is now a great need for a settled narrative of admirable traits and daring achievements that the English people can claim as their own. According to Tory leadership candidate Robert Jenrick, Scottish and Welsh people already have this, but “woke culture” has taught the English to be ashamed of the past and “we can’t possibly forge a united country around an identity we aren’t proud of”.

But while serving a bit less shame with our history would be no bad thing, I’m not so sure the Scots and the Welsh really do have such a firm grasp on the magnificent deeds of their forebears. What they have instead is a pronounced animus toward their larger neighbour — and there is nothing like the spectre of a much-disliked outgroup to bond an ingroup. By dint of being the more powerful partner in the Union, England lacks this sort of resentful focus. Nor is there even a satisfying hatred of France or Germany to get people going any more, international football fixtures notwithstanding. 

And it is not just the lack of an obvious local contrast class that hampers our quest for national differentiation. It is also the fact that, across the world, millions speak the same language as us, and some of them share our head of state. No wonder it feels so hard to articulate where we end and the rest of the world begins. Viewed from this angle, hackneyed English traits like repression, understatement and self-deprecation even start to seem like useful features, not bugs. Creating an in-your-face sense of English selfhood, when we can already shapeshift so easily and advantageously into wider settings, might even be positively against the national interest.

Still, Jenrick seems to crave a more definite story — even if only to get interviewers to stop asking him about the details. What, then, are the options? In discussions of national identity, it’s standard to distinguish two possible routes: ethnic and civic. But practically speaking, the ethnic route is hopeless in an already multicultural country set in a globalised world — at least, assuming social cohesion is the sincere aim.

Of course, there are those who positively relish an ethnic framing for English identity, seeing it as compensatory for years of neglect and liberal guilt-flinging, and they tend to be unconcerned about the conflicts in existing communities that this exacerbates. We should note that “identity” is used here in Francis Fukuyama’s sense of a site of grievance about lack of adequate political recognition, rather than as a source of beaming pride in past achievements. It’s hard to tell a convincingly chest-thumping story about yourself when you are simultaneously pressing a tale of victimhood and alienation.

In any case, no one in parliament is currently making the case for ethnic identity as a national narrative (and long may that last; we are not Hungary, after all). The official focus is on the destructive effects of mass immigration generally, and not on particular minorities who have been here for decades or centuries. Shorn of probably the easiest yet least ethically acceptable route to creating the sense of a unified People, academics and politicians have turned instead towards “civics”. This envisages social cohesion as achieved not by appeals to ethnicity, but by commitment to a shared set of norms and values, and appreciation of common history. 

Such a conception is implicit in the “Life in the UK” test, required as part of an application for British citizenship, and is presumably the kind of English identity that Jenrick thinks is on the wane. But trying to implement a single normative story, endorsed at scale, also seems likely to undermine existing solidarity. This is because a civic approach requires not just that you indoctrinate already-incentivised newcomers into a single story, but that you get longstanding and more recalcitrant citizens to sign up too. 

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Never mind the inevitable religious and cultural conflict that this would entail, in a context where, for years, we have been encouraged to make values up as we go along — we’d also have to improve the cultural and historical literacy of the average Anglo-Saxon type first. Arguably, given the state of national education, the “Life in the UK” test has already created a two-tier society; one in which the only people who know what the Statute of Rhuddlan was, or who designed the Clifton suspension bridge, are those trying to get into the country. Add to this the fact that another part of the English personality is to be disputatious, mocking and contrarian and the hope of us collectively submitting to just one set of norms is bleak. 

As these remarks suggest, our best hope of telling a convincing, genuinely cohesive story about English identity is not to stipulate what facts about history and literature we are supposed to recite approvingly, nor the values we are all supposed to hold — but more neutrally to stick to predictable facets of the national character: a love of small pleasures, emotional repression, argumentativeness, and all the rest of it. This is in fact what chroniclers of Britishcore are already trying to do, though with an off-putting helping of smugness or self-loathing on the side. 

And crucially, to avoid the twin traps of self-aggrandisement and self-flagellation in working out who we are, we still need the help of outside observers looking in, for we are probably our own least reliable narrators. It takes Chinese consumers of English video content, say, to remind us that we are not all sophisticated bon viveurs in the midst of a culinary renaissance, as we might otherwise like to imagine. We are still a country where schoolchildren are unable to identify courgettes, and where companies launch cheese toastie-flavoured crisps. In other words, we are the home of Old Dry Keith — a fact in which we might be interested, but should feel neither particularly proud nor ashamed.

For the minority of a more severe, moralistic, and joyless disposition, this made him a national-psychological defect to be suppressed, or ideally exposed and exorcised. Before Piers Morgan, Nigel Farage or Donald Trump provided such stern competition, it was a small badge of honour on the Left to publicly hate Clarkson. But for many of us (probably a majority at his peak) he was a vulgar treat to indulge. For the length of a Sunday column or an episode of Top Gear, we could wallow harmlessly in the swamp of arrogant prejudice and self-gratification which sits at the bottom of the brain. At a time of minimal collective loyalty, the nation could reliably divide into those two tribes. Clarkson the monster, or Clarkson the geezer. Wokery vs blokery. A version of the same split is fuelling the current Clarkson row, but with the weight of opinion reversed.

Amazon, Clarkson’s primary current employer, now seems to have picked its side. His contract to make TV programmes about cars, farms and larks will reportedly not be renewed. There are rumours ITV may let him go too. We can suppose this is at least partly thanks to the nearly month-long storm over his astonishingly tasteless joke in The Sun about the Duchess of Sussex. For that, Clarkson has been granted no quarter by Harry, Meghan or their supporters. His first “rather put my foot in it” bumble was rejected. The Sun’s own “regret[ful]” memory-holing of the article was rejected. Even Clarkson’s last-gasp, hands-clasped grovel has been rejected, such is his history (they say) of “hate rhetoric”.

But his spiritual and popular appointment to the English is a far tougher thing to dismiss. He is, like it or not, quite a lot of us writ ludicrously, satirically large. Like a 21st-century John Bull: to paraphrase Auden, a self-confident, swaggering bully of meaty neck and clumsy jest. Whatever Clarkson’s professional fate, the question of whether our society can tolerate him has implications for the stomach and sensibility of the national character, of which he is a significant avatar and champion. And his rise and fall reads as a history of a changing English firmament, one in which public morality has come to supersede mere entertainment.

Plenty of time and work went into the germination of such a figure. Clarkson’s early life is a whistle-stop tour of the English class system. He was born rural, lower-middle class, Yorkshire. But, in a wonderful twist of fate, the Clarkson family came into money after his parents won the exclusive rights to sell Paddington Bear dolls, based on the ones they had made for him and his sister. With aspirational intent, Clarkson was sent to Repton, one of the North’s oldest private schools. There, he smoked, pranked and failed his way to expulsion, developing the likeable loutishness which is his career mainstay. And then he jumped social tracks again, entering the lowest rungs of the Fourth Estate at the Rotherham Advertiser.

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A public schoolboy who can still boast that he crashed out of education with a C and two Us at A Level. The ingredients were in place for a broad, classless appeal. But Clarkson really came of professional age in the new meritocracy of Thatcher and Murdoch, a place where common touch came to supersede common background (something also exploited by Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage). It was an England of quick, coarse wit, and quicker, coarser money; of the triumphant red-top, and the unrepentant “lad”. It suited Clarkson perfectly. Flush with entrepreneurial spirit, in Eighties London he had the wheeze of syndicating car news and reviews from his own company to the regional press. It was a money-maker which introduced him to motoring journalism and eventually to the producers of Top Gear.

The programme was a staid, genuinely factual affair in those days. And Clarkson’s irreverence and wayward metaphors (a Porsche Boxster “couldn’t pull a greased stick out of a pig’s bottom”) set him apart. So cars led only further into showbiz, with a chat show, documentaries, newspaper columns and pop culture ubiquity to follow. By the time he reformatted Top Gear 20 years ago (and made it the BBC’s biggest global brand), he already had the privilege of being recognisable by silhouette alone. The stance: arms-crossed, in male-barbecuing or under-the-bonnet-inspecting mode. And the hair: the curly remnants of the kind of Englishman’s ‘fro which peaked in the Seventies.

England at the turn of the millennium was Clarkson’s home. It wanted entertainment, and it got it from the Victorian circus of Big Brother and X Factor, and from the sneers and stereotypes of Little Britain. Clarkson’s Top Gear, launched in 2002, was almost edifying by comparison. Its open secret was that it was not really about cars. Instead, Top Gear seemed to scoop the ersatz appeal of reality TV and gave you the life you wished you and your mates could live. All the rudeness, ribaldry and exotic travel you could want. And while clearly a masculine offering, 40% of viewers were women. English people weren’t just seeing their grainy selves mirrored back — in Clarkson and his lieutenants they saw a dream life.

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Do they still? After multiple warnings — including for homophobia, xenophobia and the n-word — the BBC reached the end of its tether with the assault and abuse of a producer in 2015. Clarkson was initially undiminished. He was snapped up by a rich and ambitious streaming giant and instructed to make the same programme with more money. He took over Who Wants to be a Millionaire? and his collected journalism continued to be published (standing at eight volumes, the bestselling World According to Clarkson series must make its author the Proust of the pub bores). But the England that Clarkson once charmed was changing. Where once he was propelled by the forces of the contemporary, now he is encircled by them.

The principal feature of England in Clarkson’s imperial period was how apolitical it was. Electoral turnout fell; party memberships were tiny. Referendums proceeded according to plan. And the stability of New Labour’s long summer lent itself to a sense of consequence-free triviality. Under its aegis existed a crude cultural free-play. It was nasty, brutal and ephemeral, but in its own way quite funny, and even forgiving. So when, for example, he compared driving some svelte supercar to “smearing honey on Keira Knightley”, it was just good old Clarkson. Even when he said that striking workers should be “executed in front of their families” (a remark which yielded as many complaints as his Meghan column), it was, eventually and by enough people, forgotten.

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But there has come a point when such lines aren’t provocative catnip anymore, but an embarrassing commercial risk. Once Clarkson could stomp on to any old landmine — from speed limits to lorry drivers murdering prostitutes — and walk away with his popular constituency intact. Now he’d find himself blown into the no man’s land of an interminable culture war. And his nose and instinct for provocation means he can’t keep clear of it. Even his bucolic “Farmer Clarkson” period landed him in the soup. Before this latest fracas, his farm restaurant was making headlines for irritating the Nimbys and planning laws of Oxfordshire, a foretaste of the coming clash over the ownership and purpose of the British countryside.

The rowdy, TV-tabloid moment Clarkson enjoyed is gone. The lives and affairs of the lowest celebrity, from footballer to stand-up, are no longer sub-political fun. And the subterranean Englishness Clarkson personified is on trial, its burly, vinegary instincts held responsible for Brexit and the politics of reaction it supposedly represents. Much of Clarkson’s constituency will dislike both Meghan and the gleeful violence of the column he wrote. But, in his apology to Meghan, Clarkson wrote that it is “hard to be interesting and vigilant at the same time”. It won’t wash with Harry or Meghan, but it will have spoken to his fans’ sense of alienation from the new set of rules that turned their hero into an ethical criminal.

Decades later, and Britain seems a more hospitable place for foreign ideologies, importing America-style culture wars over “wokeism”. Or at least, this is the finding of a major study released this week by American pollster Frank Luntz. Based on three nationwide surveys and two focus groups, Luntz argues that post-Brexit Britain is rapidly following America into the abyss of highly-polarised culture wars over populism and wokeism.

“It’s not what the British public want”, Luntz told historian Niall Ferguson at one event this week, “but it’s coming anyway”. The research has already attracted a storm of criticism, mostly from British pollsters and academics who, as Nate Silver can testify, have always taken issue with American analysts daring to intervene in Britain’s domestic debate.

The case against Luntz’s thesis is not a hard one to make. The first and most obvious point to make is that most British people do not even know what “woke” or “wokeism” mean.

Recent polling by YouGov finds that while nearly 60% of British adults have heard of the term “woke” they have no idea what it refers to. Luntz himself found that not even 40% of Britain is familiar with the term and only 15% feel “proud to be woke”.

The second argument against Luntz is that, contrary to what many liberal progressives would have you believe, Britain is not America. We live in a society where debates about class are more important than debates about race. While the British continue to debate the legacy of Empire they have not had to contend with the dark legacy of slavery, Jim Crow and segregation. The parameters of our debate about race are completely different from the ones in America.

Our political culture, as Almond and Verba argued, is defined by our history. Unlike the highly-charged, emotional, divisive and resentful politics that took root across the Channel, Britain’s civic culture was long hailed for prioritising the critical importance of tradition, consensus, moderation, tolerance, compromise and pluralism.

From one generation to the next, this civic culture left the British hard-wired to feel proud of their institutions and traditions, to instinctively see the best in their country and to be sceptical of radicals whose shrill, dogmatic, messianic and angry politics were seen to threaten this precious inheritance.

Much of this was reinforced by a significant barrier, which is that Left and Right offered broad and unifying narratives of belonging that transcended appeals to individual groups. Throughout the 20th century, Labour and the Conservatives certainly appealed along class lines but they also stressed national citizenship, a moderate patriotism and a sense of obligation to the wider (national) community. On both Left and Right, politicians were not afraid to celebrate Britain’s distinctive identity, its achievements and contributions to the world. Being born in Britain was not a marker of shame; it was the greatest privilege of all.

But how much of this is true today, after four decades in which academia has gone from leaning Left to being overwhelmingly progressive? Wokeism might not yet be a term used by the masses but it is rapidly going mainstream. Take last week as an example. Excluding references to Luntz’s study, the terms “woke” or “wokeism” appeared in a large number of articles across a diverse array of UK media, from debates about sustainable investing, employee training, William Shakespeare and television advertisements to debates about local councils, Alien, Love Island, university reading lists, the England team and trigger warnings for university students, to name only a few.

As training sessions inspired by critical race theory continue to cascade out of universities and into corporations, government departments, councils, media, schools and religious institutions, as British people continue to debate football players taking the knee, the role of white privilege and the causes of racial disparities – all of which originated in America – the salience of these debates will only increase, pushed on by striking generational divides. The idea, popular on the Left, that wokeism is merely a fringe obsession among right-wing culture warriors appears increasingly absurd.

Britons who argue that wokeism is exaggerated ignore the generational tides shaping the country’s future. While YouGov found that “only” 41% of British adults had ‘heard of the term woke and know what it means’, this spirals to 63% among 18-24-year-old Zoomers. This group are also more than three times as likely as older Baby boomers to say they are woke and three times more likely to say that this is a “good thing”.

Anybody who has spent any time on Britain’s university campuses knows that wokeism and its associated ideas – white privilege, decolonisation, unconscious bias – are already part of everyday vocabulary (and not only among students). Academics are frequently asked to decolonise their reading lists and participate in unconscious bias training, even though the methodology for the latter has been shown to be flawed. Unsurprisingly, recent surveys suggest that one in four university students are self-censoring in class, feeling unable to express their views.

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The sharp political divide that Luntz finds, whereby Labour voters are more than twice as likely as Conservative voters to describe themselves as woke, is magnified in Britain’s higher education institutions where Labour supporters outnumber their conservative counterparts by a ratio of about 8 to 1 among academics.

The idea that Britain’s traditional class divide will act as a buffer to the importation of these debates is also for the birds. One big lesson from the last decade of British politics is that class no longer has anywhere near as much explanatory power as it once had. The reason why education and age, not class and income, have become the main drivers of politics is because of the much greater influence that people’s cultural values are wielding over their decisions at the ballot box: immigration, multiculturalism, diversity, Europe, Britishness, Englishness, Islam, teachers in hiding and competing interpretations of our history have all become far more central.

A large pile of research supports Luntz’s core argument, namely that these values-based conflicts over culture, identity and belonging are wielding far more power over politics. They are the vessel in which more specific debates over statuecide, Empire, anti-racism, Englishness, Black Lives Matter and academic freedom are carried. Detailed studies at Kings, the University of Manchester and elsewhere chart how Britain is now on the same road as America, albeit a few miles behind, heading into polarised debates about “who we are”. Luntz is not the first to make this argument and will not be the last.

“Woke versus Not Woke” increasingly looks set to become the latest proxy of this deeper fault line, much like Remainers versus Leavers became a more recent proxy of the older divide between social liberals and cultural conservatives. You can already see this in the data, which points to how these groups are oceans apart not simply on Brexit but many of the debates that hang off wokeism: anti-racism, free speech, diversity and equality.

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Even today, five years after Brexit, while 52% of Remainers think that immigration has been good for Britain, only 9% of Leavers agree; while 63% of Leavers think that people are ‘less free to say what they think’, only 37% of Remainers agree; while 65% of Remainers support the Black Lives Matter protests only 22% of Leavers do, a similar figure for whether footballers should take the knee before kick-off. Britain might have moved on from Brexit but it has not moved on from the underlying divide that could easily restructure itself around Woke-Not Woke.

This transformation looks set to be encouraged by something else that has changed from the old era: the inability of our leaders, especially those on the left, to offer the broad, unifying narratives that once held earlier generations of Britons together. The British like to joke that they are haunted by the 52:48 divide which delivered Brexit, so here is another 52:48 divide to consider: while 52% of Labour voters believe that Britain is ‘an institutionally racist and discriminatory nation’, only 48% see it as ‘a nation of equality and freedom’. Conservative voters, unsurprisingly, opt overwhelming for the latter.

For the first time in our history, one of Britain’s mainstream parties has become a vessel for an ideology which encourages people to, put simply, dislike their own country. Labour has increasingly turned in on itself and away from the wider country, indulging in narrow appeals focused on the holy trinity of gender, sexual and racial diversity while failing to offer the broad and unifying appeals that used to actually win elections.

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This is entrenching the new divide, separating people who are on balance more willing to see the good than the bad in their country from those who see only the bad. It is also quickly becoming a huge problem for the Left, further severing its link with more culturally conservative workers and leaving it even more dependent on progressives who congregate in the cities but are simply too small in number to deliver election victories.

It is indeed no coincidence that as this ideology as moved from the margins to the mainstream, the centre-left has suffered some of its most dramatic electoral losses. As Ronald Reagan once reminded Jimmy Carter, people do not warm to movements that appear to despise their own nation. If Luntz is right and wokeism is going mainstream, then the ultimate loser won’t be white privilege or the patriarchy but the Labour Party.

Tippi Hedren had never acted before. But on the basis of that advert alone Hitchcock offered her a five-year contract on $500 a week. He first cast her in The Birds, his dreamscape horror film set in northern California. The fact she wasn’t a star meant Hitchcock had greater leeway to exercise his Pygmalion instincts: he instructed her on what to wear, what to eat, what friends to see, and he isolated her from the other actors. Hedren later accused Hitchcock of sexually harassing her in Marnie, their final film together.

How did a greengrocer’s son from the East End of London, end up, by the time Marnie was being shot, the most powerful film director in the world? Edward White’s enjoyable jaunt through the different aspects of Alfred Hitchcock is not a straightforward biography; we don’t go from baby Hitch at the twilight of Victorian England to a portly octogenarian in sunlit California. The Twelve Lives of Alfred Hitchcock examines Hitchcock thematically. Through these themes an answer to that question emerges.

Hitchcock grew up in Edwardian London. As a boy, he read Edgar Allen Poe, John Buchan, and G.K Chesterton — works of fiction that combined cheap thrills with weightier metaphysical themes of dread and alienation. He loved the West End, and grew up in the culture of music halls and pubs. Both parents had Irish backgrounds, but his father was raised in the Church of England. When his father married his mother, he converted to Roman Catholicism.

He retained in later life all the fears and anxieties of his childhood. He was scared of policemen, strangers, driving, solitude, crowds, heights, water, and conflict of any sort. Like a child playing with his favourite toys, he preferred to work on sets rather than locations. And it is childishness, this desire for control, that, paradoxically, fuelled his status as an auteur.

Hitchcock was christened as such by La Nouvelle Vague, that avant-garde movement from the country that invented the cinema. But he was never the sole “author” of his films. Unlike Woody Allen or Quentin Tarantino, “when it came to screenwriting, Hitchcock relied on the talents of others”. Nevertheless, all his scripts had to have a “Hitchcock touch”: “The biggest trouble”, he once said, “is to educate writers to work along my lines”. He also had to educate actors to work along his lines, and this dictatorial approach to female actors, especially, is the most troubling aspect of his career.

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White describes Hitchock’s relationship to women as “complex” and “contradictory”. On the one hand, “he surrounded himself with women, sought out their friendship, gave them responsibilities and opportunities that few men of his station did, and proudly championed their work”. But on the other hand, it was through women that “he revealed the darkest, most discomfiting parts of himself”. White wonderfully describes him as a “curious brew of J. Alfred Prufrock and Benny Hill: English repression meeting English bawdiness, which may be two sides of the same coin”.

Hitchcock claimed his life with his wife Alma was celibate, and joked that when they conceived their only child he used a fountain-pen. When directing his first film at 25, The Pleasure Garden, he was baffled when one of the actresses refused to go inside water for a drowning scene. A cameraman had to explain to him what menstruation was: “I’ve never heard of it in my life!”. Yet a few years later, during a screen test with the Czech actress Anny Ondra for his first talkie film Blackmail, he questioned her on her sex life.

He also maintained throughout his career that he made films “to please women rather than men” because the majority of cinema-goers were supposedly women. White points out that the producer of his TV show was a woman, as were many of the screenwriters he worked with. Still, the most famous scene he ever shot features a woman, who the audience had up until then thought was the protagonist of the story, being stabbed to death less than halfway through the film.

Psycho cost $800,000 to make, and it made 15 million dollars. Hitchcock self-financed the film, and its success made him the richest director in America. After the high-budget Technicolor suspense thrillers of the 1950s with Grace Kelly, James Stewart, and Cary Grant, Psycho was a different affair. It was a black-and-white horror. The famous shower scene, lasting 50 seconds, took seven days to shoot. Chocolate syrup was used for the blood, and Janet Leigh’s body double for the scene was the Playboy model Marli Renfro.

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The most remarkable thing about the film was not the content, though, but the publicity. Hitchcock made cinema managers sign contracts which forbade audience members from entering the film after it started. He also ordered that, after the final haunting shot of the film was shown, cinema lights be kept low for a further thirty seconds. The effect was electric. Audience members apparently ran out of their seats; many soiled themselves. Promotional posters for the film featured Hitchcock pointing to his wristwatch next to the words: “No one … BUT NO ONE … will be admitted to the theatre after the start of each performance of ALFRED HITCHCOCK’S PYSCHO”. He was a consummate showman.

This concern for appearance was also evident in his attire. White dedicates one chapter in his book to exploring Hitchcock as a dandy. “Despite looking like a staid British bank manager”, White writes, “Hitchcock apportioned great depth to the surface of things. He wasn’t showy”, but “he was committed to the perfection of appearance as a way of exerting control over himself and the world around him”.

After he became rich in the mid-twenties, Hitchcock made a pilgrimage to Savile Row to establish his look: “dark business suit with white shirt, dark tie, and highly polished black shoes”. This trademark look was more than a disguise: it was, as White quotes Philip Mann on dandies, “a uniform for living”. The clothes expressed his soul. And that an outward appearance can express a soul illustrates an equally important element of Hitchcock’s aesthetic vision: Catholicism.

“One should add”, White writes, “that English cultural life in the years of Hitchcock’s childhood and young adulthood was more informed by Catholicism than at any moment since the early seventeenth century”. The two most prominent dandies in the decade Hitchcock was born, Aubrey Beardsley and Oscar Wilde, were converts to Catholicism. Two novelists born less than a decade after Hitchcock, Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene, would convert later. Chesterton was a favourite of Hitchcock’s childhood. According to White, “the identifiably Catholic idea that can be found in Hitchcock’s aesthetic sensibility” is that “surface beauty is transcendental, a gateway to another dimension of experience”. He adds that “some of the most famous shots in Hitchcock’s films display objects that seem to be imbued with forces, good and evil, beyond the physical realm”.

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There’s a tension, according to White, between Hitchcock’s Catholicism and his experimental techniques: “the magical elements of Catholic teaching to which Hitchcock was drawn were defended fiercely by the Vatican in the years of Hitchcock’s creative life as a bulwark against modernity — a condition that Hitchcock not only grasped but embodied”. Nevertheless, White contends Hitchcock found a way to fuse the “magical” and the “modern”: “he had a fixation with technique and precision planning, but this was used to create a filmic world that slipped the grasp of science, technology, and rational thought”. He used modernist techniques, then, but resisted the overarching beliefs that explained them. And the Catholicism that suffused his films was the vague and cryptic kind, not clearly articulated doctrine.

This is why, perhaps, when people asked Hitchcock what his films were about, he shrugged: “I don’t give a damn what the film is about”. He disdained attempts to find larger meanings in his work; he wanted them to be appreciated for their form and visual excellence. In this sense, he resembled the novelist Vladimir Nabokov, who claimed of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina: “Any ass can assimilate the main points of Tolstoy’s attitude toward adultery but in order to enjoy Tolstoy’s art the good reader must wish to visualize, for instance, the arrangement of a railway carriage on the Moscow-Petersburg night train as it was a hundred years ago”.

Both rejected ideological or moralistic readings of their work; both were characterised by their stylistic virtuosity; both were fascinated by obsessional love and delusion; and both exercised omnipotent control over their art. Hitchcock’s control over his actresses recalls Nabokov’s description of his characters as “galley slaves”. Hitchcock and Nabokov were both born in 1899 and took America as their home at around the same time: they were two expats from the Old World who gave sunny post-war America a sinister edge.

In November 1964, Hitchcock had even written a letter to Nabokov asking him to write a script for two films. The first was a spy film, which Nabokov declined. The second was about “a teenage girl who realises that the hotel run by her family is a front for an organised-crime operation”. Nabokov was intrigued by this, but it never came to fruition: “Demands on both men’s time meant the collaboration never happened”. Our loss.

Nevertheless, even if his films were not about large overarching themes, White’s book shows they were nevertheless a crucible through which many of the currents of the twentieth-century clashed. Hitchcock wanted us to watch his films for entertainment; but we know they are more than that. He was a modernist and a Catholic. Elegance and charm mixed in his films with sex and violence. As White notes near the end of this stimulating book, Hitchcock’s “variegated legacies, buttressed by his phenomenal talent and unconventional personality, make him a codex of his times, usually complex, often troubling, but always vital”.

Through it the nameless suburbs found form and attachment, the beautiful game rooted in every working-class community. Much has been made of its religious form; the real physical presence, the holy grail, the communal singing but for the churches in slum areas their interests were more prosaic. It was a form for resisting the demonic temptations of the new order; drink, avarice and sloth, praising instead fitness, teamwork and skill. It was a form of virtue to take on vice.

In Glasgow, Birmingham, Bristol, Manchester and Liverpool, football was also an expression of the sectarian divisions that characterised those cities, expressing, in England at least, an almost forgotten part of our Christian heritage. In Newcastle, Sunderland and Leeds the cities found an expression of civic loyalty and pride through a club that expressed their character. It was a distinctive addition to the civic ecology, an institution rooted in place and carrying its name.

Football allowed all that was denied by the routinisation of life and work. It allowed for love and hate, for a wordless beauty, the longing for glory, the shared witness of a momentary miracle, communal celebration and shared grief. When I was growing up, the contempt for people who left early, when we were losing was striking. And through that, my grasp of the English language expanded. A single shot could slay Goliath. Swindon could beat Arsenal. Don Rodgers, frozen in eternity. Once established, the football club became a permanent part of the urban firmament. Its status was always threatened by competition but supported by association. Love and hate.

In a deindustrialised and desecrated society, football clubs recognised that the bonds of affection and attachment that lurked around in the lives of their supporters could be easily financialised. For those exiled from their homes, with loyalty passed down through families, the sense of attachment became even more intense.

And this is a capitalist story of commodification: the transformation of something that wasn’t produced for sale — human beings, nature, or, it turned out a football club — into something available for sale on the open market. The European Super League was a logical development of that. The clubs who signed up to it are no longer owned by their members but by hedge funds, oligarchs and despots, the relationship with community and place replaced by television rights and branded shirt sales. And the move was logical because the logic of capital is that of both commodification and of oligarchy, towards the elimination of competition and the securing of permanent revenue streams in order to reduce risk. Towards concentration not competition, which explains the oligarchs.

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The maximisation of returns and the minimisation of risk is the core strategy of any established corporation. By freezing a hierarchy at a particular moment, by banning relegation, the Super League took the classic form of cartelisation.

In many ways, it is a consolidation of a long-term trend towards a disembedded and disembodied spectacle, mediated by television. The terrible reality of lockdown is that it dispelled the idea that the presence of fans was required in order to secure viewers. The script has been developed for a while. The Champions League need not be won by champions, but those who finish in the top four. Blowing the group phase need not eliminate the cash flow of European competition, just entry into the Europa League.

The thrill of games between European teams with their own traditions and styles was homogenised into clashes between large corporations drawing from the same managerial and player pool. Commodification is the process from virtue to the virtual. VAR was part of this trend, as the power was no longer in the ground, but removed to somewhere else. The crowd was silenced in two ways. The joy of scoring was tempered by the arbitrary judgement of Stockley Park, a secluded judgement from afar decides your fate. From within the ground came the verdict, “It’s not football any more”. And then the fans were gone.

I’ve been Spurs since before I can remember, it is a covenantal commitment. It links me to the dead, players and fans, Danny Blanchflower, my Uncle Sid and Peter Cook, as well as to those yet to be born in a community of fate, bound by shared memory and the eternal desire for glory. Like all clubs, we have our saints, Steve Perryman and Bill Nicholson, and our sinners, Sol Campbell and Terry Neil.

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By signing up to a cartel, we did not even deserve to be part of, Spurs broke a covenantal promise. Our objection to Arsenal is not only that they are from Woolwich but that they cheated us of a deserved promotion by rigging the composition of the new First Division in 1918.  And now Spurs wanted to be part of a rigged system that abolished relegation.  “we’re not Tottenham any more”.

I was born in the year that Spurs reached its perfect platonic form, the double winning team of 1960-61. A team born of the epiphany that Bill Nicholson experienced when watching the Hungarian national team beat England 6-3 in 1953. It was a full religious experience, he couldn’t sleep for three days and nights while he pondered over what he had seen and over the next eight years he worked on building that at Spurs. I never saw that team, but its memory permeated my childhood. The sacking of Jose Mourinho does not diminish his hostility to that tradition, his desecration of it. For all its history, Spurs were a distinctive member of the football family. Vulnerable, flaky, yet capable of glory. Blanchflower, Hoddle, Ardiles, Gascoigne, Dembele, Ndombele. Whatever the number they wore, the number 8 was the distinction, the midfield maestro. And Harry Winks can’t carry that cross. We have betrayed others, but also ourselves.

Love is a sublime faithful relationship with another person. It is a strange emotion to feel towards an institution that is committed to securitised income. I have tried to subject my love for Spurs to some kind of critical scrutiny; when we floated on the stock exchange, when the Premier League was founded. But I could not break the bond, and still it remains. What does astonish me is that I am not alone in this, that despite Marx’s teaching that under capitalism “all that is solid melts into air and everything holy is profaned”, the sense of association, of tradition, of belonging still endures.

Ten years ago, I worked with Jon Cruddas and Clive Efford in developing a Labour policy for supporter representation on the boards of clubs. There was a strong sense of dispossession felt by football fans, particularly intense in the Premier League among supporters of Manchester United, Liverpool and Newcastle. From shirt and ticket prices, to the selling off of training grounds, to the emergence of foreign oligarchs who skewed the market. In the lower leagues, the feeling was more intense, that their civic inheritance was being plundered by a very dirty capitalism. The story of Wigan Athletic is a case study in the pathologies of globalisation and the Pharaonic nature of the pyramid. We developed this along with supporters groups and adopted the German model so that they would have a veto on pricing in terms of merchandising and kit, as well as the first option to buy if the club was sold. It was an attempt to re-embed the clubs in their place and with their support. It was also an attempt to limit the domination of money in the decisions of an institution that was not simply a commodity.

If globalisation is understood as the process through which finance capital escapes the bonds of domestic constraints in order to maximise returns, then the establishment of the Premier League created globalisation in one country. The response of the Premier League to our proposals was hostile and aggressive. They were proud of the model they had developed in which minimal regulation led to increasing global market share. By attracting foreign investment, the brand and the revenue grew. To have fans on the board was seen as nostalgic and an impediment to growth. We were accused of killing the goose that laid the golden egg, and they were offended by the suggestion that they were fouling their own nest.

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Andrea Agnelli who, along with Florentino Perez, was the chief instigator of the Super League, was sure it was compliant with EU Law — but hadn’t noticed that the political era had changed from the heady days of uncontested globalisation. The Premier League had grown its market share with a new kind of owner in Abramovich and Sheikh Mansour, who had secured their income streams through oil or gas, and were more interested in their reputation and power. PSG are also in that mode.

Agnelli and Perez knew that unless they securitised their income stream, the domination of their national leagues and European competition would be jeopardised by investors who were not concerned with money, but with power. One of the most widely quoted sayings in Italy is from Lampedusa’s novel The Leopard in which Tancredi says that “for things to stay the same everything must change”. Without the eternal backing that only states can bring, and with lockdown strangling match day revenue and sales, they made their move. But it relied on the English clubs to buy into it, and it is significant that Manchester City and Chelsea, the clubs least dependent on market share, were the first to withdraw. They recognised that the political consensus had shifted.

Boris Johnson hadn’t led a referendum on the basis of take back control and transformed the class basis of the Conservative Party in order to bow to the inevitable logic of globalisation. The new consensus is based on a greater economic role for the nation state, an increased importance of working-class voters and the places where they live. He immediately threatened to drop a “legislative bomb”, the call went through to the UAE to back off the proposal.

The threat of expulsion from the Premiership, withdrawal of police support on match days and the refusal to approve work permits were brought into play. By last Tuesday night all six English clubs had withdrawn their support leaving Agnelli and Perez stranded in the breach with nothing but their debts for company. It’s no wonder they blame Brexit.

There was no political response from the governments of Italy and Spain, no sustained opposition from their fans. But here it was different. It seems that the owners of the clubs only spoke to each other and shared nothing of their plans with the management or players, let alone the fans. There is now a consensus that this was a travesty that could repeat again unless changes are made.

The European Super League expressed the ultimate consequence of the domination of the financial interest alone, towards oligarchy and commodification and the elimination of competition and association. It is only through the transformation of governance through the equal representation on fans on boards that the broken covenant can be salvaged. Central to that is the notion that a football club is not simply a commodity, but an inheritance that cannot be trusted to the owners. They have acted in bad faith and are in breach of trust.

Without constraints, capitalism will eat itself, it will steal what it did not create and then destroy it. It is the fans who carry the tradition and must be trusted to save football from its owners by being given a golden share on strategic issues. In order to stay the same everything must change. La lotta continua.