An English obsession with all things foreign

Peter O'Toole playes TE Lawrence in Lawrence in Arabia Photo: Rex

Charles Moore reviews Treason of the Heart by David Pryce-Jones (Encounter Books) and learns that the great self-hating project for clever English people is the European Union

The higher you rise in the intellectual scale, the more likely you are to hate your own country. This is particularly true, as George Orwell once noted, of the English (though not of the Scots or the Welsh). It is an odd phenomenon. It involves, in theory, a love of the rights of the masses and, in practice, a lofty disdain for the common herd.

David Pryce-Jones has written a whole book about it, starting in the 18th century and ending in the present day. His story discloses uncanny similarities between one generation and another. The Englishmen who exulted in the French Revolution did so for much the same reasons as those who rejoiced over the rise of Communism or even over the triumph of Hitler. The violence added glamour. “The light of the French Revolution circled my head like a glory,” wrote William Hazlitt, “though dabbled with drops of crimson gore”.

W. H. Auden wrote approvingly of “the necessary murder”. Winifred Williams, who married Wagner’s son and helped consecrate Bayreuth for Nazism, wrote as late as October 1944 that the Führer’s stature had “grown ever more heroic”.

Sometimes, these tendencies were even hereditary. Harold St John Philby worked for the Foreign Office, but became so ardent an Arabist that he converted to Wahhabi Islam and did business for the house of Saud instead. He declared that Arab public morality was “definitely superior” to European ethical codes. His son Kim worked for MI6, and betrayed his country and his colleagues to the Soviet Union. Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, another Arabist, cursed British soldiers in the Sudan as “mongrel scum of thieves from Whitechapel and Seven Dials”. His kinsman, Anthony, expressed his contempt for his country by helping Kim Philby escape to Moscow.

Pryce-Jones notes that part of the appeal of foreign allegiance is that it can confer a new identity, one that seems virtuous and idealistic. “We are all Greeks,” exclaimed Shelley, when that country’s struggle against the Ottoman Empire was the cause of the day. Being Greek had a special charm to Englishmen well educated in the classics.


Clothes also came into the change of identity, as did sexual preferences.

T. E. Lawrence appeared at the Versailles Peace Conference in full Arab dress, determined to defeat “my own country and its allies in the council chamber”. The artist Claire Sheridan enthused about Arabs that “in spite of their lethargy, they can always make love”. Such intellectuals’ ideas of foreigners are often romantic and aesthetic, and hence misleading – posher versions of flings with Cypriot waiters or Alpine ski instructors. “All that is best in the Arabs has come from the desert,” wrote Wilfred Thesiger. When you think about it, this cannot be true. Much of the Arab greatness came from the urban habits of trade and craftsmanship.

Once one falls under such spells, one tends to believe ever more whopping lies. I am just old enough to remember when clever contemporaries at school would praise Chairman Mao. In our arguments about this, they would say, “OK, he has to use totalitarian methods, but at least people in China do not starve.” In fact, approximately 45 million people are thought to have died because of Mao’s Great Leap Forward, which revolutionised agriculture (destroying the harvest) and steel production (making steel that could not be used). When Mao died, Tony Benn paid a condolence call on the Chinese embassy and lamented the passing of the “greatest man of the 20th century”.

In modern times, Pryce-Jones argues, the great self-hating project for clever English people is the European Union. He thinks they are attracted by the strategy of deception explicitly put forward in the words of the EU’s founding father, Jean Monnet: “Europe’s nations should be guided towards a superstate without their people understanding what is happening.” He might also have said more about the lure of Irish republicanism for this weird psychology. No smart English writer will touch the cause of Ulster Unionism. IRA berets are sexier than Orangemen’s bowler hats. The slogan “No Surrender” is, when shouted on behalf of the United Kingdom, the most embarrassing one could devise.

Pryce-Jones sets out his case in a spirited manner. He is absolutely right about the link between bad politics and hatred of one’s country, and about the dishonesty involved. Travellers’ tales are notoriously untrue, and so are fellow-travellers’ tales. It is sobering to be reminded how recent it is that many of the leading figures in our universities – people like Christopher Hill, Master of Balliol, Oxford, and Joseph Needham, Master of Caius, Cambridge – devoted their lives to advancing Marxism-Leninism, the most pervasive totalitarianism of all time.

But I do want to put in a word of sympathy for the trains of thought that Pryce-Jones denounces. Imagination requires stimulation. Most great ideas, not only for poetry or art, but also in philosophy, religion or politics, do not come solely from dry thought processes. They come from moments of inspiration. These include falling in love, or being entranced by a particular landscape, dance, wine or building. It is inevitable that one’s fascination with another country or culture will begin as an intuition. One should not be ashamed of that. One should pursue it.

The same, after all, applies to the love of one’s own country, of which Pryce-Jones approves. It can be grounded in reason and good sense, but it must go beyond reason too, as love always does.