A London-based foreign correspondent is probably not the target audience of Michael Peel’s latest book. Indeed, what Peel (himself a former Financial Times correspondent in Lagos, Abu Dhabi, Bangkok and Brussels) discusses in eight lively, well-researched chapters won’t come as a surprise to any of his UK-based foreign colleagues: how Britain is perceived abroad; and how little it seems to permeate the national consciousness. This blindness – or the British inability to realise how they appear to others, as opposed to the image they have of themselves – often has foreign correspondents pulling their hair in disbelief. If only Britain knew how it was seen!
One senses that Peel’s return to London from Tokyo after 13 years of foreign postings must have felt like a crash landing. The filth, the erratic, if not nightmarish, transport system, and the overall mess, loom large in the first pages:
Within months of being back, I felt that if Britain were a person, it would need its friends to sit it down and deliver it a few home truths. It has had a rough time lately. At an institutional level, it has damaged others, and increasingly itself, with its behaviour. It urgently needs to allow its many better qualities to flourish.
If Britain were indeed a person, one could add that it suffers from body dysmorphic disorder and mythomania.
Peel begins by examining what he calls Britain’s ‘trick mirror’ before weaving together personal memories with analyses of polls and interviews with academics, politicians and diplomats. Citing a 2016 Ipsos study of people’s views on certain topics, he reminds us that ‘some of the most grievous UK misapprehensions concern how the country is changing as a result of immigration’.
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