When we lost our mojo

Eden, the only male British prime minister known to have varnished his fingernails, was easily the best-looking individual, of either sex, to occupy that office in the 20th century.

With Our Times, A. N. Wilson concludes the sequence of British history books he started in The Victorians, and the sentence that opens his chapter on Suez is a fine instance of his style. It has three characteristic qualities: it is irrelevantly judgmental; it drops in a nice piece of gossip (the pregnant ‘known to’, arguably, making that two pieces of gossip); and it makes you want to read on.

This is an enormously enjoyable book, a non-systematic, chatty and wilful piece of work, slaloming through familiar terrain with brio and dash rather than statistics and documents. Wilson is at one minute high-minded, at the next frivolous; at one moment wise, at the next daft; at one moment exceptionally humane, at the next merrily spiteful. He aims to be suggestive rather than authoritative; entertaining rather than canonical.

But he does have something to say. He thinks the second Elizabethan age is when the United Kingdom lost its mojo. We gained material comfort but lost our identity as a nation. Cars replaced trains. Monstrous carbuncles replaced Georgian terraces. ‘Joyless’ decimal currency replaced pounds, shillings and pence. The established institutions of church and crown crumbled about us, the empire vanished and the skids went under the Union. Mass immigration brought a dissolving cultural pluralism. There is no longer, as Wilson sees it, a ‘Britain’ about which you can meaningfully say anything much at all.

This sounds like a bellow of rage emitted from a leather chair in a Pall Mall club, but its author isn’t as predictable as that. Best on Westminster politics, high society and finger-to-the-wind assessments of the national mood, he’s shakier on pop culture, seeming to attribute the volume of punk rock to the invention of synthesisers, rather than to amplified guitars, for example, and describing skunk cannabis as ‘resin’.