Back in the 1970s, when I was a lad on the Guardian’s staff, I interviewed AJP Taylor, then Britain’s most celebrated historian. The occasion was Taylor’s biography of newspaper magnate and politician William Maxwell Aitken, the first Lord Beaverbrook. It was an enormous tome that seemed rather on the generous side. But it was a labour of love. Taylor had lavished praise on Politicians and the War (“Tacitus and John Aubrey rolled into one”), Beaverbrook’s insider account of backstairs political dealings during 1914-18. As a result the two became friends and Taylor, also a prolific journalist and broadcaster, became a regular contributor to the then-mighty Daily Express—owned by Beaverbrook. Bashing Germans and bashing motorists were two of Taylor’s niche interests.
I often think of Taylor when reading anything by historian Niall Ferguson, another clever outsider (Glasgow, not Lancashire), bursting with self-confidence and determined to cause trouble. A born contrarian, he announced last month that despite backing “Remain,” in the EU referendum, he now regrets not having voted for Brexit. Theresa May and many Remain-voting Cabinet ministers may appear to have been on the same journey as they accommodate themselves to Brexitland, but none has done so with the quite the same unapologetic swagger.
Ferguson has much in common with Taylor. He sold a lot of books and attracted some scathing reviews from his peers—for example Pankaj Mishra’s take-down in the London Review of Books, which led to a long exchange in the letters pages between the pair. He relishes all this broken glass.
Books (with those handy TV tie-ins) have covered Money, as well as Empire—he is an unfashionable booster for the fading Anglo-American ascendancy. Currently at Stanford, last year Ferguson published The Idealist, a first volume of two, an official biography on Henry Kissinger which has attracted praise in Prospect among other places. At other times, his (jealous?) peers sound disdainful—“He wrote three good books, since when he’s been more of a brand than a scholar,” an Oxbridge historian told me the other day.
And so to his latest pub brawl: this month’s volte face over British membership of the EU, which he announced at the Milken Institute conference in London. Ah, the Milken Institute. Founded by rebranded “Junk Bond King,” convicted felon and Wall Street grass, Michael Milken, the self-styled think tank proclaims that it is “objective and non-partisan.” Though “Remain” speakers shared the Milken platform, all we heard about in next day’s Daily Mail was Ferguson’s admission that he had been suffering “post-Brexit traumatic stress disorder” since 23rd June. He now realised that “elites” like himself should have spent more time listening to the concerns of “the non-elite majority of voters” about immigration in “the pubs of provincial England and provincial Wales,” though not, it seems, those in provincial Scotland or Northern Ireland which voted “Remain.”
It’s always reasonable for any of us to change our minds when the facts change. But long before polling day the facts now cited by Ferguson should have been pretty obvious, even to globe-trotting elites too busy to be sinking pints in The Dog and Brexit. Indeed, Professor Ferguson did himself address exactly these problems with Europe in Prospect, in the Sunday Times and doubtless elsewhere. Europe’s failures over security, migration and borders, the malfunctions of the eurozone and excess German zeal to impose austerity on Greece, all contributed to widespread voter disaffection and populist insurgency, not just in Britain but throughout the EU. Successive UK governments’ failure to curb immigration from all quarters was the Leave campaign’s unofficial driver. Yet Ferguson’s grasp of such qualms did not inhibit the senior fellow at the Hoover Institution from pouring scorn on the Leavers.
Plenty of people sensed the scale of disaffection, but nonetheless decided that the balance of Britain’s interests lay with staying in the EU, despite those warts. Or rather, half in-half out, since successive British governments had wisely steered clear of both the single currency and the Schengen Agreement on open borders. Take a bow, John Major and Gordon Brown. No, not Tony Blair—you failed to impose transitional restrictions on all those hard-working Polish plumbers and Lithuanian barmaids who make many British lives easier. But not all British lives.
Ferguson’s u-turn, however, is both expedient and shallow. He now says he was never wholly convinced of the “Remain” case but wanted the Cameron-Osborne government to survive. But before his Damascene conversion, Ferguson did not speak in terms of measured calculation. He asserted that Brexit’s “happy morons” were indifferent to the “horrendous” economic consequences of leaving. They were gripped by the nostalgic fantasies of the “Anglosphere,” where Britain could “pull up an imaginary drawbridge” and restore Victorian sovereignty. Obama was right to warn the “Anglo loonies” and Boris Johnson’s self-serving pap would lead to a costly divorce, to a worse UK economy with no spare cash for the NHS.
Having done nicely peddling Spenglerian gloom on behalf of the Remain campaign, Fighting Niall will now bask in the spotlight for his flip flop, a retreat to the winning side he once confidently predicted would lose heavily. But then, Ferguson also spent much of 2016 predicting that Trumpism had peaked, right up to the moment when the Donald actually won the White House. With his usual chutzpah, Ferguson is already making the necessary accommodation with the realities of power, or what passes for reality on the President-Elect’s Twitter account.
It would be comic if it wasn’t so serious. But us dullards would not be surprised if pub regulars in England and Wales had had enough of experts like Niall Ferguson.
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