Philip Larkin made just one intervention on the Middle East. The 1969 poem “Homage to a Government” was inspired by the closure of the British base in Aden (now part of Yemen), which happened in 1967 under the first Harold Wilson government. But that was just one episode in a saga of retreat and torpor: spending cuts, the devaluation of the pound and the additional closure of all those bases found, in Rudyard Kipling’s phrase, “east of Suez” – Malaysia, Singapore, the Maldives, the Persian Gulf. In this maudlin, terminal mood, Larkin produced this trite and dreary 18-liner. It’s not his best – it sounds more like the right-wing nursery rhymes he knocked out for friends in letters than a finished work. Nevertheless, he did collect it, in the 1974 volume High Windows. If he were a songwriter, we’d call it an album track:
Next year we are to bring all the soldiers home
For lack of money, and it is all right.
Places they guarded, or kept orderly,
Must guard themselves, and keep themselves orderly
We want the money for ourselves at home
Instead of working. And this is all right.
The poem is salvaged in the final stanza by a beautifully Larkinesque compound: “Statues… standing in the same/Tree-muffled squares.” Still, he can’t resist the sarcastic bathos of the final couplet: “Our children will not know it’s a different country./All we can hope to leave them now is money.” And while no great literary work, the verse does have biographical, political and psychic insight.
For his own part, Larkin could not work out what he was expressing – neither straightforward chauvinism or weary stoicism. He told an interviewer: “That poem has been quoted in several books as a kind of symbol of the British withdrawal from a world role. I don’t mind troops being brought home if we’d decided this was the best thing all round, but to bring them home simply because we couldn’t afford to keep them there seemed a dreadful humiliation.” For better or for worse, Larkin speaks for England. In his generic nostalgia, bleary bewilderment and nagging sense of blighted pride, he captured the condition of a nation, one that cannot decide if it is a world power – or even if it wants to be.
If I could speak to the miserable old guy, I’d have good news for him. Britain never did withdraw from east of Suez, as the past few years have made very clear. Leave to one side the invasion of Iraq and the long-term occupation of Afghanistan by British troops. In 2021, Boris Johnson’s government signed the Aukus pact, an alliance with Australia and the US that agreed to “promote a free and open Indo-Pacific that is secure and stable”. Keir Starmer’s government has spent the past 18 months scandalising itself through negotiation over the sovereignty of an archipelago in the Indian Ocean. The Royal Air Force flew near-daily surveillance flights over Gaza throughout Israel’s war. And, most topically: in March 2024, Anne, Princess Royal, opened the Donnelly Lines facility at the Al Minhad Air Base in the UAE. The base joined the existing British presence in Oman and Bahrain, the latter home to the UK naval support facility. It dates back to 1935, but was permanently reopened in 2018 by the former prince Andrew, and houses up to 500 personnel. On 7 March, RAF Typhoon jets deployed from RAF Coningsby to Dukhan Air Base in Qatar, and are overhead as I write, ready to kill those who threaten Britain’s interests.
Larkin could not work out why he felt sad about Britain’s withdrawal from its outposts. There are obvious historical reasons: Larkin was born in the year the empire reached its territorial zenith (he never doubts that British troops “guarded, or kept orderly”), and he reached maturity in the years of its collapse. In certain moods, he was capable of reacting to imperial dissolution in a comparable way to Enoch Powell (“Powell for Premier” Larkin wrote to a friend a year after the politician’s “Rivers of Blood” speech), retreating into a psychological-political core of deep reaction.
But he never mimicked Powell’s didacticism, nor his spittle. He is a register for competing English instincts, local and global, centrifugal and centripetal, Little England and Great Britain. And his tone is vague and detached, that of a newspaper reader or bulletin catcher: an observer of global affairs rather than their participant or laureate (as, for instance, Kipling was). In its commitments and its world-view, every British government since Wilson, and since Larkin’s poem, has weighed the same choice.
Have you thought – ever, or hard – about the Donnelly Lines facility? About the fact that Britain expanded its military presence in the Gulf only two years ago, stationing soldiers in the Middle East under the royal crest? Did you vote for it? Have you thought about the British sovereign territory on the island of Cyprus – admittedly just west of Suez, but still a full 98 square miles and home to 4,000 British personnel? Have you thought about the RAF missions against Islamic State that still continue in the Middle East, with British and French jets striking an underground arms cache in Syria in January this year? And – on a grand commercial and migratory scale – have you thought about the 300,000 British nationals scattered across the Gulf, the footprint of an epic partnership between British business and the region?
It is these interests that the Labour Party is scrambling to defend. Some of them are simply facts of life. “He used to work in Saudi,” my mother might snipingly say of an over-comfortable neighbour, and Dubai and the UAE are part of a rotation not just for tax-dodging influencers but also for an upper caste of salesmen done good abroad. France has historically been much more relaxed about its continuing imperium than we have (though it is now being hit by a belated breakaway, with Niger, Mali and Burkina Faso turning away from France and towards Russia).
But I still don’t think it is an admission of world-shyness to confess that these realities and decisions do not disturb most of the country. Only in London and its economic annexes – Oxford, Cambridge, Edinburgh – do you truly retain the sense of Britain as a country with international interests or attractions.
Foreign policy remains, by some distance, the most aristocratic aspect of modern democratic government. The two British foreign policy scandals of our time – the Chagos affair for the right, and the Gaza war for the left – might together be understood as occasions when British aristocratic principles (respect for international law and support for Israel) were subjected to democratic scrutiny.
The three animating forces of Larkin’s poem – money, pride and humiliation – have all been on display in the British debate over the Iran war. Money – we have already cut the foreign aid budget to fund defence, and certain influential commentators are using this conflict to argue that we should cut welfare to juice the arms industry. Pride – Tony Blair chastised Britain for not joining the American war from the outset, saying, “If they are your ally and they are an indispensable cornerstone for your security… you had better show up when they want you to.” And humiliation – the Royal Navy has been unable to protect its bases in Cyprus from Iranian drones (“Its last minehunter was towed home to save money,” reported the Times on 14 March). Meanwhile, allies in the Gulf have bemoaned Britain’s slow response on the war, even as Donald Trump slashed directly at Britain’s self-image when he said Starmer was “no Churchill” after he (initially) refused the US access to British bases.
Starmer’s government has since become a tacit participant in the war. US special forces flew out of RAF Mildenhall – into the skies of Suffolk, that is; did anyone there know this was happening? – and on to an unknown location on 12 March. British military officers have travelled to Washington DC to help plot the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz. Yet, our two leading political parties, in popular terms, have become parties of isolation. Zack Polanski’s Greens are predictably pacific, but Reform has produced the sharpest propaganda from the conflict: as Labour ministers fly to the Middle East, Robert Jenrick and Nigel Farage pose at the petrol pump, politics priced per litre. Reform’s reversal was striking: after briefly enjoying the chance to say “regime change” at the outbreak – and still cheerleading the American effort – Farage has now remarked that “if we can’t even defend Cyprus, let’s not get ourselves involved in another foreign war”. It was an intelligent stunt. The centripetal and centrifugal have never drifted so far apart in British political discussion. In January, as Starmer did his best to defend Greenland from American annexation, thousands of households across Kent and Sussex ran out of water.
Only the Labour Party has allowed itself to become trapped in Larkin’s muddle – the status quo party, unable to clarify whether war is valiant or expensive or immoral or anachronistic. It is caught in a version of the foreign policy dilemma that has plagued the British ruling class since its decline became apparent in the late Sixties and early Seventies. As Anton Jäger recently wrote in the New York Times, using Britain’s response to decline as a cautionary tale: “In the postwar world, as its empire was crumbling, the country saw two paths in front of it. It could serve as a sort of butler to the United States, fastening its economy and foreign policy to American imperatives. Or it could become a kind of greater Sweden, retaining its industrial base, welfare state and relative diplomatic autonomy. Eventually, after a tussle, Britain opted for the first route, forgoing national independence for the special relationship.”
Larkin’s luxury was to articulate his muddle as a poem, not to deploy soldiers in a hedged effort to resolve it. As Britain’s broadsheets talk us towards war, even as the “special relationship” is obituarised in their same opinion pages, we should remember what memories and neuroses their talk is founded on. Larkin did note, in his more cautious middle stanza: “The places are a long way off, not here/Which is all right, and from what we hear/The soldiers there only made trouble happen.”
[Further reading: Matt Goodwin’s intellectual suicide]
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This article appears in the 25 Mar 2026 issue of the New Statesman, Easter Special
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