David Cameron is taking a battering in the newspapers and the blogosphere. In the midst of his first visit to the United States as prime minister, he told Sky’s Adam Boulton:
I think it’s important in life to speak as it is, and the fact is that we are a very effective partner of the US, but we are the junior partner. We were the junior partner in 1940 when we were fighting the Nazis.
Hmm. The Americans, of course, didn’t participate in the Battle of Britain. In fact, the United States was plunged into the Second World War by the “surprise” Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941, followed by Adolf Hitler’s declaration of war against America.
The Daily Mail has gone to town on the story, citing General Sir Patrick Cordingley, former commander of the Desert Rats: “I am quite sure if Winston Churchill were alive today he would be dismayed.” The Spectator‘s James Forsyth writes: “The error is even odder given Cameron’s penchant for war movies: he’s watched Where Eagles Dare 17 times apparently.”
So what did Cameron gain from his expensive Eton education? You’d think, given the British educational establishment’s obsession with the Second World War, that our collective historical knowledge of this particular conflict might be, um, er, above average. But you’d be wrong.
Cameron is the self-professed “heir to Blair” and Blair himself made a similar gaffe in the run-up to the Iraq war. As Robert Fisk has written:
Blair, of course, also tried on Churchill’s waistcoat and jacket for size. No “appeaser” he. America was Britain’s oldest ally, he proclaimed — and both Bush and Blair reminded journalists that the US had stood shoulder-to-shoulder with Britain in her hour of need in 1940.
But none of this was true.
Britain’s old ally was not the United States. It was Portugal, a neutral fascist state during World War Two. Only my own newspaper, the Independent, picked this up.
Nor did America fight alongside Britain in her hour of need in 1940, when Hitler threatened invasion and the German air force blitzed London. No, in 1940 America was enjoying a very profitable period of neutrality — and did not join Britain in the war until Japan attacked the US naval base at Pearl Harbor in December of 1941.
Ouch!
Blair exposed his embarrassing ignorance of history on several different occasions. Once, during an interview with Channel 4’s Jon Snow on the subject of Iran and its alleged nuclear threat, the then prime minister had to concede that he had never heard of Muhammed Mossadeq — the democratically elected Iranian prime minister that Britain helped depose in a 1953 coup.
But, hold on, things just got a bit better: it seems Niall Ferguson and Andrew Roberts are on their way to rescue our school history lessons!
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