Anglo-Gaullism is doomed

We never realised we needed our own Général. It’s far too late now

Elder statesman: Charles de Gaulle’s forceful leadership defined postwar France. Photo via Bettmann

Why go to Mars when you can go to France instead, and have a much more exotic and illuminating experience? The air is the same, and can be breathed without difficulty. The food can be wonderful, though I suggest you avoid the fromage de tête, as it may not be what you think it is. The inhabitants are roughly the same shape and size as us. Some sort of communication is possible between us, though do not get carried away.

Since first travelling to Paris on the old Golden Arrow express (alas, long defunct) as a schoolboy in 1965, I have been enthralled by our neighbour, that sweet enemy. How could another country be so similar to ours and yet so utterly different? Paris smelt different from London in those days, not in a bad way. It sounded different. It was different. There were no pillows, only bolsters as hard as sandbags. The coins were either made of aluminium, like East German marks, and would blow away in a strong wind, or were ancient, blackened copper discs dating from the age of Clemenceau. The stately Third Republic French I had learned at my Devon prep school was more or less still in use. Restaurant menus were spirit-duplicated in purple ink and handwritten in that wild looped script that has now vanished, but had once been taught by professeurs to élèves in lycées. There were first-class carriages on the Metro (painted yellow). Television had not been properly invented – a horizontal line repeatedly swept across the screen, even when General de Gaulle (then in the midst of a presidential election) was speaking. There were still gendarmes in capes and kepis. The trains from Calais to Amiens were pulled by muscular black steam locomotives which, when annoyed, emitted strange and incongruously effeminate peeping sounds. It was plain even to my 14-year-old self that there was a good deal more sex than in England.

As the years passed, and I made more interplanetary visits, I also came to realise that the politics, history and religion were different too. The contrast between raffish, unofficial Fleet Street, where I worked, and the row of pseudo-ministerial black Citroëns parked outside the offices of Le Monde in the Boulevard des Italiens was highly educational. So was the suspicious, conspiratorial response of the French Trotskyists on the Left Bank whom I sought to befriend in my Bolshevik days. For all its Declarations of the Rights of Man, France always remained a rather grim-visaged monarchy, thinly disguised as a republic. Should you be lucky enough to travel to the lovely city of Troyes, you will find on the town hall a rare example of the original version of “Liberté, égalité, fraternité”, carved in stone. Unlike the modern style, it continues “… ou la mort”.

But what I did not grasp at the time, smug as I was about the security and superiority of Britain, was that Britain and France were both passing through the same dismal process of humiliation and decline. And that, under Charles de Gaulle, they were making a better job of it. This was because we had “won the war” – that is to say we had ended up on the winning side, whereas France had been ruined in 1940.

I owe my epiphany on the subject to Julian Jackson, who has written one of the greatest books of our age, A Certain Idea of France: The Life of Charles de Gaulle, and to the American Catholic magazine First Things, which asked me to review it in 2019. It was like reading a hurricane or an earthquake. I sat on well into the night, reading and taking notes until my eyes were sore. Here were politics and history, and a man who could climb, stride, swim or struggle his way through them like no other, in a country which was more worth saving than any but my own. And better still, here was a man of profound reading, broad education and intelligent ruthlessness, who was physically brave, knew how to get power, and knew how to use it when he got it. Incidentally, he was very, very funny when he wanted to be, and genuinely devoted to his family. You should read it.

But one of the many conclusions I drew was this: that de Gaulle had achieved his aims by combining in one figure and one government a series of precepts that never seemed to arrive together in Britain – patriotism and strong armed forces, rigorous education, a reasonable level of order and justice, and at the same time a welfare state that removed all the terrors of destitution and ill-health which haunt the poor and weak. As I wrote, it is a strange thing that this potentially attractive political combination seldom exists in the advanced countries of the West. You may have some of these things, but never all of them at once. De Gaulle was a rare exception, who did seek to bring these elements together, and so appealed far beyond any partisan constituency. He also despised the supranational ambitions of Brussels and refused to be pushed around by the US.

It is true that the man himself was hard to imagine in Britain, a sort of wild, improbable merger between Winston Churchill, the Duke of Wellington and Ernest Bevin. But what a pity we couldn’t have it, even if the price was – as it must be – our recognition that we had been left bankrupt, weak and shattered by the 1939-45 war and were in reality not much better placed than France.

But it was not until August 2021 that I was finally pushed into realising that I had myself become a British (not “Anglo”) Gaullist. This discovery came during my only encounter with Nigel Farage, on his GB News show. I do not think I shall be invited back and the interview seemed to end rather abruptly. Mr Farage is a one-man Margaret Thatcher tribute band. He has mused publicly about decriminalising marijuana, and really has not got much further than the weary free-market, low-tax supposed remedies of 40 years ago. But he is what now passes for political conservatism in this country, and people of my sort might as well go into internal exile if this is what is left. Even so, I must be grateful for him in getting me to out myself as a Gaullist.

So, what with my review of Jackson’s book and the Farage episode, I think I can count myself as the inventor of British Gaullism. And, just as Trotsky was not a Trotskyist and Marx was not a Marxist once they realised what their supposed followers were saying, I gaze with dismay on the thing now emerging under the name “Anglo-Gaullism”. I only realised how bad it had got when Ben Judah, a former special adviser to David Lammy, appeared in Michael Gove’s Spectator to proclaim himself an “Anglo-Gaullist”. As he himself says, he had until recently been an “Atlanticist”, a grand way of saying he had believed in the supercharged piffle of the “special relationship”, which no adult should take seriously. Judah had discovered, during a visit by Mr Lammy to JD Vance, that the US could be “erratic, emotional and unpredictable”. Gosh. Ernest Bevin, who vowed in 1948 to build a British nuclear bomb after being bullied by the US State Department, could have told him that. His cat, if he has one, could have told him that. But he thinks Gaullism is simply a response to France’s postwar political chaos. Actually, there were many possible responses to that. De Gaulle’s was the only one that worked because de Gaulle could still summon up the ancient spirits of France. What passes for today’s “Anglo-Gaullism”, in contrast, appears to consist mainly of some Whitehall tinkering to make Downing Street more powerful, something already achieved in a bad cause by those Atlanticists Alastair Campbell and Jonathan Powell in 1997. Then there’s the promise of more defence spending. But why? Britain’s military spending is already very high. We just don’t get very much for it. It is used up on trying to pretend to be a superpower instead of on defending the actual country from actual, or feasible dangers.

But the true difficulty is that it is too late for British Gaullism. When I called myself a British Gaullist I was, as I always am, discussing what we could have done and didn’t. I wasn’t offering a manifesto. We cannot haul the remnants of the decrepit British dreadnought out of the muddy, polluted creek into which it has sunk. In my review of Professor Jackson’s book, I noted above all that de Gaulle had in the end been beaten, in 1968, by a wordless, incoherent insurrection. Vacuous as it was, it defeated him, his patriotism, his idea of France and his evocation of ancient loyalties. The 1968 generation in France had no use for the threadbare banners of nation, duty and faith. They preferred the new post-patriotic, secular Europe, in which bodily autonomy matters much more than national sovereignty.

I wrote in 2019 that it was a great tribute to Charles de Gaulle that this movement, which has transformed the world, originally rose in its full strength specifically against him, his rule and his principles. He had a certain idea of France and of the world, and they knew, absolutely knew, that it was their enemy. Britain had no such figure then or since, whatever the Thatcherites would have you believe. It thought it was too safe to need one. Now it is clear that it is not safe, there is no such leader available and there will be no “Anglo-Gaullism”.

[Further reading: The Mandelson Affair is stripping this government bare]