«Who do they think we are? Being British»

British Council Independent Lecture, Palace of Westminster, London

28 June 2001

It must have been 1988. I was Minister for Overseas Development, on a bad day (I used to think) the best job in Britain, on a good day the best job in the world. I had been visiting Egypt to see the Cairo waste water system that the British government was helping to finance, and was flying on from there to East Africa. Our plane developed a fault and we had to touch down for repairs in Addis Ababa.

I had been to Ethiopia two or three times already by then, in the footsteps of Bob Geldof and Jonathan Dimbleby, to offer humanitarian assistance to the starving, brave, handsome victims of drought, environmental degradation and disastrous Stalinist agricultural policies. So I knew the place reasonably well and reckoned I could spend a few quiet hours in the hillside bungalow of the British ambassador. But, alas, he was as they say in Africa "up country". "OK", I said to my private secretary (now himself the ambassador in Addis), "let's go and see the British Council".

Off we drove, discovering en route that the Council's representative and his deputy were also out of town. Is it good or bad luck to be away when a Minister of the Crown drops in unexpectedly? Well, they may have been cursing who knows? when they subsequently learned of a missed opportunity to impress one of their paymasters. They needn't have bothered. When I got to the office, the sight could not have been bettered if it had been set up by the Council's financial controller.

The small block in which the office and its library were housed was ringed by a queue of young Ethiopians. Round the block, along the street, and up the stairs they were waiting to get into the library, some to borrow books, some to return them, some to look at one of the much-thumbed British newspapers on the premises. I asked one young man the subject of the book he was clutching under his arm. "It's about great British Explorers," he replied. "Like Shackleton and Scott. I loved the story about Scott". We'll return to Scott later.

What price, I wondered, would the public expenditure Stakhanovites in the Treasury place on the value to Britain of a queue of Ethiopians, patiently waiting in the morning sun for a chance to read the "Weekly Guardian" or to exchange "Brideshead Revisited" for "Barchester Towers"? What proportion would it represent of the cost of a reception in the Locarno Room? How would it stack up against filling potholes in motorways or repairing leaking museum roofs? Everything has a price.

It is one of the small tragedies of our times and past times too, that the British Council's price has invariably exceeded what policy makers and legislators have deemed to be its worth, or rather to be more accurate that what we should have been prepared to spend on this marvellous national asset has outstripped our public generosity. For years an odd mixture of philistinism, arrogance and lack of self-esteem or perhaps self-understanding denied the necessity of following in the footsteps of the French, the Germans and the Italians. The French might require their "Alliance Française", but what need did we have of such cultural pretentiousness? We had cricket, Oxbridge and the Dominions. And when eventually, to quote from an early statement of aims, we accepted the case "to promote abroad a wider appreciation of British culture and civilisation", this grand notion was implemented in the spirit of a not very successful counting house. For years, despite letters to "The Times" from the great and good, despite unpersuasive lunches for the unpersuadable at The Athenaeum and The Reform, despite queues outside shabby premises from Bombay to Beirut to Berlin, the Council's budget was the first over the top in every public spending Passchendaele. And we were, as psychiatrists used to say, all guilty.

At least, we must hope, until recently. In the last year or two, we may have seen the rosy fingers of a new dawn. All credit, if we have, where it is due, on the strict understanding that the conversion is truly Pauline in its length and sincerity. Might it, just might it, represent the important glimpse of an understanding that you do not need to toss away all sense of values in order to revive the capitalist spirit, a notion that would have astonished our Victorian bourgeois forefathers. Surely the challenge today, to follow Daniel Bell, is to reassert the existence of a moral compass for entrepreneurial capitalism, for without that we really do risk becoming a hedonistic society polarised between rich and poor yobs.

I hope that I don't risk argument over-load in saying that not only does proper funding of the British Council, or the BBC World Service, or our universities for that matter, represent for me understanding the difference in public policy between value and price, but it also offers the chance of investing in a vision of Britain that attracts others abroad and should inspire both loyalty and affection at home. We can, I believe, put behind us now the toe curling embarrassment of Cool Britannia and the Dome Age, and assert a notion of Britishness that others from Voltaire to Pevsner have applauded for centuries. It is sometimes an admiration of our institutions, sometime of our language, sometimes of our style, sometimes of the way we do things and of what we do.

There's a lovely example, a British Council example as it happens, in Ian Buruma's recent firecracker of a book on Anglomania ("Voltaire's Coconuts"). 1948 Berlin, under Soviet siege, starves and shivers. The Western Allies airlift food and medical supplies to keep the city alive. And each side, the Soviet and the West, brings culture to the Cold War's battlefront. A Cossack Choir of Russian soldiers sings revolutionary songs on the Alexanderplatz. In the British sector, the British Council fly in a company of actors to perform Shakespeare's "Measure for Measure" in English of course.

If only the Russians had been able to attend, they might have learned from Isabella

"… O, it is excellent

To have a giant's strength; but it is tyrannous

To use it like a giant"

Anglophiles or Britophiles, as one should perhaps describe them, in order to accommodate, among many others, Queen Victoria's Consort would love every nuance of that decision to send Shakespeare to defend freedom. It is a story that combines stylish humour, gentle self-confidence and understated civility in quantities that maybe flatter us but do tell something real about us as well. And Shakespeare is always for foreigners not least the well-read Chinese President Jiang Zemin the apogee and exemplar of our culture and our nationhood "When I see Chris Patten" (we were at the EU-China Summit in Peking and actually he used my Chinese name, Pang Ting Hong) "I am reminded of William Shakespeare". I think I know what he meant and modestly prefer this comparison to others that have been made from time to time not least by some of President Jiang's compatriots.

For a number of reasons we are tempted today to doubt our appeal to others, to question whether our image abroad is an attractive one, to worry about whether what we have assumed to be our traditional virtues are alive and kicking. What has happened to our house spirit? Are we suffering from an identity crisis?

Several causes four, above all - have been adduced for this purported loss of national self-esteem. First, there are the worries that multi-ethnicity has brought in its train multi-culturalism and that that has destroyed our traditional British cultural values. Let me briefly try to unpick an argument that is loaded with value judgements, prejudices and old-fashioned nonsense. Britain is indeed a multi-ethnic society and has for centuries been what one writer after another has called a mongrel breed. But if today some say that we no longer know who we are, I think that Alexander Chancellor is right to argue that this has more to do with a collapse of old common standards among many white people than with immigration from the Caribbean and South Asia. It also has something to do with driving the argument to extremes between supine political correctness on one side and absurd loyalty tests on the other. So multi-culturalism itself can be a threat when those who speak in its name denounce those institutions and values that pre-existed today's multi-culturalism as being therefore by definition morally flawed. Equally, multi-culturalism exceeds the bounds of liberal tolerance when it questions or threatens those traditional freedoms that have given our community its heart and its cohesion. Freedom of speech, for example, is not a redoubt that should be abandoned at the first whiff of an allegedly broader multi-cultural tolerance. "Liberty", Burke wrote, "too, must be limited in order to be possessed." That is a proposition that both encompasses multi-culturalism and defines its limits.

Now let me deal with the other side of the argument as the holder of a British Passport who, like 5 million other citizens of this country, has several pints of Irish blood in his veins. So I'm a "Brit" with Irish roots on my father's side, a Catholic, a supporter of Lancashire County Cricket Club, Arsenal and Newcastle Football Clubs, a Tory, once a colonial governor and now a European Commissioner - a mélange of loyalties and identities. I have no difficulty balancing them, accommodating them, living comfortably with them. Balfour said much the same a century ago though I don't believe he supported Arsenal.

A second purported reason for questioning our customary idea of ourselves is a nervous worry that we have somehow lost our sense of civilised restraint along the way, that we are no longer a gentle, well-mannered people. The great piano accompanist Gerald Moore, titled his autobiography, "Am I Too Loud?"- a gentlemanly question that we have occasionally suggested applies to all of us. But Michael Elliot fears that we have now become a nation of rowdy slobs, known from the football grounds of northern Europe to the esplanades and beaches of the south for violence and vomit. Unfortunately, there may be some truth in this. If our new Home Secretary draws the obvious conclusions from the statistical correlation between violence and drunkenness I shall be among his firmest supporters. But we should not be too shocked or preachy about this. I fear that a reputation for red-faced booziness has always sat uneasily beside the image of diffident, labrador-loving, vicars reading Jane Austen novels, sipping weak tea, and eating cucumber sandwiches in Cathedral Closes.

I re-read recently George Orwell's essay, "England your England". Better as literature than historical analysis - Orwell was determined to establish that a patriotic working class had been let down by the nation's leaders it is full of memorable images of Britain, including most notably that of "the old maids biking to Holy Communion through the mists of autumn mornings".

The old maids are listed just after "the rattle of pin tables in the Soho pubs". Noting that his fellow citizens are not puritanical, Orwell went on to write, "They are inveterate gamblers, drink as much beer as their wages will permit, are devoted to bawdy jokes, and use probably the foulest language in the world". So the booze and the coyly described "F-word" were always with us.

It is also argued (the third factor in our identity crisis) that the very concept of Britain and Britishness was an artificial construction knocked together in order to win and control an overseas empire, and that we have always been a community of disparate communities. Linda Colley and Norman Davies, are among those who have written entertainingly along these lines. Their evidence is picked over by both supporters and opponents of devolution, the latter arguing that the establishment of legislative bodies in Edinburgh, Cardiff and Belfast risks tearing apart what the providential hand of history has joined together. It may be worth recalling that the use of historians in this sort of argument is not new. The spin doctors of the Middle Ages, like the authors of "The Encomium" and the "Life of Edward" (the Confessor), battled a millennium ago over who could stake the best claim to be the guardian of Englishness, a concept broad enough to include Viking rulers yet traditional enough to put the boot into the French and the Germans.

I am not persuaded that today's intellectual deconstruction of the idea of the British state on the grounds that it artificially provides the political quarters for separate nations, reflects the extent to which the citizens of the whole state feel natural loyalties towards it at the same time as they feel loyalty to their nationhood. I also suspect that, unless they are actually obliged to make a distinction between nation and state, it would not occur to many British passport holders to attempt to do so. I regard as wholly fanciful (indeed, pretty well inconceivable) the idea that many of our fellow citizens will find that they have a higher loyalty to Brussels than to London, and that their sense of community can be satisfactorily billeted in one lodging called England or Scotland or Wales or Northern Ireland, and another called Europe.

But that does bring me to the core of my argument (the fourth reason for our alleged uncertainty about who we are), the agonising, infuriating, debilitating argument about Britain and Europe, a debate that does in a way reflect a real loss of confidence in "being British". It is a debate that confuses, confounds and mystifies our friends many in the United States as well as in Europe and often prevents us from pursuing our national interest as vigorously as we should or could. Let me try to set it in context.

For familiar and well-documented historical reasons, by the dawn of the last century, Britain was a Great Power, arguably still the greatest in the world.

We had lived after the English Revolution with relatively stable institutions. They framed the rule of law which Alexis de Tocqueville thought more important to our wealth than our forests, ports, rivers and minerals. The accumulation and distribution of capital was encouraged by a benign combination of policy and law on the one hand the law of contract, for example and technology and natural resources on the other. We were the pioneers of the Industrial Revolution, and the first to reap its rewards. Our sailors and soldiers explored distant continents; their reputation varying with the observer's vantage point. Visiting the cathedral at Santiago de Compostella last autumn, the Spanish guide paused before a memorial plaque for Francis Drake "Drake", she said, "the notorious English pirate". "Is he any relation", a friend enquired, "of the famous English naval hero of the same name?" The outposts conquered or discovered by generations of our finest mongrel stock, were sewn together in an imperial fabric, which brought great commercial as well as political benefits and was sustained by a philosophy both worthy and hypocritical. The "white man's burden" brought a sweat to his red brow and coin to his pocket.

At the time of Victoria's Jubilee, her imperial dominions covered a quarter of the land surface of the world. A mood of languid and suave self-confidence pervaded the country. The optimism scared Rudyard Kipling, and in "Recessional" published in "The Times" the day after the Almighty had been thanked in St. Paul's for his beneficence by the Empress Defender of the Faith, her loyal subjects, her Mounted Rifles, Light Horse and Lancers, the great poet of Empire warned that vanity eventually reduced every empire to dust:

"Far called, our navies melt away;

On dune and headland sinks the fire;

Lo, all our pomp of yesterday

Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!

Judge of the Nations, spare us yet,

Lest we forget lest we forget."

Within just over two decades that phrase was to be used to commemorate the British Empire's victims in the conflagration that scorched the earth, the liberties and the civilisation of Europe. Britain's global predominance was on the skids, at precisely the moment when not only were we challenged by American and German industrial competition, but also at that dark moment when the confident turn of the century assumption that democracy and economic freedom would forever rule our destinies was put to the sword by terrible tyrannies of left and right.

Kipling again

"As it will be in the future, it was at the birth of Man -

There are only four things certain since Social Progress began:

That the Dog returns to his Vomit and the Sow returns to her Mire;

And the burnt Fool's bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire …"

Irish secession, the rise of labour, the 1926 strike, the grim years of depression, the humiliations of appeasement were followed by that last magnificent outpouring of energy, courage and accumulated wealth that helped to save European Civilisation in the second terrible civil war of the last century. We had been jerked out of what Orwell called "the deep, deep sleep of England" by the roar of bombs; would we remain awake when the bombs stopped falling or would we drift back into our daydreams?

There was a heavy economic price to pay for victory the liquidation of many of our global assets but as Hugo Young reminds us in "This Blessed Plot", we were better placed than others to move forward under a government chosen by an electorate that had sent its war-time hero packing and voted for a peaceful revolution. We were a creditor with the rest of the shattered European continent, our exports equal in 1947 to the combined figures for France, Germany, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Norway and Denmark.

Where our industrial capacity at war's end was higher than it had been in 1939, Germany, France and Italy had been reduced to penury. I recall childhood holidays when the franc was a joke. I recall, too, in later years a senior Treasury civil servant telling me that his first job as a young assistant principal had been to assist in the defence of the deutschmark on the foreign exchanges. That was when there were 14 DM to the pound. He went on, wistfully, to observe that when he compared the later performances of the British and German economies he found it difficult to regard his subsequent career as an unparalleled success.

Along with the relative economic decline a devalued currency, the stop-go economic cycle, the "British disease" of low productivity, low investment and wage inflation, the "I'm-alright-Jack" mentality, the hollowing out of industrial competitiveness along with all that came the strategically real and the psychologically half-hearted adjustment to our position in the new post-war world. Suez rudely reminded us just how much we could do on our own in a world dominated by our great Trans-Atlantic partner; more significant still, we dismantled our empire from India to Hong Kong. After the bloody harvest that followed the independence of India and the foundation of Pakistan, the rest of the hazardous enterprise was pursued with remarkable skill and resolve. It was a grand act of enforced statesmanship on which History is likely to nod its approval. Nothing perhaps became us more, from dry and dusty Africa to the monsoon soaked South China coast, than how we quit and what we tried to leave behind. But we long bore and still bear the scars of all those torrid economic and political experiences. And maybe we learned the commercial lessons of Kipling's "Gods of the Copy Book Headings" that "Two and Two make Four" more rapidly than we learned what those same Gods taught us about our place in the world.

We started the second half of the 20th Century with a hopelessly false self-image, especially and understandably after our Finest Hour. Other countries, like Germany and Japan, have tried to bury their ghosts scarcely surprisingly. We have fought not to do so. We cling to the "Island Story" myths of our past the world through the eyes of A.L. Bryant. A newspaper vendor's sign in London in 1940 read, "French sign Peace Treaty: We're in the Finals". And the game goes on. We sometimes appear still to think that a cheerful Cockney two fingers to the world - "up yours Delors" - and another bash at "the Hun" is the same as defining and pursuing our national interest. No one should want to forget our bravest moments and greatest sacrifices. Yet you cannot forever see your relationship with the rest of the world through the prism of Britain's majestic rise from the azure main.

"The nations not so blest as thee, / must in their turn to tyrants fall …" is not an all-encompassing definition of how to conduct foreign and security policy in 2001. And yet if you read, for example, Robert Conquest's recent book, "Reflections on a Ravaged Century", that is more or less his argument that Britain should align herself with the English speaking nations of North America and the former white Dominions which really understand freedom, rather than break baguettes with the suspect Continental Europeans. Bad contemporary advice and bad history, as regiments of Europeans from Mazzini to Havel would affirm.

And much of the history is bad, the historical memory extraordinarily warped. To some, any political advance in Europe is identified as the continuation by other means of past nefarious continental plots even the names of Goering, Goebbels and Hitler whizzed about during the recent and little lamented election campaign.

Had any of those who summoned these demonic spirits with, I would judge, somewhat limited electoral success ever read Friedrich von Hayek's "The Road to Serfdom", a seminal work for economic liberals of the Right? Written in 1944, Hayek argued in "The Road to Serfdom" that after the war European countries would have to accept that their national economic sovereignty should be limited within a political Federation of Nation States, which would be the only way to secure democratic control and accountability over them! As Lord Acton wrote, "Few discoveries are more irritating that those which expose the pedigree of ideas".

It is sadly not just a question of losing historical knowledge and perspective. Worse still, we often give the impression that we are unworthy of our forebears, that we can only admire the mountains they climbed not try to climb some of our own. If this attitude did not come after the event, one would be tempted to call it a pre-emptive cringe.

The cringing changed for a time with the advent of Margaret Thatcher. Whatever your political views (and it's one aspect of her legacy that the perspective of most of us was changed by her Premiership), it is now widely accepted that her years in No.10 prevented relative economic decline in Britain leading to absolute decline. Many of the assumptions about the inevitability of our economic condition wage inflation, the abuse of union power, a growing state sector and higher taxation were demolished. She put her stamp on our political and economic life.

But not all was for the better. Even many of her admirers would argue that Margaret Thatcher's blind spot was Europe, despite her contribution to its construction in, for example, the 1975 referendum campaign and the signing of the Single European Act. Would she actually disagree with the suggestions that she felt in the marrow of her bones that our "so-called partners" were despicable, that the re-unification of Germany was a dangerous threat (a position she originally shared with President Mitterrand, but from which he rather neatly detached himself) and that the very essence of our freedom and independence were under assault from a dangerous combine of historic foes? It wasn't just our freedom and independence that were in peril, but also our ties of blood and history to our traditional allies beyond Europe, pre-eminent among them, of course, the United States.

So we have, throughout our membership of the EU, been confronted with a false choice Washington or Brussels even when our wisest American friends remind us that we matter most to them when we count in Europe, when we lead in Europe, not when semi-detached from our continental partners we seek to turn the special relationship of legend into a partnership that even our warmest American friends would regard as improbable at best, vainglorious at worst. To borrow the jargon I am a pro-European Atlanticist. I do not feel obliged to define my pro-European sentiments in terms of anti-Americanism nor my pro-Atlanticist views in terms of anti-Europeanism.

There are other reasons for our unease in Europe. Just as, on the largest scale, the interdependence of world forces obliges us all to adapt, so membership of the European Union requires us to change the way we do some things in order to make a success of working with our regional partners. And this becomes a poisonous issue even when the purpose is, as with the creation of the single market, one that we have done more than others to define and promulgate. But the process causes bitter, septic as much as sceptic resentment. People resent what looks to be a consequence of our relative decline.

Despite having saved Europe by our exertions, despite having such superior institutions, despite having dammit pretty much invented political tolerance and freedom, despite our famous bloody sense of humour, despite being such a good, fair, impressive lot, here we are being ordered about by these foreigners. What have they got to teach us about how to run an economy, about how to run hospitals and schools, or who knows? - about how to run a railway. What indeed!

Sometimes lacking the self-confidence to embrace change, we have as a consequence done less than we should to shape our own future. Our decline relative to others, though probably halted, still rankles, and makes even governments with big majorities look as though they are being bullied by Brussels and our European partners, when, that is, they are not being bullied by Wapping. So the debate has oscillated between two deplorable extremes. First, there are the placards that tell us that British is always best, invariably adding the footnote "to hell with Europe, with immigrants, with asylum seekers". This is not, definitely not, a proud reassertion of all that made us great. It is a nasty, mean-spirited betrayal of those qualities. "A State", Lord Acton wrote "which is incompetent to satisfy different races condemns itself; a State which labours to neutralise, to absorb or to expel them, destroys its own vitality; a State which does not include them is destitute of the chief basis of self-government."

In the other corner is the contention that we have to re-invent ourselves, at the very least to re-paint our tail fins. There is the profligate assault on our institutions from the monarchy, to parliament, to local government, to the universities, to the civil service. It seems to me so meretricious, so ill thought out. It devalues our history, indeed it usually shows no knowledge of our history. It fails to show proper pride in it. How much happier many of us would have been if we had spent the Lottery's money and our own on a museum of our national history rather than on the biggest and now emptiest of all tents.

There is so much to be proud of in Britain that we should have the confidence to share our sovereignty with others in the certain knowledge that that is the best way to preserve real sovereignty rather than the notional kind. We would be able, for example, to lead the present debate in Europe about how to distinguish between what should really be done at the European level and what at the national, and about how to make the institutions which manage policy at the European level more accountable to national electorates. We could make Europe more as we would wish it to be, if only we could treat it as it really is, not as we fear it may be, and if we would see our own place in the world more honestly, more clearly.

As Ian Buruma argues in the book to which I referred earlier, "Britain has many allies in the European Continent…. That Europe, my Europe, could not survive without Britain, as the champion of popular sovereignty and free trade…. But Britain cannot cultivate its allies by fighting "Europe" in the spirit of Dunkirk. For European democracies to survive, Europeans must regain the confidence to govern themselves, and that cause is not helped by the notion that only Britain, by some historic miracle, has the organic, homegrown political traditions to sustain a liberal state. For Europe to become more Anglophile, the Anglophile myth must go".

Of course, it is true, as Jean Monnet argued in his memoirs that Britain's greatest contributions to civilisation were respect for liberty, habeas corpus and democratic institutions. Provided we do not assume that we have a monopoly of virtue in this area, our record ensures that others will listen to us in the debate on Europe's future.

This is only a part of what we bring to the shaping of Europe. There is so much of which we can be proud our language and literature, our record of scientific discovery, our freedom of speech, the BBC, our professional non-political armed forces, our responsible global diplomacy, our civil society. And we can point to the identifiable and beneficial influence that we have already exerted in Europe - opening markets internally and externally, enlargement, de-regulation, competition, privatisation, transparency, the importance of sound administration. It is a pretty good balance sheet of our record since membership. A balance sheet, in short, which should give any modest patriot reason for quiet pride.

So patriotism, and the assertion of what we esteem as a nation and of what others have customarily esteemed us for, are not incompatible with being a whole-hearted member of the European Union. Rather the contrary. But some, including strong supporters of our European vocation, would turn their nose up at this. They regard patriotism as the wrong drum to beat in a new millennium. Of course, if patriotism were only about narrow political, military or economic objectives the audacious goals of our national hymns: taming haughty tyrants, setting our bounds wider still and wider, frustrating knavish tricks, burnishing the commercial polish on our shining cities then they might have a point. But patriotism, certainly the best of our patriotism, has always struck a more profound note, too the note of Blake and Parry in "Jerusalem" and the note of what is for me the greatest of all our national hymns, Cecil Spring-Rice's "I Vow to Thee, My Country", sung to Holst's Jupiter hymn.

During a political life in which what I have done has sometimes fallen well below the level of events, I regard one of my smaller acts of pusillanimity as caving in to those who opposed including this incomparable national hymn in the programme for our rain-streaked departure from Hong Kong. I went meekly along with the fat-headed advice that it would sound a bit too… well, British.

But it shows that there is another dimension to patriotism that goes way beyond the boundaries and the concepts of the nation state a spiritual dimension, celebrated by Spring-Rice in language that draws on our Christian tradition, and is familiar to us from school assemblies and memorial services -

"And there's another country, I've heard of long ago,

most dear to them that love her, most great to them that know;

we may not count her armies, we may not see her King;

her fortress is a faithful heart, her pride is suffering;

and soul by soul and silently her shining bounds increase,

and her ways are ways of gentleness and all her paths are peace."

Someone whose patriotism coursed along those channels was Stanley Baldwin. He expressed the sentiment perhaps best in a celebration of the memory of the explorer admired by that Ethiopian student of my fleeting acquaintance, Captain Scott, beaten by 34 days in his 1912 race to the South Pole by the Norwegian Roald Amundsen, and frozen to death in a blizzard on his return journey.

Scott's last expedition was rightly included in a recent book of British Greats from Chaucer to fish and chips, from trial by jury to Welsh male voice choirs, from the Proms to the reading of the Saturday afternoon football results. It was hailed "Great Scott!" as a part of British mythology epitomising in Fergus Flemming's words "a host of national traditions" including "monumental understatement" (remember Captain Oates' last words "I am just going outside and may be some time"); "the struggle against overwhelming odds; the adulation (however perverse) of amateurism; support for the underdog". All true. But there was another element, an element that we are told helped to fortify the spirits of many of the young men condemned to the trenches of Flanders two years after Scott's death, whose grim, short lives in the mud and blood were illuminated by his spirit.

In a speech delivered 22 years after Scott's death and 16 years after the end of the First Great War, at an event in Cambridge to mark the opening of the eponymous Polar Research Institute that memorialises the explorer, Stanley Baldwin noted that it was not enough in life to be a success. To think that it was, was to miss a crucial dimension. He concluded his remarks by describing the last moments of Scott and his colleagues

"The last choice that lay before them, when all was accomplished, was the choice of death at their own hands or death as it should come to them… A man's life is not his own. It was the trump of God which was to sound the time when he was to fall out. They heard that trumpet as they looked out from the doors of their tent, and saw the swift remorseless fingers of inexorable fate weaving their shroud of snow. Then they were content. Their work was done. They had run their course, they had kept the faith to their own country, to their own ideals, to their own best selves and to one another; and because they had conquered self, and because they had possessed their own souls, they will live in the hearts of their fellow-countrymen and in every part of the world till the end of time"

Every part of the world.

Now that is a view of patriotism that no caricature or nightmare vision of our future in Europe could bury. More important it is a view of patriotism that is readily understood by people from other nations, and not just by a lone Ethiopian student more than a decade ago. Thrice blessed, and thrice again, is the institution that gives young men and women like that from every part of the world the opportunity to share such an insight.