At last month’s Chalke Valley History Festival, you could get your military training from men dressed as second-world-war Tommies, and then defend a pretend hill in Flanders. I met a chap who had driven up in a vintage Citro?n van, though admittedly it had broken down en route. All this took place in a sun-dappled English meadow straight out of a Merchant Ivory film, with local ladies serving home-baked sponge cake.
Perhaps no country has a happier relationship with its own past than Britain, and the self-appointed guardian of that relationship is the Tory party. But, since about 1800, Britain has always offered cutting-edge modernity. The sites of that modernity have shifted from northern industrial cities to London and university towns, but Britons have consistently helped invent the future, from the train through punk rock to the world wide web. Travelling the country in recent weeks, dodging train strikes, I felt that had changed. Neither main party now offers a vision of the future. No wonder: an ageing society doesn’t particularly need one.
Britain’s transformative postwar leaders — Attlee, Thatcher and Blair — were futurist almost by definition, though Thatcher also looked backward to the glorious national past. Her heirs, the Brexiters, sold a similarly potent double brew in 2016: the glorious past plus the promise of a “Global Britain” jetting around signing trade deals.