Strangeland – How Britain Stopped Making Sense
Jon Sopel, Ebury Press, £22

FROM the start, I was sceptical about this book. After all, someone like Jon Sopel, who was for many years a top BBC correspondent — for eight years its man in Washington — must be completely in tune with Establishment ideology or he would not have been given such a job.

Here he takes a critical look at a country that has dramatically changed since he left it in 2014. “Returning to the UK in some ways has been disconcerting,” he writes. “It is, after all, my home; a country I love and am proud of. But either it’s changed, or I have. Maybe both. It just feels like a strange land. This book is, I suppose, about Britishness — the values that have guided us.”

I’m always bemused by those who express “pride” in something they have not contributed to themselves. It’s as meaningless as saying you’re proud of the Roman conquest or Blackpool tower. And what about Britain’s appalling historical legacy of colonialism and imperial arrogance. Are you proud of that too, Jon?

The tenor of his perspective is revealed when he writes: “With her [Queen Elizabeth’s] death it felt that some other cherished bits of what it means to be British had seemingly gone as well.”

Ostensibly his book is a discourse on the changing face of Britain, but it is more a chronology of Sopel’s own journalistic career. Like many mainstream political reporters, he views Washington DC and Westminster as the places where everything of interest happens. When he describes the Trump era and the latter’s attempt to cling on to office, he provides no wider social or economic context for the Trump phenomenon, any more than he does for the changes he notes in Britain. 

When he mentions the 2008 financial crash and the recession, he tells us blandly: “That’s the economic cycle”, ie an eternal reality we have to learn to live with. He also spends unnecessary time rehashing the past Westminster political machinations around Brexit etc. He even takes aim at the BBC and the climate of fear created by political interference, but again he appears to look back to a golden age rather than question the role of a monopolised and overwhelmingly right-wing media.

While he can write with wit and often has a neat turn of phrase, generally his language is rather simplistic, as if he is talking to a school class.

Sopel’s identification with the Establishment becomes very clear when he mentions Jeremy Corbyn and patronisingly declares that “the problem with Jeremy Corbyn was that of apparent arrested development.” He never grew out of his teenage protest years, he asserts.

When he writes about Theresa May’s calling of a snap election for June 8 2017 — when she was confident of winning a landslide — he doesn’t even mention that she stood against Corbyn, who had little time to prepare and faced a fifth column of Judases in his own parliamentary party and yet, despite the odds, won 40 per cent of the votes cast to the Tories’ 42.4 per cent — an amazing achievement. Corbyn is someone Sopel describes as “totally unelectable,” despite almost matching the Tories’ vote. The subsequent massive media onslaught against Corbyn and the whipping up of hysteria over anti-semitism is not mentioned either. 

Instead, he misquotes the politically motivated Equality and Human Rights Commission report and holds Corbyn responsible for “the Labour Party’s ‘unlawful’ discrimination and harassment of Jews during the four-and-a-half years of his leadership.” He totally ignores the fact that this report was politically motivated in order to undermine Corbyn at a crucial time. He also ignores the subsequent independent report by Martin Forde QC which came to very different conclusions.

The Forde report, an independent inquiry into Labour’s culture that was published in July 2022, found that the party was an “unwelcoming place for people of colour” and had a “toxic” culture of factional disputes between the party’s right and left.

Sopel yearns nostalgically for the old times when Britain was Britain. “Then,” he writes, “Westminster was run along the lines of a gentlemen’s club — the barristers and doctors, company directors and consultants would earn their real money in the morning and the house wouldn’t start work until the afternoon and would sit late into the night.” How cosy!

This book is, in essence, a rehash of the already well covered sleaze and corruption that has dogged successive governments, but particularly that of Boris Johnson, related by someone who for much of that time was stationed in Washington DC. It lacks deeper insights or explanations for the malaise he bemoans.

For more profound investigations into why our present political and economic systems see Matt Kennard and Claire Provost’s Silent Coup — How Corporations Overthrew Democracy, and Sam Freedman’s Failed State.