The End of the American Era

Abstract

The intelligent reader will not have needed William Rees-Mogg’s sensitive appreciation of the delights of Californian breakfast-time television to know that Britain has much to offer the American election campaign. In 1976 we figured prominently, with Gerald Ford campaigning under the slogan ‘Don’t follow England down the drain!’ This year the Republicans have decided they have other sorts of lessons to learn from us. Hard-nosed men with horn-rimmed eyes (let alone glasses) have crossed the Atlantic to make admiring studies of how the battle of Britain of May ’79 was won. They return home, one is told, to apply the gospel according to Saatchi, Saatchi and Thatcher with a terrible and scientific rigour. The wonderful humourlessness of their efforts is excusable, no doubt, by the stern nobility of their cause: to bring about a conservative resurrection of strong leadership, thereby to restore the full bloom of American greatness. To be fair, it’s not a party matter. If Teddy, Jimmy, Ronald and all the rest have one thing in common it is an overriding obsession with ‘leadership’ and ‘greatness’.

First published in New Society, 24 April 1980.