The Aachen Memorandum

"I should start by saying—and I’m not being controversial here because the author himself, Andrew Roberts, has said it—that as a thriller and as a novel this book is just awful. He said it was supposed to be dystopian, it was supposed to be a thriller and it was supposed to be comic and it is none of these things. The reason I chose it was twofold. One is that it actually weirdly predicts quite a lot. In the book, there’s a referendum in 2015 for Britain to join the United States of Europe, a referendum which is passed, bizarrely, 52% to 48%. The book is set in 2045 and the spiffily named hero, Horatio Lestocq, discovers that the referendum was carried only because of large-scale electoral fraud. And then he goes about trying to prove this. It’s a counterfactual in the way Robert Harris did with Fatherland or Len Deighton did with SS-GB , where the Nazis had won the war. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Except this time the EU is the bad guy. Waterloo Station has been renamed Maastricht Terminus and Trafalgar Square Delors Square and so on. Those bits are funny, as is Lestocq, who is this overweight, asthmatic, very much the non-hero. Also, Maggie Thatcher has been assassinated. All that stuff, about dark EU forces, tapped into fears people had. And that’s what satire does; it takes existing fears and amplifies them. Look at 1984 . At the time, although very powerful and prescient, it also must have seemed ludicrous because only by being ludicrous can you get across the message. Now, of course, it seems like the greatest work of prophecy ever written. I make no claims like that for The Aachen Memorandum. It’s a curiosity, if nothing else. But I did like the fact that it was trying to take down the EU by all means, which predates, but was also very much a part of, the referendum campaign. It’s real Sir Bufton Tufton. Andrew Roberts is a very distinguished and well-known historian and has written about Churchill and Napoleon. This book feels like a combination of a Daily Mail editorial meeting and a night in the pub. And books have been written in worse circumstances than that. It’s no coincidence that he was writing it in 1995, which was also just about the peak time of Boris Johnson-style articles: EU superstate, the Death Star, Brussels gone barmy. It taps into that narrative. They reflect the narrative but then they reinforce it as well. This is the case in any generation, for the conservative with a small ‘c.’ It’s the view that the world is changing in ways that are not good. Political correctness is a very good example, because, at its heart, political correctness is a good thing. The idea that you should not be nasty about other people purely because of their race and sexuality is a good thing. The problem starts not with political correctness but with the two words that always follow it, which is ‘gone mad.’ You can see this a lot during the referendum campaign. There was almost no reasoned debate about the biggest politically correct aspect of it all, which was immigration. On the one hand you had the Remain campaign refusing to countenance that immigration might be a problem. On the other hand, you have Nigel Farage standing in front of a poster which was, to my mind, at least more than borderline racist. That’s what happens when people will not engage meaningfully. People go to extremes of either simplifying or ignoring. “I do feel sorry for Theresa May. She has been handed the biggest shitstorm imaginable. You have to pick your way through this minefield, all the time being aware, like the England football manager, that 60 million people think they can do your job better than you can.” That’s what a lot of Brexit was about, I think, people feeling they were being ignored. And having lived in the country for a while, that is quite a rural thing. When the Countryside Alliance marched in London there were 400,000 people in Hyde Park. The police famously said they can come back anytime as they left Hyde Park cleaner than they found it. Country folk always clean up after themselves. Yet I remember watching it on TV and Gerald Kaufman saying basically that those 400,000 people don’t count. He wouldn’t say that about 400,000 of any other grouping you’d care to name. Governments by their nature are urban and metropolitan and a lot of people feel ignored by them. And this, to me, is one of the ironies. People think of Brussels as too distant whereas, in fact, for lots of people Westminster is too distant as well."