As the Suez Crisis unfolded, as with the war we waged in Iraq, it became clear that there had been a pretty big bish. International opinion consigned Britain and France to the dog house; petrol was rationed; the Prime Minister went to recuperate at Goldeneye (Ian Fleming’s house in Jamaica). George Lyttleton expressed his feelings in a letter to Rupert Hart-Davis dated 5th December 1956.
“Does anything pleasant ever happen? Really this combination of humiliation, impoverishment, hideous inconvenience and insecurity in the near, middle and distant future is very hard to bear. It is a very inadequate silver lining that Ike should be improving his putting and Eden his tennis, breast-stroke and complexion. Surely he will be out in the twinkling of an eye, and his Government. No Govt can survive such hideous results, whether the action that produced them seemed at the time to be right or wrong. And the alternative is Gaitskell and Co. Assuredly “we are for the dark”* – except that nothing turns out quite as dreadful as one expected. I fear and suspect there may be exceptions. But, as a tiresome and sensible friend of mine says – there is nothing we can do about it, so why talk about it?”
Likewise imagining Cameron and Osborne improving their backhand is not much of a silver lining post Brexit. In the same letter GL offers a hostage to fortune: “do you think that in seventy years someone will record as one of those aberrations of great critics that R H-D thought nothing of Orwell? I don’t think so; in fact what you say chimes with my own doubts and suspicions. How a small and persistent clique can bolster up a writer’s reputation”.
R H-D had written; ” I have not read Hollis’s George Orwell, and I don’t propose to, unless it is my only book on a desert island. Orwell is of no importance from the literary point of view, but for some I daresay he has the fascination of litmus paper or a chameleon: he was (slightly to change the metaphor) a sort of barometer of the Thirties and early Forties, going through and writing about all the experience of young left-wing intellectuals during those troubled years.”
*”Antony and Cleopatra: “Finish, good lady; the bright day is done, And we are for the dark.”