Exploding the Sixties myths

Dominic Sandbrook, who was only born in 1974, is the first historian of the Sixties without personal experience of that much mythologised period. So, being unburdened by first-hand impressions, he claims to be better able than his predecessors to do it justice in all its complexities and contradictions.

Ambitious as this claim may sound, it is, in my view, abundantly and impressively vindicated. After 800-odd pages of incisive prose, most of the myths fail to stand up. It was, we learn, a time of hedonism and liberation and degradation and national decline. In other words, as is the case, mercifully, with most so-called revolutions, the interesting thing is less how much was changed as how little.

Take for example - as Mr Sandbrook does to good effect - the key cultural figure of Kingsley Amis, who began the period as a rebel on the barricades and ended up as a Colonel Blimp at the bar of the Garrick Club; or the Conservative Party, which started the period desperate for modernisation after the Suez debacle, only to end up, seven years later, under the leadership of the 14th Earl of Home.

The same goes for the arts. For in spite of John Osborne's Look Back in Anger being acclaimed as a social and theatrical revolution by the cultural elite, it was almost entirely ignored by the working class.

Such illuminatingly revisionist details abound on every page, including a most disagreeable (to me) new story about Winston Churchill. On being told - shortly after he returned to power in 1951 - that the then Egyptian prime minister had announced the unilateral abrogation of the 1936 Anglo-Egyptian Treaty, he ordered his foreign secretary, Anthony Eden, to tell them "that if we have any more of their cheek we will set the Jews on them and drive them into the gutter from which they should never have emerged".

Another pleasure for oldies like your reviewer is to have the memory jogged. We read, for example, of a speech by a prominent politician, at a party conference in 1962, restating his party's social goals.

It went as follows: "The people of this county think that the society which we have created is not sufficiently just - they are puzzled by the fact that still in this twentieth century the child of a skilled manual labourer has only one chance in 100 of going to university, while the child of a professional man has 34 chances. They are puzzled that 42 per cent of the people in this country still earn £10 a week or less."

Whose words were these? The socialist firebrand of the time, Aneurin Bevan's, most probably. Not on your life. In fact they were the words of a Tory cabinet minister, Iain Macleod. As this book makes clear, Macmillan's Conservative Party of that period, in spite of, or more likely because of, containing 35 aristocratic members of his Cavendish Whig family through marriage, was far, far, to the Left of New Labour today.

Likewise with the monarchy. Again it was not from the Left that the modernising thrust first came but, rather, from the new broom, Duke of Edinburgh, and then from a hereditary peer, Lord Altrincham, who, after renouncing his title, went on, as John Grigg, to become one of the most respected of all establishment figures, whose funeral attracted almost as many of the great and the good as did the Queen Mum's.

Every aspect of the period is covered - spies, scandals, the arts, the BBC,
the unions, the end of Empire, the Cold War, the economy. The authorial tone throughout, however, is never debunking for debunking's sake; never iconoclastic, but determined always to set the record straight, too much so for my comfort, in one tiny instance, since a witty remark in the 1980s "that there was a class war and we won it" - with which I was once credited, or rather discredited - memorably by the communist Mitford sister, Jessica - I learn now was used originally in the 1960s by SuperMac himself. Mea culpa.

Democracy Needs Aristocracy by Peregrine Worsthorne is now out in paperback (Perennial, £7.99).