John Berger bucked this pattern in 1972 when he won the Booker Prize with his novel G and managed to say

John Berger bucked this pattern in 1972, when he won the Booker Prize with his novel G and managed to say some telling things about the activities of big companies like Booker Bros in the Third World. But we have nothing like the great German- language awards, the Heinrich Heine Prize or the Peace Prize, at which both winner and introducer deliver majestic cultural sermons, laboured over for months and then reprinted or broadcast all over the land.The fact remains that England now badly needs a platform from which men and women with passionate imaginations can survey their nation and report what they see. (The Scots and the Welsh face similar problems, but their prospect is less confusing.) England is too urgent an issue to be abandoned to right-wing politicians. An alarmed article in the current Spectator, by Edward Heathcote Amory, claims that members of the Tory Shadow Cabinet now speak privately in favour of “English independence”, and that the Unionist tradition of the party is giving way to talk about an English parliament within a federal system.”In all too many cases”, he writes, “[the Tories] are opting for easy and populist English nationalism in their attempt to redefine both their party and their country.” Seen from London, the chances of rebuilding Toryism in Scotland and Wales, after May’s election wipe-outs there, seem insignificant. And, as Heathcote Amory rightly says, the dilemma over Europe is also helping to drive the Conservative Party towards English nationalism.

William Hague’s decision last week to reject British membership of European Monetary Union did not merely split his party. It put it on an anti-European track which is absolutely unacceptable to the non-English parts of the United Kingdom. If Hague is to find any mass public support for his new policy of Europhobia and insularity (and he may not find one at all), it can only be in England.To leave the “invention of England” to the panicky rabble around Mr Hague would be criminal negligence Some of them do not even know where England is. In an otherwise touching Prospect article by John Keegan about British war graves, I read that “the English vision is particularly present in the Cotswolds …

in the South Hams of Devonshire, in Thomas Hardy’s Dorset, along the Welsh marches of Herefordshire and Shropshire, in Beatrix Potter country … in the Kipling territory of remoter Kent and Sussex.” Whose “vision” is this, of a ruralist paradise which has no cities, no factories, and no inhabitants north of the Trent except for Peter Rabbit and Mrs Tiggy-Winkle?Mr Keegan is a fine military historian, and I wouldn’t count him among any “panicky rabble”. But his words illustrate the terrifying lack of consensus about the very outlines of Englishness. The last generation of English writers who wrote about their own nation with unaffected love – Rupert Brooke, G K Chesterton, A E Housman, John Masefield – were clearer about the country’s identity. Surely it is possible today to love England and be grown-up at the same time, to delight in the actually-existing England that Blake Morrison, Kate Atkinson or Ian McEwan write about.English nationalism, in short, must not be left to the extreme right Politically, it has no chance of power for the moment.

But England is going to return to national self-consciousness in Tony Blair’s time, whether he likes it or not. Nation-forging has always been a work of the imagination, and it is for England’s intellectuals to accept that responsibility. Only they can rescue their country from the politics of backward-looking, ethnic resentment They can – and they should.. I rarely venture into the cinema, though I remember enjoying the first half of My Fair Lady before all the kissing and “heavy petting” (dread activity!), much of it off-camera, forced me to up-sticks and leave.

Word reached me, however, of a new film (never “movie”, if you please!) called The Full Monty. A great admirer of the Field Marshall’s, I broke the habit of a lifetime and purchased a seat in the stalls. Early in the film, my sixth sense told me that it was highly unlikely that the Field Marshal was going to get a look-in. Instead, a motley collection of English working-men (a contradiction in terms? I jest!) was to be seen prancing around an ill-swept warehouse in various states of undress.