One beautiful June day in 1990, I got my heart's desire and went to live in dirty, frightening Moscow , the capital of a country I hated.
One beautiful June day in 1990, I got my heart’s desire and went to live in dirty, frightening Moscow, the capital of a country I hated.
But in that sinister orbit, I also became oddly weightless, separated quite painfully for the first time from the country I had lived in all my life and which I thought I knew well. I thought such a journey was too important to be compressed into a few hours of featureless flight, ending with the wet whump of wheels on some dawn runway at Heathrow. I was right.
That phrase, ‘the parental State’ made me think of the single most horrible monument in Communist Moscow, set in a sad, weedy park in the district known as Red Presnya. This was a statue of the little horror Pavlik Morozov. Soviet children were actually brought up to admire this treacherous creep for betraying his own parents to the secret police. Were we heading that way? It still seems to me that we were and are.
MPs and parties represented the powerful to the people rather than the other way round. State bureaucracies treated loyal, patient taxpayers with contempt rather than respect. Trusted brands, banks and shops became infected with propaganda and political correctness, so that you could no longer advertise a new brand of sausage or a hairdryer unless you included some feminist or multicultural message.
Media, as in Moscow, served the government and inserted propaganda into what was supposed to be impartial news. In a TV broadcast, they lied flatly that the Tories would abolish the state pension. When they won the election, they crammed Downing Street with fake spontaneous demonstrators waving Union Jacks.
Because most people could not, in those days, see any coherent threat to their country or their way of life, it was like hacking away at a fogbank with a cutlass. Anyone who objected looked eccentric and got nowhere. And while I did so, I tried to find a publisher. I was very nearly too late. The eventual publication of the book was almost a miracle.
We had almost run out of hope when Naim Attallah, of Quartet Books, generously agreed to bring the book out, and so The Abolition Of Britain was born, nursed into existence by another open-minded gentleman of the old school, Piers Blofeld, nephew of the great cricket commentator Henry.
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