Our Times: The Age of Elizabeth II Book

This openly anti-liberal survey of our recent history manages to be distasteful (a truly awful extended bulimia metaphor on Diana), disablist (ridiculing "Woy" Jenkins), snobbish (Heseltine is a "spiv" with an absurd home furnished like a "country house hotel") and quasi-racist (mocking how Scot Gordon Brown pronounces "vahlews").

But the real problem is his historical judgements, which are relentlessly half baked. Where to start? Suez was a success; the sixties had no impact; the Queen was wrong not to exercise the Royal Prerogative against Labour and the Scots; even the Beatles were rubbish, less original than the Rolling Stones. The Cabinet dumped Thatcher out of personal detestation, not, as he says a page earlier, because she's become an electoral liability. Britain no longer exists. Despite massive improvement and progress our common culture has been destroyed: by prosperity, but also by immigration, Muslim schools, the EU, the Big Bang (the 1986 one), skyscrapers,the General Synod and Gordon Brown taking Britannia off the coins. And of course New Labour. No longer do we collectively do National Service, share the same rations. Even the Queen "one suspects...had come to feel a stranger there" (i.e. here).

He concludes by lamenting that only "certain conservative romantics" mourn Britannia's loss, like a family mourning a missing person, while the rest of us "bloated by illegal narcotics and American junk food sit in front of the television in the downstairs room and did not notice that she had gone."

The word tosh doesn't quite do it. One is irresistibly reminded of Margot Asquith's description of Cripps: "he has an excellent mind, until he makes it up." Wilson is a novelist, apparently a rather good one. He isn't really an historian, not even a bad one. I don't think it's just me; if you want to see a proper demolition job of Wilson the historian, see Richard Evans' lengthy "New Statesman" review (12/3/12) which pans Wilson's new Hitler biography.

But, I feel obliged to add, this book has entertainment value as a lively, grossly uneven and maverick account. There are some good lines (which he tends to repeat!) And at least he doesn't always slavishly follow the correct right-wing party line. With this health warning, why not?