Gurus in the Parking Lot by Michael Blair Schleyer

People on the left will baulk at what I’m about to say, but in some ways, with Margaret Thatcher, there was at least the strong direction recovered. But from then on, you were relinquishing the trappings of empire and power. The Second World War demonstrated the capacity of Britain still to play a leading role on the world stage. TB At the end of the 19th century, we were the most powerful country in the world. MS After the war, with that 1945 government and the huge changes made to the country, when did people start looking back?

You only have a concept like the American Dream – and Xi Jinping now talks about a Chinese Dream – when you think your best days are ahead of you. And then the Olympics, when it came about in 2012, was in many ways a celebration of that.īut there have always been these two competing ideas and, bluntly, I think that over the past few years, the older narrative has reasserted itself. We quite deliberately put Britain forward as a multicultural, tolerant society, looking to the future, and I think that’s why we won that bid.

I think, for a time, that succeeded, and it probably culminated in winning the Olympic bid in 2005. My idea was to take what I think are the enduring best qualities of Britain – open-mindedness, tolerance, innovation – and try to give Britain a different narrative that would allow it to think its best days are ahead of it. TB Britain finds it very difficult to tell a story about itself, because there is a narrative that supposes our best days are behind us, and that’s caught up in what happened in the Second World War: Churchill defeated Nazism, Britain’s finest hour. The Britain you grew up in, were educated in, became a barrister in, got into politics in – what was that Britain telling the world about who it was, and why did you come to think that story needed to change? MS When we were making The Queen, it seemed as if the story Britain told about itself had changed. Tony Blair That was generous, if inaccurate. I remember Stephen Frears, who directed two of the films where I played you, said “Don’t ever forget that these are the smartest people in the room, always.” Michael Sheen I have a lot of cognitive dissonance when it comes to you, because it’s like seeing a family member or something.

Introduced and chaired by Anoosh Chakelian, the NS Britain editor

Gurus in the Parking Lot by Michael Blair Schleyer