Britain on the Brink
2nd August 2025
Four decades ago I was sitting having a cup of tea in Bramerton Street in Chelsea, just off the King’s Road. It was the home of Alan Jay Lerner, author of Brigadoon, Paint Your Wagon, My Fair Lady, Gigi, Camelot, and much else. Alan was not as wealthy as he’d been two decades earlier, because he’d carelessly acquired seven ex-wives and was in the umpteenth year of a long-running dispute with the IRS. But I couldn’t understand why, as a man awash in Oscars and Tonys and whatnot, he chose to live not in New York but in London, when the former seemed to me (as it did to Martin Amis, Salman Rushdie and other impressionable types) far more glamorous. Alan replied that he lived in London because Britain was the most eminently civilised society on earth.
Well, it’s not anymore. A two-bedroom house in Bramerton Street will, for the moment, set you back over three million pounds, but no one except a gibbering lunatic would advance the proposition that today’s Britain is “the most eminently civilised society on earth”. England particularly is increasingly what Trump would call a bleephole – very literally. When its remnants finally go up in flames fifteen years (at most) from now, you’ll strain to believe that it could ever have been as Lerner characterised it.