The challenges we face post Brexit are formidable. But we are equal to them.
Warnings about the dire consequences of a no-deal Brexit are becoming ever more far-fetched. Last week the supermarkets threatened that their shelves could empty fast, an irresponsible prediction that might yet prompt panic buying. Another self-fulfilling prophecy is the leaking by mischievous mandarins in Whitehall of secret contingency plans, such as the evacuation of the Queen and other members of the Royal Family from Buckingham Palace in the event of serious post-Brexit rioting — an exceedingly improbable scenario. Whoever the mob might turn on, it won’t be our blameless monarch.
Then there are the unforced errors by senior politicians that undermine public confidence. The latest example is Boris Johnson, who is alleged by the Sunday Mirror to have dumped 70 pages of sensitive documents in a petrol station bin. His careless conduct was spotted, the papers were retrieved and extracts appeared in the newspaper. Among what appear to be private memos relating to Brexit was the following passage: “No-deal does not mean crashing out, it can mean we are getting it right. We don’t know what the strategy is. We have nothing to fear but fear itself. Fear isn’t scary.” Coming from a former Foreign Secretary who still aspires to even higher things, the suggestion that there may not be a strategy for no-deal at all is hardly conducive to calm. Boris has evidently forgotten what befell Sir Oliver Letwin just eight years ago, when the minister disposed of letters from his constituents in a park bin while taking his morning constitutional in St James’s Park — while photographed by the Daily Mirror.
Amid such alarums and excursions, it is as well to be reminded that this country has been through far worse times. One of the privileges that we as a nation still enjoy is the presence of those who lived through the Second World War. Last week we heard from Holocaust survivors, whose testimony is harrowing yet also infinitely precious.
Another rapidly dwindling group is the Few, veterans of the Battle of Britain, whose obituaries remind us of an incredible heroism that we should never take for granted. One of these pilots was Wing Commander JFD “Tim” Elkington, who has died aged 98. His obituary in today’s Times reads like a fictional war story rather than the kind of thing that actually happened to real people.
Aged just 19, having already gained one “kill”, the young Elkington flew his Hurricane fearlessly into an epic aerial conflict involving hundreds of aircraft over the south coast of England on August 15, 1940. This was the most dangerous phase of the battle, when the Luftwaffe concentrated on destroying British airfields. Elkington’s squadron was trying to prevent an attack on RAF Tangmere, which was badly hit that day, with the loss of 20 ground crew. Three days later, 136 RAF fighters were shot down. Churchill was not exaggerating when he said: “Never in the field of human conflict has so much been owed by so many to so few.”
Unknown to him, his mother Isabel was watching, along with thousands of others, and with her binoculars she recognised his plane by its distinctive nose painting. In horror, she watched as he was pursued and strafed by three Messerschmidts, one of which was piloted by a German air ace, Major Helmut Wick. Elkington was the German’s 18th kill.
The wing fuel tank on Elkington’s Hurricane burst into flames; badly wounded (“no pain, just blood”) and with great difficulty, he baled out at 10,000 feet. The last thing he remembered before losing consciousness was a fine view of Portsmouth below. Seeing that his parachute was drifting out to sea, where he would certainly have drowned, his flight leader Fred Berry used his own slipstream to blow the insensible Elkington towards the beach at West Wittering, where he was rescued and rushed to hospital. There his mother found him, his legs and back so full of shrapnel that even in old age specks of black metal from his burning fuel tank would sometimes emerge in a hot bath.
Elkington was back in the cockpit less than two months later and survived several more narrow escapes during a war career that took him from Europe to the Far East and back again. Fred Berry, his “guardian angel”, was not so lucky. He was killed two weeks after saving Elkington’s life; the Few had a life-expectancy of just 87 flying hours. Sixty years after the war, Elkington managed to locate Berry’s daughter and tell her about her father’s extraordinary feat, of which she had been unaware.
Such exploits now read like tales from an epic past, but they happened within living memory. Only a handful of the Few are still with us, but there are many more who, having joined up as teenagers, are still alive. They too played their part and risked their lives for their country.
Today we can only contemplate the sacrifices of that generation with awe. The challenges we face post-Brexit are formidable, but they cannot begin to compare with those that our forebears faced. The British are not only a nation of shopkeepers, as Steve Rand reminds us, but also a nation of heroes. As Pitt the Younger said just after Trafalgar, at the height of the Napoleonic peril: “England has saved herself by her exertions, and will, as I trust, save Europe by her example.”