The degree of respect which England harbours for its exceptional individuals can be precisely measured: by the amount of space dedicated to their obituary in the media after they die. The monarch (and select members of the royal family) are in a category of their own. For the remainder, half a page in the London Times is an honour. A whole print page is a great honour. And in the case of the bestselling historian and today (at the age of 78) most sought-after security commentator Max Hastings, we can (hopefully in the distant future) count with four, perhaps even six, celebratory pages.
This embodiment of the English gentleman achieved his incomparable standing with the help of the adjective ‘brutal.’ He is brutally honest, brutally fearless, brutally hard-working and brutally intransigent towards villains. Due to his research on modern warfare for more than half a century, he has become a sought-out commentator on the war in Ukraine. In the summer of 2022, Max Hastings shocked islanders with a simple declaration: “it is most likely that in the near future, we will also have to fight against the Russians.” But after two years of bleak news, both Europe and Britain are bored of the war in Ukraine. We want peace and cheap electricity. My interview with Max Hastings in October 2024 couldn’t start without drawing parallels with 1938 (but fear not, dear reader; not even Max thinks the West is lost).
***
I have spent more than a quarter of a century in England, in all its layers of society. As a result, I often fall prey to the feeling that I know it pretty well.
But then one morning I find myself in Chelsea, one of the most affluent boroughs of London, before a picturesque, dazzlingly white rural building. In 1890, a group of starving painters founded a club here, which to this day is called the Arts Club. I ring the bell to meet the man who modernised The Daily Telegraph, and described hell and human suffering in modern-day wars in more than thirty books. A man for whom the Queen Mother had a weakness, and whose presence was requested by Princess Diana at night and in far-flung places (in the book Editor, he described how adeptly the most charismatic woman in the world wrapped him around her little finger; it helped that Max openly hated Prince Charles at the time).
English clubs are usually located in grand palaces on Pall Mall, all marble, heavy velvet drapes and a (heavily used) wine cellar in the basement. Their pompous premises, clad with rare wooden panels, have been made famous around the world through Netflix series about the lives of aristocrats from the past two centuries.
This picturesque place with a giant billiard table standing on eight carved oak legs is almost the opposite of a ‘normal’ English club. Max Hastings saved the building together with some friends: they simply bought it, repaired it, and now (without any modern renovations) it serves as a handy meeting place. It is only a stone’s throw from the London flat where he and his second wife Penny entertain friends when they come from their countryside abode to the metropolis.
The English elite consider the art of conversation at candlelight dinners to be a skill, which should give the air of being carefree and playful; but they take it even more seriously than cricket. And just like in any other sport, the most coveted element is taking part in a friendly match with a living legend. To belong to the elite means to still be in the picture, to be able to elegantly disagree and ideally, to humorously put your neighbour in their place with the opposite point of view. The sentence “as Max Hastings told me yesterday…” has a comparable effect on an English person like if you pointed from the window of a block of flats to a car amidst a sea of Škodas back home in the 80s: “that new Mercedes is mine.”
“But Brexiteers aren’t allowed in our house,” Hastings later tells me, explaining why they cut off part of their friends and acquaintances: “they complain and say Penny and I are behaving like children. But for me it’s a question of principle. I feel like a European and show respect to other nationalities. These people stole our future.”
His intransigence is unusual for England. But it’s not Hastings who loses out because of it. When I set off for the interview in the morning, my son greets me with unusual politeness. He has read at least six of Hastings’ books (which are rarely shorter than eight hundred pages), and for the first time is witnessing his mother do something which can be (by an eighteen-year-old’s standards) taken seriously.
***
The Jamaican bar tender at the Chelsea Arts Club smiles from behind the bar; soon it becomes apparent how vigilant he is. Whenever anyone reaches for their phone, he immediately pounces on them; one of the few rules is a complete phone ban inside the club. When at last an incredibly tall figure in a Tesil blazer appears, I leap from the leather armchair and playfully salute them. Why not? After all, he invited me to visit them in Berkshire, we’ve exchanged countless emails, and address one another with ‘dear Anastazie’ and ‘dear Max.’ “How do you do?” The great Max Hastings says, unsmiling.
What the fuck?! I panic and mumble an incoherent response. Seriously? How do you do? We all of course know the courteous line, which nowadays is only found in Agatha Christie’s early detective novels. I last used it twenty years ago when I was introduced by British diplomats in Washington at a celebration for the Queen’s birthday. Will I manage to sit through the interview, or does another circle of hell await me? Hastings doesn’t waste a second and has already disappeared into the garden outside. There is still blossom at the end of October. Although we are both avid gardeners, not a word is pronounced regarding the surrounding beauty. You have to grab his attention, I was advised. We had barely sat on the hard garden benches when I fired a question, “Has Europe really gone back to 1938?”
“There are very real parallels with 1938, I’m afraid. In the 1930s, at least Winston Churchill was constantly making speeches and delivering warnings. Today, there is no political leader of comparable stature in Western Europe doing so. Even my good friend and English statesman Michael Heseltine – and we share common views about Europe, about all these things – said to me, “if I was still in government, I wouldn’t be spending more money on defence. If Russians are incapable of achieving absolute victory over Ukraine, then what are the chances of them threatening NATO?” I am terribly depressed that a statesman whom I admire should hold those views. To see the courage of Ukrainians in the face of aggression, in contrast with the relative lack of support they’ve received from the West…”
This historian, who has documented modern wars for more than half a century, fears that Putin bet correctly that the West never lasts long fighting. At the start of the conflict, voters are compassionate, willing to tighten their belts; but they soon lose interest in the war.
“Trump is right to say that Europeans were freeloading on the US for many, many years on defence and security. Irrespective of who gets into the White House, we need to be able to arm ourselves and to be capable to defend ourselves against aggression. Some people say today that it was naive to ever hope for Russians to join the European club. I think it was absolutely right to try to reach out to Russia after the end of the Cold War and try to establish what one might call a ‘normal’ relationship. But we are adversaries now.”
Q: You don’t always agree with others on Ukraine, do you?
“One stupid thing that was said after the invasion of Ukraine was: “this is Putin’s war, not Russia’s war.” I was always aware – because I have done research for my books in Russia – of how much dislike and resentment of the West there is in Russia. Not just in the Kremlin, but also among Russian people. And so I always thought it was essential that at big anniversaries, we were represented at the highest level, to show our appreciation for what Russia had done.”
For a long time, no one in Britain minded when the money of post-Soviet oligarchs turned the capital city into ‘Londongrad.’ At the same time, the Brits almost wiped out the memory of Russian contributions to the Second World War: in film, literature, and journalism, it was predominantly the English and the Americans who saved the world from fascism. Max Hastings is one of the few who has justly mapped the sacrifices and contributions of Russian soldiers. On the other hand, he adds that Russians themselves have a substantially distorted view on their history during the Second World War. They deny that Stalin and Hitler got along marvellously before the war…
“Almost no Russians know or recognise that before June 1941, Russia was Hitler’s ally – providing fuel for Luftwaffe aircraft to bomb London. But there is no doubt that Washington’s triumphalism after the end of the Cold War was a disaster. Americans especially, but all of us should reach out to Russians more, try harder. To help Russians. Maybe democratic institutions just didn’t or couldn’t exist to make it possible, but we should make an attempt. But now we are where we are and there is no doubt that we are in an adversarial relationship with Russia. This is a long-term issue; there is colossal Russian resentment of our success and their failure. I often use the figure of speech that Russia can’t make an electrical toaster that anyone would wish to buy. And Russians have only three things to export: oil, gas, and extreme violence. This is what we are dealing with. There is – not an immediate possibility – but a strategic one over a period of years that Russians may try to regain Baltic states, for example. And we must be very aware of what is called multidomain risk: the Russians not launching a direct attack with tanks across the border, but working through all the usual multiple means of disinformation to undermine governments of Baltic states, potentially leading to armed aggression. And these are very real risks.”
Q: In Europe we‘ve become too comfortable, too lazy, too soft…
“The only risks that people in Western Europe care about today are threats to their economy, to their livelihood and of course – immigration. Members of this club are intelligent people, but I doubt very much whether any of them know that the reason why the Wagner Group is working to destabilise the Sahel is because Russians see it as a strategic interest to promote migration up here to destabilise Europe. Everybody in the security world on both sides of the Atlantic is aware of this, but nobody in the wider world is. People seem almost oblivious of all this going on around them.”
Q: You’ve reported on more than sixty conflicts and researched people’s behaviour leading up to wars. Being oblivious – is it new?
“I am very fond of talking about what I call the ‘bomb problem.’ The ‘bomb problem’ goes back to the winter of 1939; an organisation called Mass Observation, which was an early form of opinion polling, conducted an opinion poll in November 1939 about people’s attitudes towards the war. A large number responded that they couldn’t understand why we were going on with the war, and they hoped that some sort of peace would be sorted out with Hitler sooner rather than later. Because we went to war to save Poland, and Poland was gone. British and French armies were confronting Germans in France and nothing much was happening. People wanted to return to what they called ‘normality’. And this applied specifically to the City of London and to big financial people. They wanted some deal to end this (what they considered) nonsense, and this only changed in the summer of 1940, when Hitler made (what I consider) one of his biggest mistakes by attacking Britain. If he’d just left us to stew, after he conquered France, we lacked any military power to intervene on the continent and support for Churchill was very uncertain. By starting to bomb Britain, by attacking it from the air, Hitler did us a great favour. Once bombs started falling, everybody understood that there were only two choices, and one of them was to surrender.”
Q: Are you saying there is no hope for Germans and others to wake up?
“You never say there is no hope; it’s not grown up to ever say there is no hope. Especially not to our children. We have a huge task to explain to the public in the absence of bombs falling – when everybody is sitting and having a nice lunch – why they should be prepared to make big sacrifices. In order to keep Ukraine going, to resist Russia and so on. There is a strong element of fear. They are very nervous that if we pursue in Putin’s terms to escalate, Putin may start to take direct actions, deniable actions against the West: for example, by attacking undersea communications and pipelines, and against which I am being very reliably told we have virtually no reliable systems of detection. If Putin does attack pipelines or communications, it would be very hard to attribute direct blame. Everyone knows this in the west, and they don’t want to frighten the bear. Not more than he is already. This is not noble, or courageous. But it’s not too late; we only have to awaken to the real threat out there. My generation is the most privileged in history; we lived in peace, in untold prosperity. But peace has to be fought for and defended. The problem is that politicians don’t see themselves as having a popular mandate, and to some degree it’s their fault. They haven’t talked to their people in a grownup way, or attempted to educate their people about what is going on. That lack of leadership is one thing I was talking about during lunch last week with Michael Heseltine: he was ruminating about the quality of people in politics around the world. And he said, “I do wish there would be more people who really care about something else than just themselves.” Donald Trump cares about nothing but himself, Boris Johnson cares about nothing but himself, Bibi Netanyahu cares about nothing but himself. Where are the politicians of the new generation who will convince people that politicians are not just in it for themselves?”
Q: No one wants to join the army, no one wants to hear about danger; do we really need another war to wake us up?
“Please – never think that I am arguing that the war is good for us. There is a difference between saying war is good for us, and saying sometimes it’s essential to fight. To show willingness.”
Q: You see parallels between Ukraine and the war in Korea. In what sense?
“I think it was absolutely right to fight in Korea. That was a dreadfully unpopular war. And there is a parallel with now, regarding the timescale. Korea started in June 1950 and Harry Truman acted very courageously by committing American troops. The reason that Truman had not stood again in the 1952 election and Eisenhower became president is because Truman knew he would lose. Because American people were bored with Korea and they were saying, “why are we putting up with being humiliated at enormous cost by these wretched Chinese laundry men when we have the atomic bomb? Why aren’t we using our real power to end this nonsense?” Eisenhower was an iconic figure, people believed he would end the war and so he did. Unfortunately, at that point, the military situation was strong enough they were able to end the war more or less on the terms on which the war started.
What they had not done, which was what McCarthy and others wanted, was to liberate (others would say conquer) North Korea. And I interviewed a lot of American soldiers of that era, and they were all bitterly disappointed with the end of the Korean War, because they hadn’t won. What they didn’t realise was that actually not that many wars end in victory. And the Second World War in a nuclear age was rather an exception than a rule. In 2022, I wrote in The Times (and incurred a lot of criticism) that I was afraid that the war in Ukraine would end in a ‘dirty deal.’ Several letter writers wrote in the strongest terms, saying Max Hastings is defeatist. I was only writing as a historian. And I still think that a dirty deal is what we are going to get.”
Q: How much influence does Britain still have in Europe?
“We can only talk about defence in the European context. Starmer is obviously trying to build bridges with Europe regarding defence. The question I am not sure about is whether you can do that effectively when we are not in the European Union. I have my doubts. If we would make the argument for more spending from inside, we might have more influence. From outside we have very little.”
Q: Johnson’s proclamation, “we will have our cake and we will eat it!” still echoes in the corridors of Brussels. Is there any chance that Boris Johnson is coming back?
“I am nervous that he may, he is unquestionably a charismatic politician. He is what we call a snake oil salesman. I remember a friend of mine some years ago, when I was complaining about lies being told (probably by Johnson), said, almost pityingly: “Max, when will you understand that we are in the post truth age?” And of course, ten years on, one recognises that Trump is riding back to the White House on a tidal wave of lies. None of us ever expected the world in which social media would lead people to choose news sources which wouldn’t tell them anything they don’t want to hear. This is something none of us ever bargained for. When the internet started, everybody expected it to empower democracy and freedom around the world. Of course, it hasn’t. It corrupted information sources. Some of us are still striving to grope for the truth, but now you have hundreds of millions of people around the world who are either denied access to the truth, as in Russia or China, or who just prefer to turn their back on the version of the truth they don’t like. We have to fight this.”
Q: At the NATO summit in Warsaw, talking to military people, I found them intelligent, educated and sensible. But German generals couldn’t stop laughing when I told them that they need to ramp up defence spending to 2 % of their GDP…
“The German military are pretty sensible, and also in the most despair getting political support. I’ll be surprised if there will even be significantly more money for defence in the English budget. The situation is extremely serious, there is a huge job of education to be done; but the world is still here and the sky hasn’t fallen in, therefore we must try harder. Those of us who care passionately about these things. That’s all. In the Cold War era, credible defence was regarded as a mandatory cost to bear; money had to be found. Nowadays, defence is regarded as an optional extra. Because politicians feel that they won’t get any thanks at all from the electorate.”
Q: What’s the solution?
“Never use the word ‘solution!’ The word ‘solution’ should be banned. Difficult problems are not susceptible to solutions. And anybody who says there is a solution to this problem or to the Middle East is talking nonsense. What we all need to discuss in grownup conversations is how to manage difficult problems. We have to keep shouting from the rooftops. If Ukraine is betrayed, which I think is about to happen, we, the Europeans will bear most of the blame. Americans were the ones who delivered overwhelming amounts of help, and this is our continent. In the 1950s it was perfectly reasonable to expect Americans to take the strain because we were ruined by the war. Today, we are not quite as prosperous as the US, but we are still relatively prosperous. We need to get serious.”
Q: Bestial brutality, atrocities in Ukraine today – is the dark side of humans forever?
“We grew up believing that only Germans, and explicitly, only Nazis, did these terrible things to other people. But we discovered in our own time that if they are authorised to do so, most people can do ghastly things to their fellow men and (especially) women. I used to think that my job was to write about soldiers. But when I was a young correspondent abroad, I saw what it was like for women and children far away, when you are at the mercy of a teenager with a gun, who can make you do anything. Rape is only the least of it; you can torture people, you can kill them. You have license to do this. Some of my colleagues used to think that only Americans behaved like that in Vietnam. Americans behaved badly in Vietnam, but so did a whole lot of other people. It’s so hard to awaken people, and we were very lucky in the 1940s that we had Churchill. At the moment we are short on Churchills.”
Q: Is there intellectual vigour in military ranks?
“I am talking all the time to highly intelligent soldiers. In fact, not all of them British. I was sitting not so long ago next to the head of the Norwegian Armed Forces. He would agree with everything we were just talking about. There certainly is an intellectual vigour, but they are very much a separate caste, the military. They don’t have much power.”
My attempt at light-heartedness fell flat at the start of the meeting, so I make a final attempt: we need a putsch. Let’s organise it!
This time, Max bursts out laughing. He offers that the garden we’re sitting in is beautiful now, but incredible in the summer. Before I have the chance to look around, he’s already striding indoors; a source he wants to question is waiting for him. I thank him in confusion. I think I got it.
I finally understand how he maintains his relevance and intellectual youthfulness around the corner from eighty years of age. His intransigence gives him the flair of a teenager’s self-awareness, which is elevated above all things superficial. Even in his middle age, he was dubbed ‘wild Max.’ Most of us are clear on what is and what isn’t right. What is and what isn’t ‘noble.’ But Hastings is one of the few who strictly abide by it.
This article appeared in the seventh issue of the print magazine N&N – Noble Notes
