Philip Larkin made only one intervention in the Middle East. The 1969 poem “Homage to a Government” was inspired by the closure of the British base in Aden (now part of Yemen), which occurred in 1967 under Harold Wilson’s first government. But this was only one episode in a saga of withdrawal and disarray: spending cuts, the devaluation of the pound and the additional closure of all those bases found, in Rudyard Kipling’s phrase, “east of Suez” – Malaysia, Singapore, the Maldives, the Persian Gulf. In this strange, terminal mood, Larkin produced this mundane and somber 18-liner. It’s not his best – it sounds more like a right-wing nursery rhyme he’s left out to his pen pals than a finished work. However, he collected it in the 1974 volume High windows. If he were a songwriter, we’d call it an album track:
Next year we will bring all the soldiers home
For lack of money, and everything is fine.
The places they guarded or kept in order,
They must protect themselves and keep themselves tidy
We want money for ourselves at home
Instead of work. And that’s okay.
The poem is saved in the last stanza by a lovely Larkinesque composition: “Statues… standing in the same / Tree-choked squares.” Still, he can’t resist the sarcasm of the last couplet: “Our children won’t know it’s another country./All we can hope to leave now is money.” And while not a great work of literature, the verse has biographical, political and psychic insights.
Larkin, for his part, could not understand what he was expressing—either outright chauvinism or jaded stoicism. He told an interviewer: “That poem has been quoted in several books as a sort of symbol of British withdrawal from a world role. I don’t mind bringing the troops home if we decided it was the best thing in the whole world, but to bring them home simply because we couldn’t afford to keep them there seemed a terrible humiliation.” For better or worse, Larkin speaks for England. In its generic nostalgia, bleak bewilderment and nagging sense of smoldering pride, it captured the plight of a nation that can’t decide if it’s a world power – or even if it wants to be.
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If I could speak to the poor old man, I would have good news for him. Britain never backed down from East Suez, as recent years have made abundantly clear. Leave aside the invasion of Iraq and the long-term occupation of Afghanistan by British troops. In 2021, Boris Johnson’s government signed the Aukus pact, an alliance with Australia and the US that agreed to “promote a free and open Indo-Pacific that is secure and stable”. Keir Starmer’s government has spent the past 18 months scandalizing itself over negotiations over the sovereignty of an archipelago in the Indian Ocean. The Royal Air Force flew almost daily surveillance flights over Gaza throughout Israel’s war. And, most importantly: in March 2024, Anne, Princess Royal, opened the Donnelly Lines facility at Al Minhad Air Base in the United Arab Emirates. The base joined the existing British presence in Oman and Bahrain, the latter home to the UK’s naval support facility. It dates back to 1935, but was reopened permanently in 2018 by former Prince Andrew, and houses up to 500 staff. On March 7, RAF Typhoon jets deployed from RAF Coningsby to Dukhan Air Base in Qatar, and are aloft as I write, ready to kill those who threaten Britain’s interests.
Larkin could not understand why he felt sad about Britain withdrawing from her posts. There are clear historical reasons: Larkin was born in the year when the empire reached its territorial zenith (he never doubts that British troops “guarded, or regularly guarded”), and he came of age in its declining years. Under certain conditions, he was capable of reacting to imperial disintegration in a way comparable to Enoch Powell (“Powell for Prime Minister” Larkin wrote to a friend a year after the politician’s speech “Rivers of Blood”), drawing on a psychological-political core of deep reaction.
But he never imitated Powell’s didacticism, nor his spitting. It is a register of English competitive instincts, local and global, centrifugal and centripetal, Little England and Great Britain. And his tone is vague and detached, that of a newspaper reader or newsletter tracker: an observer of global affairs rather than a participant or laureate of them (as, for example, Kipling was). In its commitments and worldview, every British government since Wilson and since Larkin’s poem has weighed the same choice.
Have you thought – ever, or hardly – about the Donnelly Lines facility? Because Britain expanded its military presence in the Persian Gulf just two years ago, deploying troops to the Middle East under royal banner? Did you vote for it? Have you thought about the British sovereign territory on the island of Cyprus – admittedly just west of Suez, but still a full 98 square miles and home to 4,000 British personnel? Have you thought about the RAF’s anti-Islamic State missions still going on in the Middle East, with British and French jets striking an underground weapons depot in Syria in January this year? And – on a grand scale of trade and migration – have you thought about the 300,000 British nationals spread across the Gulf, the footprint of an epic partnership between British business and the region?
It is these interests that the Labor Party is trying to protect. Some of them are just facts of life. “He used to work in Saudi Arabia,” my mum might say of an overly cozy neighbour, and Dubai and the UAE are part of a rotation not just for tax-dodging influencers, but also for an upper caste of sellers who do well abroad. France has historically been much more relaxed about its continued empire than we are (though it is now being hit by a belated secession, with Niger, Mali and Burkina Faso leaving France and towards Russia).
But I still don’t think it’s an admission of world shyness to admit that these realities and decisions don’t bother most of the country. Only in London and its economic annexes – Oxford, Cambridge, Edinburgh – do you really retain a sense of Britain as a country with international interests or appeal.
Foreign policy remains, to some extent, the most aristocratic aspect of modern democratic governance. The two British foreign policy scandals of our time – the Chagos affair for the right and the Gaza war for the left – can be understood together as instances when British aristocratic principles (respect for international law and support for Israel) were subjected to democratic scrutiny.
The three animating forces of Larkin’s poem – money, pride and humiliation – have all appeared in the British debate over the war in Iran. Money – we have already cut the foreign aid budget to fund defence, and some influential commentators are using this conflict to argue that we should cut welfare to facilitate the arms industry. Pride – Tony Blair chided Britain for not joining the US war from the start, saying: “If they are your ally and an indispensable cornerstone of your security… you better turn up when they want you.” And the humiliation – the Royal Navy has been unable to defend its bases in Cyprus from Iranian drones (“Its last minesweeper pulled home to save money,” it reported Times on March 14). Meanwhile, allies in the Persian Gulf have complained about Britain’s slow response to the war, even as Donald Trump directly undercut Britain’s self-image when he said Starmer was “no Churchill” after he (initially) refused US access to British bases.
The Starmer government has since become a silent participant in the war. American special forces flew from RAF Mildenhall – in the skies over Suffolk, that is; did anyone out there know this was happening? – and in an unknown location on March 12. British military officers have traveled to Washington DC to help with the plan to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. However, our two main political parties have, in popular terms, become parties of isolation. Zack Polanski’s Greens are predictably peaceful, but Reform has produced the sharpest propaganda from the conflict: while Labor ministers fly to the Middle East, Robert Jenrick and Nigel Farage pose at the petrol pump, price-per-litre politics. The reversal of the reform was surprising: after briefly enjoying the opportunity to say “regime change” in the explosion – and still cheering the American effort – Farage has now remarked that “if we can’t protect Cyprus, let’s not get involved in another foreign war”. It was a clever trick. Centripetal and centrifugal have never been so far apart in British political discussion. In January, as Starmer did his best to protect Greenland from US annexation, thousands of families in Kent and Sussex were left without water.
Only the Labor Party has allowed itself to get stuck in Larkin’s mess – the party of the status quo, unable to clarify whether the war is brave or expensive or immoral or anachronistic. It is caught in a version of the foreign policy dilemma that has plagued the British ruling class since its decline became apparent in the late sixties and early seventies. As Anton Jäger recently wrote in New York Timesusing Britain’s response to the decline as a cautionary tale: “In the postwar world, as its empire crumbled, the country saw two paths forward. It could serve as a kind of servant to the United States, tying its economy and foreign policy to American imperatives. Or it could become a kind of greater Sweden, while also maintaining a basis of close diplomatic autonomy behind its statehood and industrial strife, Britain chose the first path, giving up national independence for the special relationship.”
Larkin’s luxury was to articulate his entanglement as a poem, not to send soldiers on a protected quest to sort it out. As the broadsheets of Britain talk us into war, even as the “special relationship” is noted in the same opinion pages, we must remember what memories and neuroses their talk is based on. Larkin noted, in his more cautious middle stanza: “Places are far away, not here / What’s all right, and from what we hear / The soldiers there only made trouble.”
(Further reading: The intellectual suicide of Matt Goodwin)
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This article appears in the March 25, 2026 issue of the New Statesman, Easter special
