Letter from Berlin

Counterfactual history has something of a fraught reputation. It is by no means new. In the 1931 book of essays If It Had Happened Otherwise, for example, authors including Winston Churchill speculated on such scenarios as: "If Napoleon Had Escaped to America", "If the General Strike Had Succeeded", "If the Moors in Spain Had Won", and the yet more fanciful "If Byron Had Become King of Greece". This little-remembered book from almost a century ago sheds some light on the character of the genre itself: its chapters evoke moments of fate, in which someone did or did not take a gamble, and in which the odds were played, for better or worse. They all exude a whiff of the roulette wheel. That is what makes counterfactuals so seductive. We see it too in contemporary British politics, where the tumult of the past decade has stirred up a new cottage industry of counterfactual histories. What if John Smith had not died in 1994? What if David Miliband had defeated Ed Miliband in the 2010 Labour leadership election? What if Michael Gove had not brought down Boris Johnson's Conservative leadership bid in 2016? In his 2021 book The Prime Ministers We Never Had, the journalist Steve Richards imagines universes in which Denis Healey and Michael Heseltine made it to io Downing Street. It all speaks of a similar impulse to question and challenge the past. Arguably the most baroque Westminster "what if?" takes as its starting point the night in February 2012 when the Labour MP Eric Joyce got into a brawl in a parliament bar. That led to a new selection in his seat of Falkirk that was plagued with claims of union vote-rigging, which caused Labour to adopt a new leadership election model. This resulted in 2015 in the election as leader of Jeremy Corbyn, whose own ambivalence about the EU contributed to the vote for Brexit in 2016, which in turn weakened the Western alliance. What if Joyce had not thumped someone 11 years ago? Would the course of history have been different? Just as the flutter of a butterfly's wing on one side of the world can trigger a hurricane on another continent, might one Scottish Labour MP having a quiet one have led to a more cohesive West today?