It doesn’t take a particularly brilliant political analyst to understand the last decade of British history as a series of corrosive and seemingly never-ending crises and scandals. From Brexit and Covid to the dog days of Boris Johnson’s wantonly sleazy government and the morbid pageantry of the Queen’s death in 2022, a sense of palpable chaos and decay has long set in to the nation’s increasingly decrepit bones. This is the story and it’s a compelling one, told and retold from across the political spectrum, with differing emphasis and solutions depending on the prophet.
Jon Sopel is the latest to take a stab at melancholic state-of-the-nation polemic. The avuncular ex- BBC lifer’s almost 40-year association with the broadcaster came to an end in 2022, though not before he had made his name across a series of top-shelf briefs and job titles, culminating in a seven-year spell in Washington as North America editor, a role he stepped back from in October 2021. His return to the UK caused a profound shock, occasioned by coming home to a country he now barely understands: a country ravaged by stagnation and decline.
“The book is, I suppose, about Britishness...
written from the perspective of someone who has been out of the country for a few years and can’t quite recognise what he has come back to”. Strangeland isn’t constrained by its supposedly British moorings. Instead, the reader is offered a breezily related stomp through the greatest hits of recent global.
