When the SNP became Nazi collaborators – CJ Sansom’s boldest novel

With the sad death of CJ Sansom at the age of 71, two events this week seem like serendipitous tributes. The first is the premiere on Wednesday of the new Disney+ adaptation of Sansom’s Tudor-era detective novels featuring the hunch-backed sleuth Matthew Shardlake. The second is Humza Yousaf’s resignation, as a signifier of the colossal mess the Scottish National Party has got itself into. Sansom’s distaste for the SNP was one of the inspirations for what proved to be his most controversial book: Dominion (2012), an alternative-history thriller set in the 1950s.

His Shardlake novels may have occasionally raised historians’ eyebrows by promoting unorthodox theories – Henry VIII’s personality changes being induced by diabetes rather than syphilis, for example – but Sansom was clearly a private man who rarely gave interviews and had no interest in seeking the limelight for its own sake. So everybody was surprised when, with Dominion, he provoked a hoo-hah that saw him decried by an unlikely coalition of complainants ranging from fervent Scots Nats to Enoch Powell’s widow.

Dominion is one of the long line of speculative thrillers – ranging from Len Deighton’s SS-GB to Robert Harris’s Fatherland – that imagine how different the world might have been if the Second World War had followed another cause.

The idea that Germany could have successfully invaded Britain has fallen out of favour with historians since Deighton used it as the basis for SS-GB in the 1970s, so Sansom offered a subtler variation. Dominion imagines that, as was very nearly the case, Lord Halifax became Prime Minister in 1940 instead of Churchill, and posits that after Dunkirk his coalition government would have accepted one of Hitler’s periodically proffered olive branches and withdrawn from the War.

When the book begins in 1952, Hitler is dying of Parkinson’s disease, (which in real life he was already showing suspected symptoms of during the War) and Germany is still bogged down in a seemingly unwinnable conflict with the USSR. The Germans are asserting their weakened authority in any way they can and putting pressure on Britain – now more or less a vassal state – to round up and extradite its Jewish population. Churchill is leading the underground Resistance movement, and the book concerns the race to stop a mentally ill scientist with knowledge of the details of the US nuclear weapons programme from falling into the hands of the Nazis.

Two camps complained about the book for two different reasons. For several Right-leaning commentators, it was the personnel of the coalition government collaborating with the Nazis that was the problem. Nobody demurred at Sansom imagining Oswald Mosley as Home Secretary, but some readers baulked at Marie Stopes as a Ministry of Health adviser on eugenic sterilisation. Several people shared the objections made by Peter Hitchens to the casting of Lord Beaverbrook as Prime Minister (“Wicked he may have been, but not that wicked”) and Rab Butler as Foreign Secretary (“Butler [was] an undoubted appeaser but a loyal and patriotic Englishman. I suspect Mr Sansom is unwilling to accept that the two could be combined.”)

The most strident voices were raised against the idea that Enoch Powell would have served (as Secretary of State for India) in such a government. “Powell was an ardent anti-Nazi from the earliest days even when other Tories were pro-appeasement,” observed the historian Andrew Roberts. “I suspect the author is trying to make some sort of modern-day equivalence between Enoch Powell’s views on immigration and fascism and that is so intellectually debased as to be moronic.” Powell’s widow Pamela called the book an “unacceptable distortion” of her husband’s views: “The idea that he would be in any pro-Nazi government is absolutely ludicrous”.

In the Telegraph, however, the historian and novelist Allan Massie defended Sansom, on the grounds that Hitler would have been likely to promise to leave the Empire alone as long as he could behave as he liked in Europe, and Powell, a fervent Imperialist at that stage of his career (though very much the opposite later on), might have found such a deal acceptable. “Having the Powell of his younger days take the position Sansom assigns to him, in a Government led by the arch-imperialist, Beaverbrook, may be offensive to those who knew, loved or revered him, but is not inherently improbable.”

Sansom was unrepentant – “I maintain his playing such a role was plausible” – and equally bullish in defending his decision to imagine a faction of the Scottish Nationalist Party supporting the collaborationist regime. Brought up in Edinburgh by an English father and a Scottish mother (to both of whom Dominion is dedicated), Sansom hated the idea of Scottish independence, and donated £164,000 to the “Better Together” campaign.

“If this book can persuade even one person of the dangers of nationalist politics in Scotland as in the rest of Europe, and to vote ‘no’ in the referendum on Scottish independence, it will have made the whole labour worthwhile,” Sansom declared. “I make no apology for using the book to stress how I see the SNP, for all the moderate face it currently presents, as deeply dangerous, with no politics in the conventional sense, believing only in the old dream that the unleashing of ‘national spirit’ and ‘national pride’ can solve a country’s problems.”

This was a rare example in Scottish crime fiction of unambiguous political propaganda – many Scottish crime writers are reluctant to even hint at their views on independence in interviews – and brought a stinging rebuke from an SNP spokesman responded: “Sadly, CJ Sansom knows nothing about the SNP or the positive case for independence which embraces Scotland in all of its diversity.”

Whether with the help of Dominion or not, the Nationalists were defeated in the 2014 referendum. But Sansom was not optimistic that the lessons taught by his book would be learned more widely. As he observed in an interview in 2018, when he wrote the book “nationalism seemed to be taking over the world – and so it has.” But whether you agree with his views or not, Dominion can be recommended as its gifted author’s most heartfelt book.