“Yes, I am full of optimism. We shall march in the sunshine to a better future… And of this I am sure: in the new Greater Britain… women will know their bloody place.”
Robert Muller’s After All, This Is England is a strange and unsettling book. First published in 1965 under the title The Lost Diaries of Albeit Smith, it was reissued two years later in Penguin paperback, then quietly forgotten. You won’t find it in the usual histories of postwar British fiction. It doesn’t appear in surveys of the Angry Young Men or kitchen-sink realism. It predates Till Death Us Do Part and Enoch Powell’s “Rivers of Blood” speech, and yet it manages to predict the tone and content of both. It is a book that has slipped through the cracks of literary history, perhaps because it is too uncomfortable, too precise, and too familiar.
Muller himself is a curious figure. Born in Hamburg in 1925, educated in Vienna and Lambeth, he made a career in British journalism and television, writing plays, screenplays, and a handful of novels. After All, This Is England, a fictional diary of a provincial shopkeeper undergoing what we would now call radicalisation, may be his most powerful work, and certainly his most dangerous. That it hasn’t been reprinted in over half a century is baffling. That it hasn’t been rediscovered in our current moment is worse.
The novel, presented as a found document, begins innocuously. Bert Smith, grocer and family man, is urged by his therapist to keep a diary. He writes about his shop, his children, his headaches, his love of order. He lists things: items to stock, chores to do, complaints to raise. The writing is neat, clipped. It reads, at first, like a man trying very hard to sound normal. But something is off from the start. The diary becomes not just a record, but a confessional. His “little weakness”—a euphemism he never elaborates—is voyeurism. But the real weakness, the one the book lays bare, is political.
“It did me good to be out and about in the fine spring air… Washed away all unclean thoughts of my little weakness… I seem to have cured myself through political action.”
Bert is, in the parlance of the day, “sound.” He believes in discipline, the bomb, the sanctity of the family. He loathes his son’s lefty friends, his wife’s amateur dramatics, and most of all, the immigrants who increasingly appear in the town. A Black customer eats a pear in the shop and Bert recoils: “They’re just not like us, not really civilised.” At first the racism feels incidental, a background hum. But as the entries accumulate, it becomes clear these resentments are the ideological tissue of something far larger.
The transformation is gradual but unmistakable. Bert moves from nostalgic reveries about the mahogany shelves, green lampshades and butter-clappers of his father’s old shop, now replaced by the sterile efficiencies of Summer Products—to an almost visceral aversion to the smell of cheese, which he begins to regard as a personal affront. What begins as distaste becomes disgust, not just for products but for people: the “big buck nigger” who touches the bacon, the foreign wholesaler peddling tinned meat from Hungary, the Jewish shopkeepers next door with their pink-painted storefront. When the British Reform Party is launched—by a breakaway Conservative MP and a charismatic demagogue—Bert is already nodding along. By the time the Reform Party merges into the broader British Movement, he’s not just on board. He’s taking minutes. There are meetings, leaflets, a signed letter from “the Leader.” What started as diary therapy becomes a ledger of purification.
There are moments, especially in the middle of the book, when it’s hard to tell who Bert is writing to. Himself? The Movement? Some imagined England yet to come? The diary isn’t just a record, it becomes a staging ground for restoration. Not of democracy, or decency, or anything so abstract, but of the world as he remembers it: stable, English, and his.
What begins as a diary ends, by the final chapters, as a manifesto. The tone doesn’t change, Muller never breaks character, but the content hardens. Bert is groomed by men with medals and titles; he’s installed as the Seabourne branch secretary. “We are all local people here,” one tells him. “We must never give potential supporters the impression that we’re directed from some remote central office in London.” The line could pass for a Reform UK press release.
The Movement’s platform rests on two foundations: racial purity and national rebirth. One speaker, to enthusiastic applause, calls for Britain to “bring the white countries of the Empire into a dynamic United White Federation,” and demands “a full-scale deportation of racially inferior elements.” This isn’t the private bile of a provincial grocer. It’s a programme, with slogans, posters, and spreadsheets. The Movement promises to “cut like a sword through the knot of parliamentary sloth.” Bert volunteers to help sharpen it.
There’s no catharsis, no reckoning. Ronnie, his son, vanishes from the narrative. Margaret, his wife, remains remote. But Bert no longer needs them. The Movement gives him what the shop, the marriage, the doctor never could: purpose, a title, and somewhere to put the blame. His final lists, always the lists, now include names of potential sympathisers, tasks for the next rally, leaflets to distribute. He files the Leader’s letter next to his father’s inventory books, as though the two were part of the same national tradition.
“We do not need to take power by force… It will be possible for us to assume power by purely constitutional means… We may have to give destiny a gentle kick in the pants from time to time—just to hurry it up a little.”
Muller is careful never to parody him. The prose stays dry, exact. The horror comes not from what is said, but from how reasonable it all sounds. Bert doesn’t rave. He itemises. He straightens the edge of the page.
Reading it now, in the age of Farage and Reform UK, it is impossible not to hear the echo. Bert is not deranged. He’s recognisable. He worries about immigration, takes pride in the flag, wants someone to tell people what to do for their own good—a paraphrase, but only just. He doesn’t oppose democracy; he simply thinks it’s no longer working properly. He wants a leader who can clear things up. He finds one. By the end, he’s no longer confused. He’s efficient.
Muller understood, well before it became fashionable to say so, that English fascism wouldn’t arrive in jackboots but in brogues. Or more precisely: in slippers. It wouldn’t march. It would shuffle. It wouldn’t shout. It would tut. The country wouldn’t fall to dictatorship. It would tidy its way there, one committee meeting at a time.
“We do not need to take power by force… It will be possible for us to assume power by purely constitutional means… We may have to give destiny a gentle kick in the pants from time to time—just to hurry it up a little.”
After All, This Is England is not just satire. It is something more uncomfortable: a novel that shows what fascism looks like before it calls itself by name. That it was published in 1965 and reads like a diary from 2025 is chilling. That it isn’t better known is worse.
When Trump was elected, Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here saw a renaissance in sales. Americans turned to fiction to understand what their institutions had failed to prevent. If Farage comes close to power, After All, This Is England should be our wake-up call, not because it tells us what could happen, but because it shows what already has.
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