They were never going to like it, but the reaction of the cultural right to Danny Boyle's brilliant Olympics pageant speaks volumes about their incompatibility with modern Britain.
Deploying his trademark demagoguery, the Cannock Chase MP Aidan Burley summed it up best when he called for an end to the show's "leftie, multicultural crap" and asked for some Red Arrows and Shakespeare instead. Other angry tweeters thought it a "£27m party political broadcast" for the Labour party.
Of course it was polemical, but had the critics mulled on it a little longer they would also have discovered some gently conservative elements to the triptych. Indeed, it was the spirit of the quintessentially English interwar writer JB Priestley that seemed to hover over Boyle's wonderful, iconoclastic, urgent and era-defining Olympics pageant.
In his 1934 work English Journey, Priestley spoke of three Englands: the so-called "real, enduring England", which spoke to Boyle's bucolic "Jerusalem" opening with its maypoles and cricket, maids and mummery.
Then the second England of the industrial revolution that "had found a green and pleasant land and had left a wilderness of dirty bricks", which gave licence to the smoke stacks bursting through the Stratford stadium. And what better to way to round it off than by having an Olympic ring smelted in the workshop of the world?
In the interrelationship between the first and second Englands there was also much that spoke to George Orwell's description of a Britain bound by "solid breakfasts and gloomy Sundays, smoky towns and winding roads, green fields and red pillar boxes". This was the England that the previous Tory prime minister, John Major, seemed to find so alluring – but that was a gentler conservatism.
Finally, there was Priestley's third England, modern England, which in the 1930s he saw among "giant cinemas and dance-halls and cafes", but Boyle locates in an east London house party. And while Priestley thought it cheap and tacky, Boyle adores the technology and mobility (social and racial) of contemporary Britain.
For this was about Britain, not just England, and so our shared icons of the National Health Service and monarchy, of film and music, were rightly celebrated. There was the armed forces and the union flag, a bow to the Chelsea pensioners and the poppies of the first world war. But also Gregory's Girl and the BBC. Indeed, I thought it the most persuasive cultural case for the union made in a generation. Something I would have thought Tories would applaud.
What they really didn't like was the imagery of the CND and the NHS (both of which Priestley was equally supportive of), or maybe the Jarrow marchers and Windrush. But these are part of the cultural ecology of contemporary Britain. It is sometimes said that while the right has won the economic arguments, the left took victory in the culture wars. So, yes, here was our march past.
What Boyle's ceremony did was to visualise the promise the bid had always been based upon: the reality of a new Britain unshackled from its imperial past. From the heart of the East End, where the riches of Empire had once flowed into the docklands, Boyle provided a template of modern, vibrant, multicultural Britain with all its energy and vulgarity. The director who had chosen another site of British imperialism – Mumbai's Victoria Terminus – to introduce a new India to the world in his film Slumdog Millionaire had done it again with his home nation.
The vehicle for Boyle's narrative was the "liquid history" of the river Thames, flowing from its spring down to Stratford (with David Beckham as pilot). But what a different history to that offered by the Thames two months ago, when the jubilee flotilla celebrated the Queen's public service but also codified a staid and nostalgic national identity. This was always the fear when that ghastly doubledecker bus had appeared in Beijing. By contrast, Boyle's Britain ebbed and flowed, succeeded and failed in equal measures, but offered an attractively contradictory, complicated and above all creative conception of these Isles of Wonder.
