Letter: I Will Wait to See Myself Feature in the Film

Published on: 21 Apr, 2026
Updated on: 21 Apr, 2026

From David Roberts

In response to: Greenham Common – “It’s Like Nothing That’s Ever Happened Before”

In an odd way, I was sort-of involved with Greenham Common. As a desk officer in the Foreign Office’s arms control department, it was my job to draft replies, from either officials or ministers, to the hundreds of letters that came in weekly about it.

This was pre-internet, of course, and it was an absolute pain. But I’m proud to say that, unlike emails today, every single letter got a prompt and proper answer. There were heaps of MPs’ questions and parliamentary debates to deal with too, of course.

Having said that, I still haven’t a clue what Greenham Common was really all about, or what it actually achieved. Ostensibly, the aim was to change the Thatcher government’s policy on nuclear arms.

In this it failed completely and may even have had the opposite effect. But its wider significance seems to have been as a kind of identity-building anarcho-leftist/feminist love fest. As such, it seems to fill the historical gap between CND, which fizzled out in the early ’60s, and the anti-Iraq war protests.

From time to time, phenomena like these seem to provide a lot of otherwise aimless souls with a feeling of sub-cultural belonging that lends itself, years later, to shameless myth-making.

I hope Eleanor’s novel becomes a best-seller but I don’t feel much urge to read it. I think I’ll wait for the inevitable feel-good Brit movie, starring all our national-treasure luvvies. Full Monty meets Chariots of Fire meets Calendar Girls, kind of thing. An original sub-plot might feature a young Foreign Office desk officer.