Lost, just lost

Rory Stewart is an exceptionally well-travelled man, an Ibn Battuta or Marco Polo of our our times.  The latter is especially appropriate because the the Venetian was given a place in the government of Kublai Khan while Mr Stewart was made essentially a pro-consul of British-occupied Iraq at the age of 30.  To put it into comparison, I'm 31.  Given how it turned out with the USA having to bail out the British in Basra, would I have done worse?  To that Stewart might cavil, "Could you have done any better?"  It brings to mind the words of the Byzantine Emperor Phocas - who has plunged the continuation of Rome into chaos and brought it to the edge of extinction - to his successor and the man who deposed him, Heraclius.  As John Julius Norwich says, "it was a fair question but not one to inspire clemency."  Phocas met his deserved end and Heraclius went onto save the Empire, only to lose much of it again when the Arabs began their onslaught.
Just as I am no Heraclius (by a long chalk), Stewart is no Phocas.  The Eton-educated son of a diplomat now makes a living in the somewhat more humdrum surroundings of Penrith in Cumbria as a member of parliament - that's when he isn't comparing his constituents to 'yokels', with the medicine of 'the darkened room' and holding their trousers up with twine as signs of how 'primitive' they are.  Now he gets a puff piece from the BBC (and on 2 no less rather than 4) to essentially come up with a bit of blarney about how the trunk of the island of Great Britain is a 'Mittelland' between the open plains of the south and the unforgiving highlands of the north - Border Country: The Story of Britain's Lost Middleland.  For all it's worth, it would make more sense to talk about Middle Earth (JRR Tolkien had a fascinating grasp of geopolitics).  It's just as well Stewart is on the Irish Sea side of the Pennines because he struggle to get re-elected if he represented a part of Yorkshire, who wouldn't take too kindly to be lumped with Lancashire.  Then again, I don't think Lancashire would take too kindly to it either.
When he talked about one of the most bloody borders in history, I thought 'oh good, we're going to have a considered discussion of the intriguing Marchlands that historically separated England from Wales'.  But no it was an excuse to trot out hoary old stereotypes about southerners, northerners and the Scottish (because of the impending referendum) - how the weak-willed southerners rapidly accepted Roman dominion while the northerners were a more hardy type and the area that is Scotland now was unconquerable.
It got off to a bad start when the name 'England' encroached into Wales on the illustrative map.  To test his hooey, sorry, theory, Stewart asked a few bowls-playing Scottish locals if they put their sense of nationhood as to never being conquered by the Romans.  Unsurprisingly, they concurred.  No mention is made that this therefore cut them off from the developments of the Renaissance because there was nothing to be 'reborn'.  Stewart made the startling claim that the Romans gave up and a mark of their surrender was Hadrian's Wall.  At this, the historical inaccuracies just piled up vertiginously, in a manner reminiscent of BBC Radio 4's Wild East, which someone in their infinite wisdom has seen fit to re-air to explain Russia's actions in the Ukraine and Crimea.
It seems to never have occurred to Stewart that cross-Channel trade was extensive long before the conquest and the Celtic peoples of the south were already quite Romanised, such that it wasn't a massive leap for them to adopt the trapping of Roman life.  The Romans didn't come to 'civilise' out of the goodness of their hearts - they initially came for the pearls in the area now known as Kent and the tin and silver in what is now Cornwall.  From then on the conquest of Britain took on a strategic dimension, as having 'barbarians' on one's northern flank without a natural barrier isn't such a wise move if one can help it.
Stewart quotes from Tacitus the bits he wants to highlight, which is a little tricksy.  So in the south, "Step by step they were led to things which dispose to vice, the lounge, the bath, the elegant banquet. All this in their ignorance they called civilisation, when it was but a part of their servitude."  (though Stewart substituted 'servitude' for 'slavery' - fine enough but with a bit more of kick to it).  This to contrast with salt of the earth northerners and yet ignoring that the Orkneys offered themselves as vassals to Emperor Claudius.  Tacitus was also the son-in-law of Gnaeus Julius Agricola - one of the most eminent generals in all Roman history.  Agricola conquered the north and routed the Celtic remnants at Mon Graupius in AD 84 and was well on the way to subjugating Scotland (Caledonia) and thence Ireland (Hibernia) when the Emperor Domitian, fearful of Agricola's prowess, recalled him, as Tacitus notes with some bitterness.
Hadrian's Wall was built after the eponymous emperor paid a visit, not because the Romans couldn't suppress the wild hordes north of it but because it wasn't worth the effort - too poor, too windswept, too uneconomic - better to bottle the inhabitants up in the north of the island.  The Han Chinese linked up previous walls to create the Great Wall, not because they couldn't conquer the Uighurs and others to the north but it was an unnecessary expense to occupy such unproductive land.  The Han only conquered the Gansu corridor to create a passageway they controlled between the trade of east and west.  There were many abortive Roman attempts to conquer what is now Scotland, almost as many as aborted towards Persia.  This had nothing to do with the prowess of the 'savages' and everything to do with internal politics, as we have seen with Agricola.  Antoninus Pius built his Antonine Wall but lack of interest meant it was abandoned before the end of his tenure.  It occurred again in the reign of Septimius Severus who was determined to erase this anomaly but died in Eburacum (York) - both his sons were eager to return to Rome to bicker over power.  Ironically, the Picts and Scots brought the English upon themselves because after the Roman legions left, the Vortigern (ruler of Romanised Britain), in desperation at their raids, paid Angles and Saxons as mercenaries to come over - they soon turned on their paymaster and bit by bit created what would eventually become England.
If so fond of the historian, maybe Stewart should consider memorising this part of Tacitus, substituting 'empire' for 'democracy'  - it is quite fitting when one thinks of Iraq.  "To plunder, butcher, steal, these things they misname empire: they make a desolation and they call it peace."