‘The country of my birth has lost its heart’: Miriam Margolyes on how to fix broken Britain

An 85-Year-Old Comedian’s Diagnosis: Britain Has Lost Its Heart

Wanderstayfinder.com – Miriam Margolyes spent decades making audiences howl with laughter, yet she confesses that her humour is largely unscripted — arriving unbidden, much like the bodily functions she compares it to. At 85, the veteran performer finds herself in a peculiar position: never richer, never more in demand, surrounded by a small circle of remaining friends and a partner whose temperament differs from hers but whose political convictions align. And yet, she says, her heart carries a weight of foreboding that no amount of professional success can offset.

The disorientation she describes is not merely personal. It is generational. The Britain she remembers — the one shaped by postwar reconstruction, by the founding of the NHS, by the cultural ferment of the 1960s — now feels almost unrecognisable to her and to virtually everyone she speaks with. The historian Eric Hobsbawm, whom Margolyes knew personally and admired deeply, once observed that societies manufacture the past they wish they had, while the actual past diverges sharply from that fabrication:

“Today is the great age of historical mythology.”

He was correct, Margolyes acknowledges. Still, that invented past functions as a safe harbour she longs to revisit. People feel untethered, disconnected from a place they believed they understood. The mirror, she admits, sometimes shocks her: wrinkles and silver hair stare back, while inside she remains that mischievous Oxford High School girl who risked detention purely for the thrill of entertaining her classmates. Age, she argues, does not confer wisdom. It simply amplifies who you already were. The task is to make peace with that amplified self and with one another.

A Ledger of Losses

Her postwar cohort witnessed the rise and collapse of an extraordinary catalogue of institutions, figures, and technologies: the Berlin Wall, Winston Churchill, the European Union, the National Health Service, the Beatles, the Profumo affair, Elizabeth II, the Great Train Robbery, the contraceptive pill, the IRA, Margaret Thatcher, the Falklands War, Black Monday, the Grenfell Tower fire, heart transplants, autonomous vehicles, Brexit, and the Covid-19 pandemic. Each event reshaped the social contract. But Margolyes judges the present moment to be the most troubling of all.

The infrastructure of ordinary civic life is eroding. Free speech, the local Post Office branch, the neighbourhood bank, even the fixed-line home telephone — all are vanishing from the landscape. Across the Atlantic, the United States has become, in her framing, an adversary. Oligarchs and their networks of influence, she warns, stalk every sphere of public life. At home, the archbishop of Canterbury has resigned from his post, and Jewish residents of north London report fearing to wear a Magen David — the Shield or Star of David — outside their front doors for fear of assault. Speaking publicly, she notes, has become an act of courage. Many have urged her to remain silent. She cannot.

The Present as Hostile Terrain

Margolyes draws a parallel between the unwelcoming atmosphere she perceives at home and the experience of asylum seekers scrambling for a foothold on British shores. The country of her birth, she states plainly, has lost its heart. The question that follows — how did we arrive here? — is one she answers partly through humour, because she has discovered that, when it comes to the frictions between the nations of the British Isles, a well-placed joke can cut straight to the jugular.

She recounts a tale in which an Englishman, lost on a Welsh country road, spots a local and calls out in a lordly accent, asking the way to Cardiff. The Welshman, eyes raking him up and down, replies: “Just a minute now, how did you know my name was Dai?” The Englishman answers, “I guessed, man! I guessed!” The Welshman retorts, “Well, better guess your way to bloody Cardiff then, hadn’t you!”

A second anecdote places an Irishman, a Scotsman, a Welshman, and an Englishman aboard a descending aircraft with a single parachute. The Scotsman declares, “Scotland will remember me,” and leaps to his death. The Welshman says, “Wales will remember me,” and follows. The Irishman announces, “Ireland will remember me,” and shoves the Englishman out of the plane.

Margolyes uses these not as mere entertainment but as diagnostic tools. She suggests the English remain baffled by the hostility their Welsh, Scottish, and Irish neighbours direct at them — baffled in the same way the Englishman in the first joke is baffled by being called “Dai.” Meanwhile, their arrogant postures prolong the very animosity they cannot fathom. She is careful to note this behaviour is not exclusive to England. The British Isles, she observes, are even less popular abroad than they are with one another.

Confronting the Imperial Ledger

The history of these islands is dense with painful episodes and terrible decisions, and Margolyes insists they must be faced rather than buried. Looking away from past wrongs, she writes, is like hoping no one noticed a fart. Spoiler: everyone noticed. Like any multinational corporation with a long operating history, Great Britain plc has inflicted considerable harm over the centuries. The choice of red to mark the British empire on world maps, she implies, was never innocent — it was a colour of extraction, of subjugation, of a system whose benefits were distributed unevenly and whose costs were borne by the colonised.

The implication for 2026 is not nostalgia but accountability. A nation that has lost its heart cannot simply wish the organ back into place. It must understand what was removed, by whom, and under what conditions. For Margolyes, that understanding begins with the willingness to laugh at oneself — to let the joke land, to accept the punchline, and to build something from the wreckage that is not merely a replica of what was lost but something honest about what remains.