IF I KNOW the apes of Gibraltar, they will be panicking this morning. They will be leaping from crag to crag, chattering hysterically, chucking their bits and bobs into little suitcases, cancelling the papers, badgering travel agents and generally making ready to leave the Rock; because they think the British Empire is at long last coming to an end. They have seen the writing on the wall, where — though Gibraltar is just about as big as walls get and carries more graffiti than you can shake an aerosol at — one message in glaring imperial red stands out from all the rest: it says “MG to be sold to China”.
You will have spotted that message yourself, in all your newspapers. The last British- owned major car manufacturer, strapped for cash, stands poised to be taken over by the Shanghai Automotive Industry Corporation. If the Chinese Government gives the deal the nod, the most idiosyncratically British motor car there ever was will henceforth be cobbled together in China. And knowing me, as you do, for the unreconstructably nostalgic patriot I am, you are probably thinking that you would like, right now, to slip your arm about my shaking shoulders even as I bend my head to weep upon your own.
Save it. This is such terrific news that the little white zig-zag scars on the thumb I’m using this very minute to tap the space bar are glowing more excitedly than they have done in all the 40-odd years since I first got them. They are remembering the car I got them on, which I had to start by swinging a handle cleverly designed to trap the thumb against the front bumper so that you would have something to remember it by for the rest of your life. It was a 1932 MG Midget — a name I type with some unease in 2004, when caring propriety doubtless requires it to be called an MG Dimensionally Challenged — and it was a little cracker, a sporty two-seat tourer capable, in a downhill tail-wind, of getting up to 60mph. More, possibly, though I never knew, because at over 60, the rattling threw the speedometer into your lap.
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IT FELT like twice that speed, mind, because it had a windscreen which folded flat so that you could feel the wind in your hair and meant that I had to wear goggles like Biggles and would turn up at girls’ houses with cheeks so splattered that they couldn’t spot the acne for the bug-stains, something of a bonus when you were trying to cut a sophisticated dash. The further bonus was that, because the MG was great for pulling girls, girls were great for pulling MGs: thanks to its formidable mechanics, couples spent far less time sitting side by side than with one at the back, pushing, and the other at the front, dragging, until you managed to struggle to an AA phone-box.
What larks, eh? Which is why it is such terrific news that, with a bit of deal-brokering luck, all this might no longer be, sadly, a thing of the past but, joyfully, a thing of the present; for I note from the motoring press that the particular appeal of the MG marque to the Chinese is that it would give them a foothold in the traditional sports car market, and if they are as shrewd and as practical as I have always taken them to be, this can only mean one thing.
Or, rather, several. For the MG tourer is not merely a car, it is a culture, and I can think of nothing more cheering than the notion of that culture’s being re-created on the other side of the world; and exponentially, at that, given both that there are more than a billion Chinese and that their booming economy is demonstrably encouraging them to aspirations that more and more mimic our own. Which could be wonderful for both of us: trade follows the flag, and when that flag is an octagonal badge, the result could bring illimitable commercial advantage to Britain. Pretty soon, the Chinese will be clamouring for millions of genuine English cheese-cutter cloth caps and hounds’ tooth hacking-jackets and cavalry twill trousers — plus-fours, even — and sturdy oxblood brogues and Paisley-patterned cravats and string-backed gloves, and all the other essential sartorial accoutrements without which the true MG-owner wouldn’t be caught dead.
More yet, they will keenly seek our advice on, not to say profitable co-partnership in, road-houses and tearooms and punt-stations and little thatched pubs and all those other idyllic spots down winding hedgerowed roads to which young couples in two-seaters yearn to tootle. And if we and the Chinese thus grew ever closer, would that not be jolly good?
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