The Rest is History is what our fractured nation needs right now

Gary Lineker has blown his cover. Readers may have been under the impression that the former England striker and football pundit is a fully signed-up member of the liberal wokerati. But don’t be fooled. The real Gary Lineker is no wet liberal: he’s a tub-thumping national conservative on a one-man mission to spark a patriotic renewal.

I have to hand it to Gary: his wokey false identity has been very convincing. But earlier this month all was revealed, when The Rest is History won the prestigious Apple Podcasts’ 2025 Show of the Year award. TRIH – as it is known by fans – has been credited with sparking a growing revival of interest in British history and identity. And who can we thank for this remarkable phenomenon? Step forward closet conservative Sir Gary Lineker, who owns TRIH through his company Goalhanger.

I find it hard to believe that readers of this esteemed, patriotic publication will not have heard of TRIH, but on the off chance you’ve accidentally clicked through from a link on Bluesky, allow me to explain. The show is presented by celebrated historians Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook who, three times a week, take their listeners on a detailed journey through an important period of history. Since 2020, the duo have racked up a back catalogue of nearly 900 episodes with series on Nelson, Elizabeth I, Martin Luther, the World Wars and much, much more.

It might sound rather dry on the face of it – but nothing could be further from the truth. Holland and Sandbrook make an extraordinarily knowledgeable and gifted pair, who bring history to life with compelling storytelling, tension, humour, irreverence and – occasionally – dodgy German accents. Both are refreshingly factual about their subject matter; there is no revisionism, no judging of past actions by present moral standards, no performative outrage at the misdemeanours of historical figures. Each episode ends on a cliffhanger, leaving the listener desperate to find out what happens next. In an age when all this information is available instantly online, it is quite an achievement to keep people coming back for more.

And come back they do, in droves. TRIH boasts an astonishing 15million downloads a month, with three-quarters of listeners under the age of 40. In the 1990s, office workers might have gathered around the water cooler to discuss last night’s episode of Coronation Street. Thanks to TRIH, we’re now more likely to ask a colleague if they’ve heard the latest salacious rumours about Marie Antoinette.

Why are young people so hungry for history? Perhaps it’s because they learned so little at school. A recent report by the Foundation for the History of Totalitarianism found that only a quarter of young adults know anything about Nelson and only one in seven has heard of Field Marshal Montgomery.

You might well ask, so what? The success of TRIH is great news for Lineker’s bank balance, and for Sandbrook and Holland who reportedly pocketed £1million each from the show last year. But this podcast is so much more than just entertainment. The Rest is History is front and centre of Britain’s ‘quiet revival’, feeding a growing interest in patriotism, cultural roots and national identity, especially among the young.

The loss of a common understanding of history has been disastrous. Far from being ‘our strength’, an emphasis on diversity rather than unity has undermined the foundations of social cohesion. Mass immigration and fear of offending people from other cultures have been key drivers of the failure to pass on an Anglo-centric understanding of history.

Even before 21st-century multiculturalism, British educationalists failed to take history teaching seriously. In 1991, against the background of a push for more science and technology teaching to spur economic growth, education secretary Kenneth Clarke scrapped the requirement for children to take history at GCSE. As a result, most children in the UK now drop the subject at the age 13 or 14. This is highly unusual in the developed world; the Foundation’s report found Britain is an outlier among OECD countries, where history is normally a compulsory subject until age 16.

Is it any wonder that young people (and indeed their teachers) have such different views on things like the British Empire, Communism or Israel, when they are simply far less knowledgeable than the generations that went before? The current education secretary, Bridget Phillipson, wants to ‘embed critical thinking’ in the primary-school curriculum. Yet it seems to have escaped her notice that, without any actual facts to go on, Britain’s children will have precious little to think critically about. Meanwhile – and I say this as a science graduate and former secondary-school science teacher – an obsessive focus on STEM has had no impact whatsoever on economic growth.

Of course, I am not trying to imply that TRIH is pushing a nationalist agenda – it most definitely is not. Its content is far from limited to exclusively British history. Rather, the podcast tells the warts-and-all stories of who we are and where we’ve come from, re-establishing a shared understanding of truth that is the basis of a strong and common identity.

So thank you, Gary, for giving us The Rest is History. Your affected wokeness is forgiven; even the vomit-inducing The Rest is Politics shall not mar your legacy. In the words of my 15-year-old daughter studying for her history GCSE, ‘If you don’t know any history, how on Earth do you understand what’s going on in the world?’. Quite.

Miriam Cates is a GB News presenter, senior fellow at the Centre for Social Justice and a former Conservative MP.