Aware of the irony that the June 2016 European Union referendum had raised the Commonwealth's profile in an unexpected and quite dramatic way, Philip Murphy set out to write The Empire's New Clothes to show “the gulf between the Commonwealth's lofty rhetoric and its actual achievements” (xii). In its weakness, he believes, the organization is “vulnerable to exploitation by those whose motives are far less enlightened” than those held by people who have continued to support it over the years “for the very best of motives” (xii). The tension between the wish to lower expectations and the duty to credit successes animates this lively and informative book.

Murphy has excellent credentials to write about the modern Commonwealth. A respected historian of modern Britain, he has also occupied the role of director of the Institute of Commonwealth Studies since 2009. In addition to being a self-confessed “archive rat” (8), he makes use of his institute's Commonwealth Oral History Project to offer a close-up account of the progress of the organization. While Murphy's background means that he is “in” the Commonwealth, he is careful to demonstrate that he is not “of” it; instead, his aim is to examine “how the myth of the Commonwealth has evolved” (18).

Taken in sum, the book's chapters embody Murphy's “attempt to make sense of the complexity and contradictions of Britain's relationship both to the Commonwealth and its own imperial past” (17–18). In chapter 1, Murphy describes his memories of the empire/Commonwealth while growing up at the end of the 1960s and 1970s, interestingly situating the evolving organization within postimperial British culture. In the second chapter, he sketches a history of the modern Commonwealth, claiming that it developed “more in spite of British designs than because of them” and explaining the British government's difficulty in mobilizing it to further its own interests, contributing to “its growing sense of disillusionment” with the organization (20). In chapter 3, Murphy asks why former colonies of the British Empire (for the most part) “voluntarily retained this apparently neo-colonial bond with the UK” (56). His answers range from the complex (education) and controversial (race) to the practical (Cold War politics, regional ties). The transition to black majority rule in South Africa in 1994, along with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the eastern bloc, “was a bittersweet victory” for a Commonwealth that had been given “purpose,” “value,” “momentum,” and “significance” by these issues (72). As such, “what currently holds the Commonwealth together,” he believes, “is a certain sort of inertia” (79).

Following these historical chapters, the remainder of the book focuses on recent issues and broader underlying themes. In chapter 4, Murphy explores the complexities of the crown's relationship with the Commonwealth, a role that Elizabeth II has taken “extremely seriously” (82) over the years. The next chapter, entitled “Guilt,” looks at contemporary debates connected with the legacy of empire, providing a sense of the polarized political climate in which discussions about the Commonwealth are taking place. Rather than succumbing to a kind of “collective amnesia” about the Commonwealth's imperial past (133), Murphy proposes that the Commonwealth can be the “ideal forum for a debate at the highest levels about the impacts and legacies of colonialism” (134). In chapter 6, he discusses Commonwealth “values,” which he links to the end of the Cold War and “the process of reimagining the Commonwealth as something bound by an historic respect for democracy, human rights and the rule of law” (143). He also analyzes the breakdown of the progress of the Commonwealth Charter through the governing Secretariat in early 2013, criticizing those responsible for the seemingly deliberate vagueness of its final form. The theme continues in chapter 7, in which Murphy considers how the 2013 Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting ended up being held in Sri Lanka, despite the country being under the rule of the controversial Rajapaksa regime.

In the penultimate chapter, Murphy discusses the way in which an ill-defined set of claims and promises about what could be gained through the Commonwealth “provided reassuring mood music” for the Leave campaign in the months prior to the 2016 European Union referendum (198). It feels as if this is the subject to which he has been building up, and here he launches an array of facts and arguments to take down what he believes were the illusions of that campaign. In concluding with a comparison between the Commonwealth and the European Union, he states bluntly that decisions made by the EU matter “in the way that the Commonwealth's empty pronouncements do not” (227).

While pursuing his polemic, Murphy sprinkles jokes and anecdotes into the well-marshalled facts and arguments to keep the narrative flowing—evoking, for instance, how Lord David Howell would occasionally take time out “from recalling gap years in Kenya … to make an abstract point of more general relevance” in the House of Lords’ periodic debates on the Commonwealth (14). The witty comparison of the Catholic Church with the Commonwealth—“The difference is that the vast majority of the former actually know they're Catholics” (16)—gives a sense of the book's tone. For an organization that apparently means so little to most of its citizens, it is interesting how much each chapter reveals about its relationship to contemporary British politics and society.

Perhaps that is the point, for this book about the Commonwealth under the shadow of Brexit is inevitably also a reflection on modern British identity. Paradoxically, it gains insight by being written by a comparative outsider, a northerner with Irish Catholic roots who has come to learn about the organization by walking its halls and meeting its people. While scholars of the Commonwealth will find a lot to digest in The Empire's New Clothes, this engaging work deserves a wider audience.