Lansbury came from a radical family, and he’d been campaigning for women’s rights since the 1880s. Then in the Liberal Party, he’d gone on to join the Social Democratic Federation, the country’s first socialist party, before being elected in December 1910 as the Labour MP for Bow and Bromley, in the East End of London. Once in Parliament, he was infuriated by the Liberal government’s refusal to extend the franchise to women and by its approval of force-feeding Suffragette prisoners on hunger strike. “You are beneath contempt,” he shouted, walking up to the government front bench. “You will go down in history as the men who tortured innocent women.” He was suspended from the chamber for that outburst.

He was equally angered by his own party’s failure to confront the government on the issue. Having exhausted all other tactics, he resigned his seat and called a by-election, asking his constituents “to endorse my policy of making women’s suffrage the beginning and end of my parliamentary fight”. It was a risky move. Bow and Bromley was a marginal constituency, and he’d only been elected in 1910 because the Liberals had declined to field a candidate and had backed him, giving him a clear run against his Conservative opponent. But it was worth the risk for one so committed to the cause. 

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The by-election that followed was noisy and atypical. The Labour Party was incensed by Lansbury’s actions and declined to give him official support, while the Liberals again refused to participate. Women’s groups from around the country campaigned for Lansbury, with public meetings addressed by the constitutionalist Millicent Fawcett, the socialist Ethel Snowden and the extremist Emmeline Pankhurst. Meanwhile, anti-suffrage opponents rallied under the slogan of “No Petticoat Government”, and the Conservatives tried hard to insist that this wasn’t a single-issue election.

The most effective poster read: “Lansbury is sick of Parliament. Bow and Bromley is sick of Lansbury. Vote for Blair and make everybody happy.” And on polling day, that’s what happened. On a 10% swing, the Conservative Reginald Blair took the seat and Lansbury was out of Parliament for a decade.

In the long run, standing on his principles didn’t do him any harm. When he returned to Westminster in 1922, again for Bow and Bromley, the number of votes cast had more than tripled, the electorate swelled by the enfranchisement of the working class and of most — if not yet all — women. It turned out that he’d been, in that curious modern phrase, on the right side of history. And when the Labour government split in 1931, and the party suffered a massive election defeat, he was the only ex-Cabinet minister left in Parliament, becoming leader by default at the age of 73. He held the party together in its darkest hour, his record speaking for him as a veteran campaigner for women, peace and the working class.

Nigel Farage, it hardly needs saying, is no George Lansbury. There is no issue of principle, or even of policy, at stake in today’s by-election in Clacton. And the difference doesn’t speak well of today’s politics. Beneath Farage’s thin-skinned petulance and posturing, there lies the media’s — and perhaps the public’s — fascination with electoral contests, rather than actual policy. Keir Starmer’s premiership was a time of flatlining productivity, of rising unemployment, of an incipient borrowing crisis (bond yields are higher than when Liz Truss “spooked the markets”). But the average voter could be forgiven for not noticing the parlous state of the economy as the drama of Andy Burnham’s by-election victory and unopposed coup played out in the press. This isn’t politics, it’s soap opera, and with the departure of Peter Mandelson, Farage is now the longest-standing character still in the show, in large part because he recognized the direction of travel early on.

It wasn’t always thus. Even if we consider the closest recent parallel to Clacton, that of David Davis in 2008, there was a serious point being made. Davis was the Conservative shadow home secretary and believed that a critical moment had been reached when the Commons voted in favor of the Labour government’s proposal to allow detention without charge for up to 42 days. This came in the midst of an attempt to introduce identity cards, attacks on the jury system, and increased surveillance by councils and quangos. As Davis pointed out, “600 public bodies have the authority to bug phones and emails and intercept the post”. So he resigned both his shadow cabinet job and his seat to fight a by-election in his constituency of Haltemprice and Howden in Yorkshire on the issue of civil liberties.

Then, as now, the other major parties didn’t contest the election. Labour, understandably, had no wish to defend its record, and Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg said his party supported Davis’s position and wouldn’t therefore stand against him. The whole thing became a farce. There was a record field of candidates — 26 in all — including the likes of David Icke, Mad Cow-Girl and Ronnie Carroll (the man who’d sung “Ring-a-Ding Girl” in the 1962 Eurovision Song Contest). There were so many of them that they weren’t allowed on the platform to hear the result, for fear of breaking the stage. 

Davis won, of course, with an increased share of the vote, but it was a pyrrhic victory, both politically and personally. Gordon Brown’s government paid no attention at all. And Davis’s career suffered. Just three years earlier, he’d fought David Cameron for the Conservative leadership. Now, he looked a much reduced, peripheral figure. “If I was given my job back, I think I’d take it,” he said. “But I don’t think I’ll be offered it.” He wasn’t, and he didn’t serve in the Coalition government of 2010-15.

In retrospect, Davis’s by-election captured the moment when British politics became totally trivial. The question of civil liberties was genuinely important, and has become ever more so. But the chance to challenge the growing power of the state was ducked by the media, which had decided that soap operas were more fun. The Daily Mirror saw Davis’s actions as “a cynically disguised leadership challenge to David Cameron”, while the Daily Telegraph said it was “a challenge to Mr Cameron’s authority”. It wasn’t. It was an attempt to position the Conservatives as the party that would defend the individual. When it was turned into a circus, the opportunity passed and the direction of travel remained unchanged. The era of the police raiding people’s homes in pursuit of social-media rudeness was just about to dawn.

And now comes Farage in Clacton. He may not have distinguished himself in Parliament, he may have struggled with delegation and with running a political party, but he has proved over the last three decades to be a consummate campaigner, and calling a by-election looks like a retreat to his comfort zone. But it’s a path fraught with danger. To start with, he runs the risk of becoming a laughing stock, even more than did David Davis. Breaking the 2008 record, there are 34 candidates, ranging from the SDP through three separate representatives of the Official Monster Raving Loony Party, all the way down to Rejoin EU. It’s hard to retain any sense of dignity in these circumstances. Worse still, the focus on Farage’s finances risks giving the impression of him being a spiv, rather than the lovable rogue that has previously been his great selling-point. 

These three self-triggered by-elections tell an unedifying story of political decline. Lansbury’s was an honorable position and it was seen as such. Davis was also a principled man, but he was treated as a joke. And now Farage reduces legitimate concerns about the probity of his funding to a caricatured gimmick of the electoral process.

Oddly, though, that comment from the Suffragette may yet be applicable. The Bow and Bromley by-election in 1912 does not “stand out in history as a great political landmark”. But if Farage is sufficiently damaged, then Clacton in 2026 may do.

Although Argentina wasn’t part of the British Empire, there have long been strong ties between the countries. British investment in the second half of the 19th century largely drove the Argentine economy as it became a major global player, with most of the infrastructure — banking, railways, shipping — British-owned, and a third of its exports going to the UK. 

Culturally, it was seen as a rugged but reliable place, more akin to South Africa or Australia than to the weird, primitive mysteries of the Amazon. If you came across a minor character in a novel by P. G. Wodehouse or John Buchan whose income came from Argentine shares, he was intended as a steady kind of chap, rather than a wild speculator. If it was not actually Empire, estate agents would certainly have described it as Empire-adjacent. It took to football and rugby, even cricket — up to a point — and was on the side of the Allies in the Second World War, albeit for just five months after belatedly entering the conflict in March 1945.

By then, though, the close economic links were dissolving, damaged by Britain’s policy in the Thirties of imposing tariffs on goods coming into the Empire, and by the nationalizing of public services under Juan Perón in the Forties. But there was still a vague sense of kinship, as seen in the friendly football relations that were established. Argentina played England at Wembley in 1951, and in Buenos Aires two years later, the latter attracting a then-record crowd for the country of 91,000 spectators.

The friendliness didn’t last. The two countries met again in 1966 in a World Cup quarter-final match that was dubbed “the Battle of Wembley” in England, and “the theft of the century” in Argentina. The issue, as England saw it, was the physical aggression of the South Americans. This, said the England manager Alf Ramsey, explained a lackluster performance: “Our best football will come against the team who come out to play football and not act as animals.” Argentina, meanwhile, was raging against what it saw as a biased referee, who sent off its captain and permitted the only goal of the game — scored by Geoff Hurst — to stand, despite a suspicion of offside.

Most of the world seemed to support the Argentine position. There was talk of a South American split from FIFA, and newspapers from Italy and Czechoslovakia to Mexico and Brazil denounced “favoritism for the English team”. In Buenos Aires, the mass-circulation paper Crónica had a cartoon of the tournament mascot, World Cup Willie, dressed as a pirate, and complained that “just as the English pirates stole the Malvinas, they made a deal with the referee to sell us out”.

And there was the rub, the great stumbling block in Anglo-Argentine relations. Las Malvinas — the Falkland Islands, as Britain called them — lay some 300 miles off the coast of Argentina, and there was a long-running dispute over their ownership. They had never been inhabited by Argentinians, Britain had been in unbroken possession since 1833 and, even as the Empire was being dismantled, the couple of thousand inhabitants unanimously wished to remain British. Argentina, however, had inherited a claim on the territory when gaining independence from Spain and had never given up its demand that it be handed over. 

This meant something in Buenos Aires, though most Britons were unaware of the islands’ existence, let alone that there was any controversy. Insofar as they were known, it was probably through Aldous Huxley’s dystopian novel Brave New World (1932). At the end of the book, when the dissident Bernard Marx is being sent into exile, so that he might write poetry without disturbing the stability of society, he asks for the most remote, forlorn and uncomfortable conditions, the better to inspire his work, and is promptly despatched to the Falklands. Thereafter, we assume, he will never be heard of again.

When the central American state of Belize became independent in 1981, the Daily Mirror provided its readers with a list of what was left of the British Empire: Hong Kong, Gibraltar, Diego Garcia, Virgin Islands, Cayman Islands, Montserrat, Pitcairn, St Helena and the Turks & Caicos Islands. It forgot even to mention the Falklands. 

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There was, therefore, genuine surprise when Britain woke up on an April morning in 1982 to hear the news that Argentine troops had invaded the islands and seized control. There was even more surprise when the prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, announced that a military force would be sent to evict the occupiers, should diplomatic means fail. Such resolute determination was not what the British people had come to expect of its post-imperial governments, but Thatcher saw it as a question of principle. “The people of the Falkland Islands, like the people of the United Kingdom, are an island race,” she told the Commons. “They are few in number, but they have the right to live in peace, to choose their own way of life and to determine their allegiance.”

Moreover, Argentina was then a military dictatorship, following a coup the previous year, led by General Leopoldo Galtieri. As Michael Foot, leader of the Labour Party, put it, when some of his MPs expressed reservations about the military operation: “I know a fascist when I see one.”

Ten weeks later, the Argentine forces on the island surrendered, following a successful counter-invasion. Some 900 were killed on both sides in the conflict, with a further 2,400 wounded, but Britain’s objective was achieved. At a time when public services were renowned for inefficiency, it turned out that the armed forces could still be relied upon. “We fought to show that aggression does not pay and that the robber cannot be allowed to get away with his swag,” said Thatcher in the aftermath. 

There were some dissenting voices, but that view was widely shared. In a 1986 episode of Only Fools and Horses, an expatriate South Londoner arrives in the Nag’s Head and begins running down the country: “The stench of defeat’s everywhere,” he says. “The old place has got no guts anymore.” And finally Del Boy loses his patience and his temper: “Somebody else said that a little while ago. A little jumped-up general from Buenos Aires, and if you’re not careful, you’ll get what the Argies got.”

It was also in 1986 that England and Argentina met again in the quarter-final of the World Cup, this time in the Azteca Stadium in Mexico City. It was a difficult time for English football, the very nadir of the hooligan era. The previous year, 39 fans had been killed in the Heysel Stadium disaster in the European Cup Final between Liverpool and Juventus, and English clubs had been banned from European competition as a result. That, combined with the legacy of the Falklands War, ensured that the build-up to the match was dominated by trepidation. 

The crowd was largely Mexican, with only around 10,000 fans of the two competing countries expected to be in attendance, but it was announced that there would be 20,000 police in the stadium, including armed plainclothes officers on the terraces. On one side there were banners proclaiming “Malvinas — always Argentine”, on the other a new chant: “Argentina, Argentina, what’s it like to lose a war?” The press did their bit. The Sun’s front page headline on the day of the match was “It’s War Senor!”, an angle that was mirrored in the Argentine media. It was left to the footballers to try to keep some sense of perspective. “We are not taking guns onto the field,” protested Argentina’s star player, Diego Maradona, “we are not going to shoot anyone. We are going to play football.”

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Maradona turned out to be the story of the match with two contrasting goals in the space of five minutes. The first was a blatant and deliberate handball, the second a sublime piece of dribbling that was later to be voted the Goal of the Century — countered only by a late consolation strike from Gary Lineker. “Malvinas 2, England 1,” exulted the Argentine press, adding “We blasted the English pirates”, a reference back to the 1966 match, and to the Falklands, when a Buenos Aires paper had depicted Thatcher with an eye-patch.

All this, of course, is ancient history now. Except that it’s not really. Argentina continues to lay claim to the Falkland Islands, and this week its foreign minister wrote of the “illegitimate occupation”, renewing the country’s demands for sovereignty talks. More significant, perhaps, were reports in April that Donald Trump — angered by Keir Starmer’s lack of cooperation in the war against Iran — might withdraw American support for British ownership of the islands. The British government’s response was a reassertion of the Falklanders’ right to self-determination; memories of the war loom too large for any sensible prime minister to say anything else.

Meanwhile, that first goal in the Azteca — scored, as Maradona himself said, “a little with the head of Maradona and a little with the hand of God” — has passed into English footballing folklore. “Same old Argies — always cheating.” Today’s game, the latest chapter in the saga, sees more at stake than ever: this time it’s a semi-final rather than a quarter-final. But for 60 years this has been about more than sport, and it still is, even if the mood is nowhere near as volatile as it was in 1986.

The rivalry lives on. From a British perspective, there’s something a little reassuring about it. All these years after the Empire collapsed, Britain is still seen as important enough to be denounced as imperialist aggressors. There’s not even any hint of post-colonial guilt — there was no native population on the Falklands to be slaughtered or oppressed. The lives that were lost were the consequence of invasion by a dictatorship.

Following its Falklands humiliation, Argentina reverted to democracy, and diplomatic relations with Britain were restored. The long, shared history of the two countries was soured by the episode, but it hasn’t been lost. Alongside the mutual suspicion, there’s also a mutual respect. Maradona was cast by English fans as a pantomime villain, but his genius was never doubted. His successor, Lionel Messi, is even more gifted and, lacking the street-tough aggression, inspires affection as well as admiration in Britain. At heart, it remains a family dispute.

Christie, who died 50 years ago this month, is internationally recognized as the Queen of Crime. Indeed she’s legally recognized as such — the phrase has been trademarked by her estate, and anyone else billed under the title is likely to receive a cease-and-desist letter (“astonishingly pitiful,” said Val McDermid, when she was warned off in 2022). She’s the world’s biggest-selling fiction writer (she is estimated to have sold between two and four billion books) and one of the most adapted: virtually every one of her 66 crime novels has made its way onto screen, stage or radio. Netflix’s adaptation of The Seven Dials Mystery is only the latest. Traditionally, these adaptations were cozy affairs. More recently they’ve tried to be edgy, but few have played to the political content of the original books, particularly those of her younger days. Which is a shame, if only because at a time when conspiracy theories are again depressingly common, it’d be good to remember how prevalent — and how wrong — they were a century ago.

The Secret Adversary (1922), her second novel, sees a charming couple of amateurs, Tommy and Tuppence, thwart an international conspiracy to bring down Western civilization. It was written at a time of economic unrest. There had been a serious downturn in 1921 — “one of the worst years of depression since the Industrial Revolution,” wrote the Economist — accompanied by a wave of strikes: more than twice as many working days were lost to industrial action as in any previous year. More alarmingly, there were fears of unemployed ex-servicemen being inspired by the revolutions in Russia and Ireland. Meanwhile, the Liberals were being supplanted by the seemingly inexorable rise of the Labour Party.

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In Christie’s story, Mr Carter explains that, however disastrous a Labour government would be, they’re not the real problem. Nor even are the communists. There’s someone further back in the shadows. “The Bolshevists are behind the Labour unrest – but this man is behind the Bolshevists.” No one knows his identity. “But one thing is certain, he is the master criminal of this age.”

Similarly, in The Big Four (1927), Hercule Poirot fights the cabal behind “the worldwide unrest, the labour troubles that beset every nation, and the revolutions that break out in some”. Their scope is global. “In Russia, you know, there were many signs that Lenin and Trotsky were mere puppets whose every action was dictated by another’s brain.” As Poirot says, “Their aim is world domination.”

This was characteristic of the popular fiction of the time. The biggest thriller hero of the Twenties was Bulldog Drummond, who battled his supervillain enemy over a succession of novels, plays and films by Sapper (the pen name of H.C. McNeile). Again, there’s an international organization controlling Left-wing politics in Britain. “Ever since the war you poisonous reptiles have been at work stirring up internal trouble in this country,” Drummond says to a Labour MP in The Black Gang (1922). “Not one in ten of you believe what you preach: your driving force is money and your own advancement.”

The idea of the Labour Party being fellow travelers was common. Dorothy L. Sayers, another billed as a Queen of Crime, presented in Clouds of Witness (1926) the Soviet Club in London, where there’s much excitement over the presence of the Labour leader, who “is going to make a speech about converting the Army and Navy to communism”.

Maybe this recurring theme might be seen as an attempt to understand the otherwise incomprehensible scale and horror of the First World War and its social impact. When things had gone so far wrong, there was a need to believe there might be an underlying cause of the discontent. “Behind all the world’s creeds, Christianity, Buddhism, Islam and the rest, lay an ancient devil-worship,” argues the charismatic villain in John Buchan’s The Three Hostages (1924). Now that “the War had cracked the veneer everywhere, the real stuff was showing through”, most obviously in the rise of communism. He intends to exploit the moral disorder so that he can seize power.

Fanciful, of course, risible even. But the idea of the hidden hand manipulating politics did have an impact, preparing the ground for real-life developments. The fall of the first Labour government in 1924 was triggered by accusations about the influence wielded by the Communist Party of Great Britain. In the subsequent election campaign, the Daily Mail produced the evidence — a letter supposedly sent by Grigori Zinoviev, Russian head of the Communist International, instructing the CPGB “to stir up the masses of the British proletariat”. There was a clear chain of command, it was alleged. “Moscow issues orders to the British Communists,” wrote the Mail, “the British Communists in turn give orders to the Socialist government, which it tamely and humbly obeys.”

It was entirely untrue — and the Zinoviev letter itself was a forgery — but the suspicion that there was some kind of Bolshevik influence was well established by now. The accusation of loyalty to an outside power was precisely what the thrillers of Agatha Christie and Sapper had warned against, and their many readers recognized the danger. The result was that Liberal voters deserted to the Tories in their droves, determined to keep out the socialists so that, although Labour increased its share of the vote, its number of MPs fell. The lesson was learned, and come the General Strike of 1927, the Trades Union Congress (TUC) was quick to deny any external influence, telling the press that a check sent from Moscow, “for some thousands of pounds”, had been returned uncashed.

Thereafter, the focus on communist subversion faded a little, merging into a much older suspicion of Russia. Ngaio Marsh’s A Man Lay Dead (1934) featured a secret Russian brotherhood “of amazing antiquity” which, in the days of Peter the Great, “practiced various indecent and horrible rites, based on a kind of inverted monasticism”. More recently, it had turned itself into a pro-Soviet political organization, even if it did retain its fondness for “erotic performances and mutilations”.

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In The Devil Rides Out (1934), Dennis Wheatley went further and identified the real-life mastermind who had caused the war. “The monk Rasputin was the evil genius behind it all,” explains our hero. “He was the greatest Black Magician that the world has known for centuries. It was he who found one of the gateways through which to let forth the four horsemen that they might wallow in blood and destruction.”

More generally, though, detectives and thriller-heroes turned their attention elsewhere. Following the Wall Street Crash in 1929 and the ensuing Depression, there was a fashion in crime fiction for uncaring financiers and rapacious businessmen. These seemed more pressing threats to the nation’s well-being. Popular literature was popular precisely because it reflected the fears and concerns of its readers.

In Leslie Charteris’s The Smart Detective (1933), Simon Templar (aka the Saint) is visited by a woman who works for “Oppenheim who owns the sweat shops”. She outlines the system: “I work with fifty other girls in an attic in the East End. We work ten hours a day, six days a week, sewing. If you’re clever and fast you can make two pieces a day. They pay you one shilling a piece.” Oppenheim, by contrast, has just bought a collection of emeralds for a quarter of a million pounds. “It’s just one of those things that makes you feel like turning communist sometimes.” Variations on the theme were to be found in the likes of Arthur Wynne’s Death of a Banker (1934), John Rhodes’s Death of the Board (1937), Nicholas Blake’s There’s Trouble Brewing (1937) and Gathorne Cookson’s Murder Pays No Dividends (1938).

And in Agatha Christie’s One, Two, Buckle My Shoe (1940), where Alistair Blunt is head of “the greatest banking firm in England”. On him rests the economic stability that had kept the country free in an age of dictators. He is, says another character, “the answer to their Hitlers and Mussolinis and all the rest of them”, and Blunt tends to agree: “I’ve done something for England, M. Poirot. I’ve held it firm and kept it solvent. It’s free from dictators – from Fascism and from Communism.”

But this is the Queen of Crime in her mature years, and the message is more subtle than in the earlier conspiracy thrillers. However sound his economics, Blunt is a murderer, and tries to persuade Poirot that he cannot be held to account. If he’s arrested, he says, “a lot of damned fools would try a lot of very costly experiments. And that would be the end of stability – of common sense, of solvency. In fact, of this England of ours as we know it.”

The fate of the nation is at stake, and it’s left to Poirot to restate the essential principle that underpins Christie and most of the Golden Age. “I am not concerned with nations, Monsieur,” he says sternly. “I am concerned with the lives of private individuals who have the right not to have their lives taken from them.” Ultimately, of course, it’s that humanity, the value of the individual, that has ensured Christie’s continuing popularity.

It was hard to disagree. At 72, Clement Attlee had been Labour leader for 20 years, with 1955 his fifth general election. His own analysis of the defeat implicitly agreed with the Mirror. “The old folk did not let us down,” he reflected. The Conservatives had no time for such nostalgia. They were led by the dashing Sir Anthony Eden, who, at 57, was positively youthful compared to his exhausted socialist rival — even as the Tories swept to power on the enthusiasm of the young. And if that’s one hint at how much Britain has changed since 1955, there are many other examples too, from a fractured electoral map to the slow death of social engagement.

In 1955, Labour fought the battles of the past, clear enough in which voters the party managed to retain. While workers in the industrial heartlands, recalling the traumatic Twenties and the hungry Thirties, stayed loyal, most of the country had little wish to look back. The times were changing. Identity cards and rationing had been abolished, and the talk was of prosperity not austerity.

This, after all, was the year that the young designer Mary Quant opened her first boutique in Chelsea, before going on to revolutionize international fashion, and the year that rock ’n’ roll arrived in the shape of Bill Haley’s “Rock Around the Clock”. While the politicians were out on the campaign trail, an actor named John Osborne was sat on Morecambe Pier, writing Look Back in Anger, the play that would introduce the public to a generation of Angry Young Men.

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Most obviously, there was the imminent arrival of ITV to break the BBC’s monopoly on television. The legislation had been passed, and broadcasting was due to start later in 1955, with a promise to give viewers what they wanted, not just what was considered good for them. Attlee disapproved of the whole thing. “They will have to reduce their programs to the lowest common denominator so they become cheaper and more and more vulgar,” he said, and Labour went into the election committed to cancelling ITV if they won. But they didn’t, and the upstart service proved so wildly popular that the Tories boasted about it in the next election campaign. “BBC or ITV?” read a poster in 1959. “You’ve a choice — thanks to the Conservatives, because Conservatives believe in opportunity.”

Attlee finally stepped down after the 1955 defeat, replaced by 49-year-old Hugh Gaitskell, the youngest leader of a major party for 60 years and the first born in the 20th century. He struck a very different note. “We are glad to see people better-off,” he admitted, “and have no patience with those who are comfortably-off themselves yet seem to resent the prosperity of others.”

But as the party’s 60-seat majority in 1955 so vividly implies, the Conservatives had already made this generational break. The election came after the octogenarian Winston Churchill finally returned to the back benches, making way for his nephew-by-marriage Eden. An unmistakably modern man, the polyglot ex-Foreign Secretary was as elegant as a film star. He had recently been named “the best dressed politician in the world” by Tailor & Cutter, and was, said the Sunday Pictorial, “admired” by millions of women (“or is that too weak a word?”).

More important than Sir Anthony himself, though, was the party organization outside Parliament. For these were the days of mass parties, where one in nine people on the electoral register was a member of one of the two big parties. Membership figures are notoriously untrustworthy, but in the mid-Fifties Labour claimed a million members. Remarkably, the Conservatives could boast some three million, making the organization as much a social group as a political party. Members weren’t expected to debate policy, and unlike Labour the annual conference was not a place for activists to argue over the party’s program. Instead they put on dances and whist drives, garden parties and coffee mornings, part of the fabric of community life.

Within that, a key role was played by the Young Conservatives, numbering around half a million. There were weekend conferences, and meetings addressed by MPs, but mostly the local branches were again less interested in ideological pursuits than in staging barbecues and beauty pageants. In 1955, the reigning Miss Young Conservative in Leeds was 19-year-old Jacqueline Pishorn, judged at an annual ball attended by 500 people to have “the best dress sense and the greatest poise, charm and personality”. For those under 18, not yet old enough to join the YCs, there was another group, the Young Britons, and there were 8,000 of them. (Their slogan: “Learning to serve.”)

At the time, the apolitical nature of the YCs was the subject of gentle ridicule. Consider a 1961 episode of Hancock’s Half Hour. Here, the sitcom’s eponymous star hoped to do “something for the benefit of the country as a whole” — and is torn between becoming a blood donor or joining the Young Conservatives. He decides on the former, because “I’m not looking for a wife and I can’t play table tennis”. (Also, he was 37 at the time, and the cut-off point was 30.) Despite the mockery, it was an appealing image, drawing in not just the established middle-class, but those with social aspirations. And beneath the fun, it did much to entrench the basic tenets of Toryism: nation, church, monarchy. Other parties looked on in envy; in 1955 even the Young Communist League admitted that they could learn from the “colorful and attractive methods of the Young Conservatives”.

Much of this was down to Lord Woolton, appointed Tory chairman in 1946 and tasked with rebuilding a demoralized party after Labour’s shock landslide the previous year. Uncle Fred, as he was known in YC circles, sought an infusion of new blood, recruiting particularly in universities, and designated 1955 as “youth year”, targeting the nine million voters under the age of 30. The campaign worked. The number of under 30s who voted Conservative reached a post-war peak, with first-time voters reported to be breaking three-to-two in favor of the Tories — a reversal of where young people had been a decade earlier.

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All this, of course, has long since passed into history. At last year’s election, according to YouGov’s survey, only 8% of under-30s voted Tory, less than a fifth of those supporting Labour. The universities have been comprehensively lost, so that the Conservatives now do better among those with the lowest educational qualifications: securing the support of 31% of those with no more than GCSEs, but just 18% of university graduates. Party memberships have collapsed too. In the last Tory leadership election, when Kemi Badenoch defeated Robert Jenrick, 95,000 members cast a vote out of a total of 130,000.

The Labour Party has held up a little better. ​​When Keir Starmer took over from Jeremy Corbyn in 2020, nearly half a million votes were cast, even as political activists still knock on doors. Yet taken together, 1955 looks like a lost world, especially now that vast hinterland of social interaction with everyday apolitical life has vanished. In retrospect, the turning-point was likely that controversial introduction of ITV, which turned television into the country’s dominant cultural pursuit, all while squeezing out other forms of recreation. Cinema admissions fell from 1,400 million a year in 1950 to 500 million by the end of the decade, and that was just with two channels.

Since then, the story has been of an increasingly atomized, homebound society. The desire for shared experience, for active engagement, remains — but has proved no match for the ever-growing power of technology. These cultural changes have inevitably influenced politics, with falling membership rolls reshaping the electoral map more broadly. Between them, Tories and Labour got 96% of the vote in 1955. Last year, they managed 57%. Turnout was also considerably higher back then: the government of Anthony Eden attracted the support of 38% of registered voters, as opposed to the 20% that voted for Keir Starmer’s Labour. As for the Tories in 2024, just one in seven of those who could have voted for them did so. It was only the old folk who didn’t let them down: a third of those in their 60s, and nearly half of over-70s, voted Conservative. Now that’s an old man’s party.

Labour MPs recognized this when they voted him as successor to Harold Wilson in 1976, topping the best slate of leadership candidates ever offered to a British party, seeing off Tony Benn, Anthony Crosland, Michael Foot, Denis Healey and Roy Jenkins. He’s still the only person to have held all four of the great offices of state: PM, chancellor, foreign secretary and home secretary. And if that’s all a bit lofty, as transport minister in Clement Attlee’s government, he gave us zebra crossings and cat’s eyes, literally changing the look of the country.

But what he’s chiefly remembered for is the wave of public-sector strikes that paralyzed the country in the early weeks of 1979. There were more days lost to industrial action that year than any since 1926 and the General Strike, and for the next two decades, the Winter of Discontent — as it became known — was the go-to line of attack for Labour’s opponents. It was the “I’m afraid there is no money” of its day. Indeed, it’s not dead yet. In January this year, Richard Littlejohn warned Daily Mail readers that the current government “would take us back to the Seventies” and the accompanying photo was captioned: “Rubbish piles up on the streets of London during the Winter of Discontent.”

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This is a bit unfair as well. Callaghan’s stewardship of the economy had thus far been successful by most measures. Labour came to power in 1974 in the midst of a recession and with massive inflationary pressures left over from Conservative Chancellor Anthony Barber, who had done economic damage far beyond that attributed to Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng. Under Wilson and then Callaghan — with Healey as Chancellor throughout — Labour steadied the ship. In 1976-78, GDP grew by an annual average of 3.2% while inflation was brought down from 24.2% to 8.3%. There was even, relatively speaking, industrial peace; more days were lost to strikes in 1972 under Edward Heath than in the first three years of Callaghan.

The key factor in all this was the partnership between government and trade unions. From 1975, a national pay policy was agreed, fixing the maximum wage increase that would be permitted, and for the most part the line was held. A decline in the standard of living was accepted, with some reluctance, by the unions as the price of restoring economic stability.

But by late 1978, the reluctance proved too great. Callaghan failed to secure an agreement with the unions, and instead the government unilaterally announced a pay policy of 5%. The Winter of Discontent ensued, Labour was driven out of office, and 18 years of opposition followed.

In his last days as PM, Callaghan predicted the dawning of a new era. “There are times, perhaps every 30 years, when there is a sea change in politics,” he told adviser Bernard Donoughue. “It then does not matter what you say or what you do.” Though he was right that this was a critical moment, there’s an unmistakable note of self-justification, because there was nothing inevitable about the country taking the direction that it did. Had he not launched that doomed pay policy, and done what everyone expected by calling a general election in the autumn of 1978, when the economic conditions were favorable, he would almost certainly have won.

But maybe the sea change had already come, back at the 1976 Labour conference, when Callaghan himself announced the death of Keynesianism. “We used to think that you could spend your way out of recession and increase employment by cutting taxes and boosting government spending,” he declared. “I tell you in all candor that that option no longer exists.” For 30 years, governments of both parties had pursued the target of full employment, but now the emphasis was to be on conquering inflation. We’d been living in a cozy world, avoiding “fundamental choices and fundamental changes” for too long. “That cozy world is gone.” As Margaret Thatcher, his successor in Downing Street, was later to say, “There is no alternative.”

And there was the problem for Labour. Callaghan’s move away from Keynes took him into Tory territory. The Thatcherite wing of the Conservatives had already concluded that inflation was the real enemy, and that state spending needed to be cut. Following her election victory in 1979, Thatcher pursued Callaghan’s argument to its logical extremes. He complained that his speech to conference had been taken out of context — “misused by Conservative spokesmen to justify their malefactions in refusing to increase public expenditure at a time of recession” — but the truth was that he had prepared the way for Thatcherism and was then horrified by what transpired.

He was the last prime minister of the old cross-party consensus, a time when — in the language of the day — union leaders had “beer and sandwiches” at No. 10, and deals were done in “smoke-filled rooms”. Displaying the conventional complacency of an ancien régime, he underestimated his rival, failing to take seriously her talk of being an outsider, “a plain straightforward provincial”, her rejection of “metropolitan liberal views”, her call for “a return to common sense”. In retrospect, Thatcher looks more and more like the harbinger of the era of populism, and Callaghan her facilitator. That 1976 speech is what he should be remembered for, the start of the sea change that he spoke about.

All of which seems increasingly relevant at a time when we are in the early stages of an even bigger sea change, with a Labour prime minister again trying to navigate the death of a cross-party consensus.

The features are very different, of course. And so are the two men. Keir Starmer didn’t exactly beat the cream of the crop when he defeated Rebecca Long-Bailey and Lisa Nandy to become leader. He had no experience of political office at all — let alone the great offices of state — before the general election last year. On the other hand, he has a massive parliamentary majority to fall back on — the 1974-79 government started with a majority of three and rapidly declined into a minority.

Despite the differences, there is the same sense of a new political mood and, as in the late Seventies, the ideological fervor is with a populist Right. Recently this has been with the rise in the polls of Reform, but a reinvented Conservative Party that can harness public discontent remains the real threat.

That looks a distant possibility right now, but the return of Donald Trump has accelerated the pace of events. Starmer’s premiership has certainly changed in response to Trump. The biggest challenge is clearly the development of a new version of NATO, but there are domestic implications as well. The noisiness of Trump and his outriders is changing the political agenda here. In particular, immigration — the key dividing line between mainstream parties and populists — looms larger.

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Earlier this month, Health Secretary Wes Streeting had some fun at the expense of the Tories. “It must be so painful for them to watch a Labour government doing the things that they only ever talked about,” he teased: “reducing bloated state bureaucracy; investing in defense; reforming our public services; bringing down the welfare bill.” He was exaggerating for the sake of comedy, but there was an underlying truth to his boast. With that comes the danger that, as Callaghan found, the attempt to try to occupy the opponents’ ground can end up merely by legitimizing the Right’s arguments. There’s been nothing in the advance briefing about Rachel Reeves’s spring statement today that looks particularly Labour.

Callaghan tried to hold the incoming tide halfway, offering a compromise that accepted spending cuts and a (hopefully short-term) rise in unemployment while retaining the structure of the old system, most notably cooperation with unions. That proved economically effective in the short term but it wasn’t enough to save Labour. By the time the party returned to power in 1997, it had accepted Thatcherism in full. As Callaghan said: “The cozy world is gone.”

It’s a small world, populated primarily by LBC, Talk Radio, Times Radio and GB News (an audio simulcast of the TV channel). These are the radio equivalents of a rolling-news television channel, and are similarly hamstrung by the fact that there simply isn’t enough news to fill 24 hours in a day, especially if you don’t have the BBC’s budget. So, the format is essentially that of comment and discussion, and there’s little variation: you can either have a phone-in with a single host, or a pair of presenters who chat between themselves. In either case, they want your emails, texts, tweets and, in a recent development, WhatsApp voice messages.

The combined listenership of these four stations is, according to the latest Rajar figures, just under 5 million, two-thirds of which is accounted for by LBC. Together, they’re a little way behind BBC Radio 5 Live (on 5.25 million) and nowhere near Radio 4 (9.63 million). Still, 5 million is not to be sniffed at, and the sector is growing. At the time of the last general election, two of those stations — Times and GB News — didn’t exist.

So, what are they saying in this election? Not a great deal, as it happens. The problem is that the campaign isn’t what you’d call exciting. It’s hard to care when the winner is so certain, and when the cast is this dull. Keir Starmer is, as Willie Whitelaw said of Harold Wilson 50 years ago, “going around the country stirring up complacency”.

On Talk’s Sunday morning show, Peter Cardwell (“The Westminster Insider”) started off wanting to discuss the election — “Lots happening politically,” he said, inaccurately — before having to concede that most listeners were far more concerned with the story of a police car deliberately driving into a cow in Staines-upon-Thames. Come Monday afternoon, and Talk’s Jeremy Kyle was still on the cow. “I would move on,” he wailed, “but the calls are obsessed with it.” And on Tuesday morning, Mike Graham, also on Talk, returned to the theme. There was, he said, “a fascinating amount of interest”. The election, on the other hand, not so much.

In the absence of anything more substantial, most of the attention has been on opinion polls. Too much so, according to Andrew Neil on Times. “Another day, another poll,” added Matt Chorley, also on Times: “Should we ban opinion polls?”

And that’s a perfectly decent subject for a phone-in. As are, to take a couple of examples from recent days: “Should pop stars stay out of politics?” (GB News), and “Should we be giving pigeons contraceptives?” (Talk). What do you think? Call us now.

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It’s easy to mock, of course. Not so easy to fill a three-hour programme, when the previous three-hour programme, and the one before that, have also been raiding the same newspapers in search of stories. And definitely not easy when everyone is drawing on such a small pool of guests.

Because if you listen long enough, the same people come round and round again. This is obviously the case with the politicians sent out to do the media; if it’s a day for Wes Streeting to speak for Labour — as it so often seems to be — then you’ll hear him on every station. But it also applies to the pundits. On Monday morning, Lord Hayward (a Tory MP, until he lost his seat in 1992) talked about the likelihood of a low turnout with Julia Hartley-Brewer on Talk. An hour or so later he was to be found chatting about Reform UK with Andrew Neil over on Times.

“You present a show on GB News,” Neil said to Tory MP Philip Davies, which isn’t actually true anymore, but does give a flavour of the media carousel. And, of course, Neil himself helped found GB News and was once a (very good) phone-in host on LBC. “I wonder whether we’re going to hear from a wider range of people,” reflected Times’s political editor Kate McCann. It seems unlikely.

The calls are mostly predictable as well. Julia Hartley-Brewer asked listeners to say what the election is all about, and the answer turns out to be immigration. As Bev Turner put it on GB News, asking for comments on yet another silly and self-indulgent stunt by Just Stop Oil: “I think I probably know what you’re going to say about this.”

The one episode that has really stirred the blood thus far was Rishi Sunak’s D-Day snafu, which provoked a torrent of calls, virtually all hostile. And then there’s been the late arrival of Nigel Farage, the one genuine star in contemporary British politics, and very much of this world: he’s had his own shows on LBC and GB News in the past. His intervention has given his sympathisers something to get their teeth into, and, even more, has been a godsend for those who see Brexit as the first step towards fascism.

This latter camp is primarily represented by James O’Brien, a former showbiz reporter on the Daily Express who now does the weekday morning show on LBC and is very important indeed. Not my words, Carol… “According to the Press Gazette, I’m the most influential journalist in the country,” he said on Monday. Then again, he added the next day: “I’ve known everything since 2016.” (He did admit that “It sounds a bit conceited”.)

O’Brien has a tendency to lump together all his hate figures, so that any mention of Farage or Boris Johnson — and there are very many such mentions — is likely to be accompanied by a cry of “Look at Trump”. At times, these word-association asides are decidedly odd. When Farage said that not all Reform candidates went to public school, O’Brien spluttered: “Oswald Mosley went to Winchester, the same school that Sunak went to.” (Full disclosure: O’Brien went to Ampleforth, the same school as David Stirling, founder of wannabe coup-makers Great Britain 75.) “This is a grown-up programme,” he insisted.

LBC argues that it doesn’t need to do impartiality within programmes; it can achieve balance across the schedule, with presenters representing different viewpoints. And the station does have its Right-wing stars. Early-evening presenter Iain Dale even tried to become the Conservative candidate for Tunbridge Wells, though it didn’t work out and he was soon back on air. The difference is that, unlike O’Brien, Dale has guests and callers from across the political spectrum; he’ll air his own views, but isn’t snitty about those who don’t share them.

There’s also Nick Ferrari, formerly of Talk and now hosting breakfast on LBC, the most accomplished broadcaster in this whole sector; on the Right but consistently courteous and mostly tolerant of other perspectives. He’s had hour-long phone-ins with both Starmer and Sunak, which were billed as election specials, though they’re nothing new. Ferrari started this format with Nick Clegg, back when the Lib Dem leader was deputy prime minister. Call Clegg was a regular feature for years, followed by Ask Boris and Phone Farage, before Call Keir debuted in 2020. On these shows, Ferrari puts himself on the side of the callers, amplifying and clarifying their points, while also keeping them on-subject.

It works quite well, and Starmer has got better at it over the years, in that he’s learnt how to deflect difficult questions. Asked about single-sex spaces, he says he’s all in favour of them, and that this doesn’t conflict with Labour’s manifesto commitment to “modernise, simplify, and reform the intrusive and outdated gender recognition law” (the one introduced by the last Labour government). He doesn’t explain quite how the potential conflicts will be resolved, and instead veers off onto mixed-sex hospital wards, where the problem, he insists, is not trans but the Tories: “The government’s lost control of our hospitals.”

Sunak isn’t as good, but he does work better in this environment than elsewhere. Even the dumb questions are handled reasonably well. A caller denounced him for saying that he likes chocolate bars and sweets at a time when children’s dental health is so poor. Rather than snorting with derision at the idea that five-year-olds are looking to the prime minister as a role model, he stood by his vices: “I can’t apologise for eating Twixes or Haribos.”

The best angle of all has been to look back, rather than forward. There’s a whole talking-shop of recognisable MPs leaving Parliament, which gives these stations the opportunity of interviewees who are more relaxed and less concerned with toeing the party line. So Andrew Neil had the double-act of Michael Gove and Harriet Harman on to talk about the election, and the result was an intelligent and entertaining discussion, even if it felt like it came from an era that’s fast disappearing. Gove dismissed Reform as a “Potemkin party”, and said that the British electorate preferred “authoritative sensible administrators”.

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Better yet, Matt Chorley has been running an excellent series of Exit Interviews (theme music: “Go Now!” by the Moody Blues), in which he talks with departing MPs. On Monday it was Andrea Leadsom’s turn, giving one-word summaries of the prime ministers she has known: David Cameron (“charming”), Theresa May (“honourable”), Boris Johnson (“optimistic”), Liz Truss (“tough”), Rishi Sunak (“smart”). She still has some odd delusions — “A lot of people say to me, ‘We wish you’d become prime minister’” — but she was superbly vitriolic about the former Speaker, John Bercow, letting loose with end-of-term freedom. “It’s great to be saying this,” she exulted.

Two other adjacent stations should be mentioned. BBC Radio 5 Live (“The Voice of the UK”) continues to straddle, ever more awkwardly, sport and politics, as well as supplying showbiz gossip and chats about what was on telly last night. Its biggest star is Nicky Campbell, who is very good at phone-ins, though not always deployed very well. On Tuesday he was soliciting “Your questions for Adrian Ramsay” — that nice young man who’s the co-leader of the Green Party of England and Wales.

And then there’s Talk Sport, sister station of Talk Radio and Times Radio, which has a bigger listenership even than LBC. Its presenters have been instructed not to mention the election, a fact that Charlie Baker probably wasn’t supposed to mention live on air. They don’t seem to be too worried by this prohibition, since they have the Euros, the T20 World Cup, the US Open, Royal Ascot, Wimbledon and the Olympics to keep them busy, but it’s still a shame. What remains of political interest is the selection of news headlines that non-obsessives might notice. And that, again, means Farage. On the launch of the Reform manifesto, they opened their bulletin — without introduction — on a clip of his new catchphrase: “Guess who’s back?” There was no time for discussion of the contents.

What do we learn from these stations? Mostly that the election hasn’t caught alight. TV debates have lost their novelty; pledges haven’t been carved in stone; Sir Ed Davey’s habit of falling over and getting wet hasn’t sparked a new version of Cleggmania. For all the talk of this being a seismic moment in political history, bearing comparison with 1906, 1945, 1979 and 1997, the public aren’t much engaged. Times bills itself as “Your Election Station”, but Matt Chorley is probably closer, as he jokingly trails an upcoming report from a hairdressing salon in Rochdale: “We are the election station — and we take the election very seriously.”

There’s much in common between the two periods: a longstanding Conservative government disintegrating after a protracted fight over Europe, lacking ideas, direction and the will to govern, and facing a media-polished Labour opposition that’s fixated on winning. And then there’s the abiding impression of sleaze and snouts-in-troughs.

Major’s problems were generally dated to his conference speech in the autumn of 1993, when he urged the nation to celebrate “the old values: neighbourliness, decency, courtesy”. It was, he said, “time to get back to basics”. His director of communications briefed that the Prime Minister “was intent on rolling back the permissive society”. Elsewhere, cabinet ministers were denouncing absent fathers, single mothers and children born out of wedlock.

The newspapers saw all this as a challenge to seek out hypocrisy, and — under the mocking banner of “Back to Basics” — began publishing stories of Conservative MPs who might be failing in their moral duties, particularly in terms of sexual fidelity. There was no shortage of sinners, even if most were deeply obscure names: Robert Hughes, Rod Richards, Gary Waller, Tim Yeo. 

There was nothing illegal going on here. But then illegality wasn’t the measure of newsworthiness when it came to sexual misbehaviour. Far more important was the pleasure that people take in seeing the high and mighty brought low by human failings. So what mattered was whether it made politicians look foolish. Richard Spring’s “three-in-a-bed romp” did. So too did Hartley Booth writing love poems to a woman less than half his age (and him a Methodist lay preacher, as well). And David Ashby’s libel action against The Sunday Times, in which he testified that he was impotent, and said his wife used to assault him and call him a “poofter”. 

The story that really stuck was that of heritage secretary David Mellor having an affair with an actress, and wearing a Chelsea strip during sex. That latter detail was — as no one then said — fake news, invented by the (yet to be disgraced) publicist Max Clifford, but it elevated the story to tabloid greatness. And it was readily believed, if only because it deflected one’s attention from the image of the “minister for fun” having sex.

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The sorry string of sex scandals left the headline-writers a little blasé. “Another Back to Basics Bombshell,” shrugged The Sunday Mirror. “How Much Worse Can It Get?” wondered The Independent. The answer to that came with the death in 1994 of Stephen Milligan MP. His body was found dressed in women’s underwear, with a satsuma in his mouth and a bin liner over his head. He had died from strangulation with a length of flex, the apparent victim of a session of autoerotic asphyxiation that had gone wrong.

Beyond sex, there were also tales of financial impropriety by MPs. Again it helped if there was an element of ridicule involved — and a killer phrase, as when Mohamed Al-Fayed, the media-loving owner of Harrods, claimed that one could “rent an MP just like you rent a London taxi”. He also said he’d had a couple of MPs, Neil Hamilton and Tim Smith, on his payroll. Smith admitted it, but Hamilton and his wife, Christine, wouldn’t let it lie, and loudly protested his innocence.

All of this got mixed up with the observation that industries that had only recently been privatised under the Conservatives now seemed to be employing rather a lot of Conservative ex-ministers. It made for an explosive equation: Back to Basics plus Fat Cats equalled Tory Sleaze. An opinion poll in October 1994 found 61% agreeing with the statement that “the Tories these days give the impression of being very sleazy and disreputable”. As Robin Cook said, this looked like “an arrogant government that has been around too long to remember it is accountable to the people”. It’s as true today as it was then.

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The attention given to the Mellor story bewildered some people. An affair with an actress, puzzled his French counterpart Jack Lang: “Why else does one become minister of culture?” It seemed a very British scandal. In other words, it didn’t actually scandalise anyone. People didn’t really care about the immorality. Lib Dem leader Paddy Ashdown discovered this when news of his adulterous affair was published under the headline “Paddy Pantsdown” (“dreadful, but brilliant,” he acknowledged), and he enjoyed an opinion-poll bounce. It was just gossip, adding to the gaiety of the nation. At a time when Cool Britannia was trying to replicate the Swinging Sixties, David Mellor was to John Profumo what Oasis were to the Beatles.

And that was largely the impact of Back to Basics. These stories embarrassed the MPs, and they embarrassed the prime minister — which made them even more entertaining because he seemed so incongruous a figure in the midst of such shenanigans. (Major’s earlier affair with Edwina Currie was not revealed until 2002.) Others got hurt in the process, but there was little public sympathy. Even the death of Stephen Milligan was largely greeted with giggles. And it all added to the image of a decadent government in its dying days.

The era came to an end with the 1997 general election, when Neil Hamilton — very much the poster boy of Tory sleaze — lost his seat to the white-suited journalist Martin Bell, standing as an independent. Thereafter, things got dull. 

Tony Blair’s government had its own image problems, and the cash-for-honours investigation meant Blair himself became the first prime minister to be questioned by police. But none of it was much fun. And New Labour was lucky. The biggest scandal on its watch was MPs expenses, and all the most colourful examples came from the Conservatives: the servicing of the boiler for Michael Ancram’s swimming pool, the cleaning of Douglas Hogg’s moat, Sir Peter Viggers’s duck house. John Prescott did his best, with mock-Tudor beams and having a toilet seat mended not once but twice, but despite that, and despite six Labour MPs being found guilty on various charges of fraud and false accountancy — five were jailed — the most the Tories could hope for was a public attitude of a plague on both their duck houses.

So how did the most recent Conservative Parliament match up to its less-than-illustrious predecessor? Not very well really. It all got a bit too serious.

Financial and other misdemeanours continued. MPs still fall, with depressing ease, for the undercover journalist offering money. But somehow the political consequences weren’t as severe as before. Under New Labour, Peter Mandelson had come back from two resignations, which seemed outrageous, but now it was scarcely worth clearing your desk: Suella Braverman resigned as home secretary, and was back in the same job a week later, courtesy of the next prime minister off the rank. 

There have been happy moments, of course. There was William Wragg, honeytrapped via the dating app Grindr — and then giving the scammer the contact numbers of his colleagues. There was Neil Parish watching pornography on his phone in the Commons, and explaining that “it was tractors I was looking at”. There was Mark Menzies, the last of the Parliament to lose the whip, following allegations of him having been locked in a flat by “some bad people” and needing money. And then there was health secretary Matt Hancock. In 2021 footage from CCTV emerged of him adulterously embracing his aide in his office, and he was obliged to resign, “because I fell in love with somebody”.

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But that wasn’t true. He actually had to go because he’d broken government rules on social distancing during the Covid pandemic. The same reason that Boris Johnson’s adviser Dominic Cummings had to go, after he’d taken his family from London to Durham, and then had a test-drive to Barnard Castle “because my eyesight seemed to have been affected by the disease”. And the same reason that Johnson’s poll ratings plummeted, when stories of Partygate refused to go away, and he was fined by the police for celebrating his birthday, the first prime minister found to have committed a criminal offence while in office.

Coinciding with Partygate was the Owen Paterson affair that badly damaged Johnson’s standing. The prime minister tried to stop the parliamentary suspension of Paterson, who had broken lobbying rules, representing a healthcare company that won two lucrative government contracts during the pandemic.

Even so, it was a sex scandal that finally did for Johnson, and perhaps that was appropriate for a prime minister whose sexual history would have impressed Lloyd George. The story went back to 2017, when the #MeToo moment cost the jobs of cabinet ministers Michael Fallon and Damian Green for inappropriate behaviour in the past. Also leaving office was assistant whip Chris Pincher, alleged to have behaved improperly towards a former Olympic rower, though he was cleared by the party and was back in government within weeks. 

In February 2022, Pincher’s career took him back to the whips’ office, and four months later he resigned again, this time after a drunken incident at the Carlton Club, where he was alleged to have groped a couple of men. Further allegations followed of unwanted sexual advances, and questions were asked about whether Johnson knew of the stories before making Pincher a whip. Initially the government denied any pre-knowledge, but then the prime minister had to admit that actually he had been informed. It was also suggested that he didn’t take any of it too seriously: “Pincher by name, Pincher by nature,” was said (by Dominic Cummings) to have been his comment.

Johnson’s duplicity came as a revelation to his colleagues. For years — decades, even — people had accused Johnson of playing fast and loose with facts, but it was not until Pinchergate that the scales fell from the eyes of chancellor Rishi Sunak and health secretary Sajid Javid. So shocked were they that they resigned from cabinet on a matter of principle, followed by dozens of other ministers, who made up in numbers what they lacked in public recognition. Michael Gove also wanted to resign, but he made the mistake of telling the prime minister in advance, and was promptly sacked. That was a final gesture by Johnson, who then resigned himself.

Obviously, Johnson’s defenestration wasn’t about Pincher at all. It was about those poll ratings and Covid. The Conservatives feared they might lose the next election if they didn’t replace Johnson with a plausible leader. Someone like Liz Truss (who’d survived revelations about her affair more than a decade ago). And for some, it was also about revenge for Brexit; Europe had brought down the last four Tory prime ministers, and played a part this time as well.

The removal of a prime minister was much more dramatic than anything the Nineties had offered, though essentially it was the same issue of hypocrisy, the gap between politicians telling others how to behave and then not doing so themselves. 

On one level, it was still as trivial as it ever was, politicians and commentators arguing earnestly about birthday cake. But it was so much more serious now, played out against a backdrop of all those deaths in the pandemic. And bubbling under the surface was the dark suspicion that those who imposed the lockdown regime knew it was pointless, which was why they were happy to ignore it. 

Partygate provoked genuine anger, in a way that David Mellor and Neil Hamilton never did. The mood of the country is different these days; much more despairing than when the economy was growing in the mid-Nineties. There’s less appetite for amusement. In a sign of dour times, we’re just about to vote a former Director of Public Prosecutions into Downing Street. Keir Starmer is not going to come a cropper like Johnson did; despite the press’s best efforts, Beergate didn’t take off, because no one could really picture Starmer at a party in the first place. There will be sexual misbehaviour and MPs on the take — there always are — but they tend not to hurt Labour so much.

On the other hand, we’re living in a time of proper scandals: institutional abuse and corruption, with cover-ups so common as to seem like this is simply how things are done. There’s public hostility to an establishment that seems more concerned with protecting itself than serving the people, and Sir Keir can look very establishment indeed. But that’s a while off yet, because incoming parties get a bit of leeway; not even the Bernie Ecclestone affair damaged Tony Blair in his first year as prime minister. Meanwhile we’re left with the bitter aftertaste of the outgoing Parliament.

The image of a decadent government — Robin Cook’s “arrogant government” — was there all right under Boris Johnson, Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak, but it had a harder, nastier edge. I don’t think it’s merely nostalgia that makes me think the Nineties will remain the Golden Age of Sleaze. The negative publicity then led to the creation of the Ministerial Code and the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards, overseen by the Standards and Privileges Committee, all in pursuit of better behaviour. It would be hard to argue that this goal has been achieved.

It wasn’t a new phenomenon. It had started two months earlier, on Easter Sunday, when Clacton-on-Sea was invaded by “1,000 fighting, drinking, roaring, rampaging teenagers on scooters and motor-cycles”. But there was no identification then of any specific groups, so they were all lumped in together, headlined “The Wild Ones”, a reference to a 1953 biker-movie starring Marlon Brando that had been banned in Britain.

Clacton had been a big story, but it was Margate, 60 years ago this weekend, that made the most impact — both at the time and in popular memory — because now there were named subcultures. In fact, had the papers been paying attention, the categorisation had already been established.

“Are you a Mod or a Rocker?” Motorcycle magazine had asked in December 1963. The choice of transport was probably enough to answer the question — the greasy motorbike of the rocker, or the neat little scooter of the mod — but in case there was any doubt, you could look in a mirror. If you were wearing a black shirt, blue jeans, big boots and a leather jacket, said Motorcycle, you were a Rocker; whereas a polka-dot shirt, pink half-mast trousers, Cuban boots, and a parka with fur-trimmed hood signified a Mod.

So Mods vs Rockers it was. They had names and they had a rivalry. It was like the Jets and the Sharks in West Side Story, which gave the papers a reference point for the older reader; three years after release, the film was still being screened in British cinemas, and the soundtrack was still in the album charts.

In the run-up to the August bank holiday, the press were licking their lips with anticipation. “Will it be another Margate?” they hoped, as they reported that 400 men from the Metropolitan Police were waiting at RAF Northolt, ready to be flown into any resort that required additional support. And in Hastings, the disturbances were bad enough for the chief constable to call in this flying squad, to deal with what the papers dubbed the Second Battle of Hastings.

The ripples spread out in unpredictable ways. In Streatham, south London, the local Young Socialists produced a leaflet: “Up the Mods! Up the Rockers! Down with police violence!” and were promptly suspended by the constituency Labour Party, with five members being expelled. There was a general election due, and caution was the order of the day; no one wanted to risk controversy with a leaflet that “was detrimental to Labour Party election chances”. Meanwhile, 22-year-old satirist Bill Oddie released his first single, “Nothing Better to Do”, inspired by the seaside confrontation: “Play, little boy,” he mocked, “there’s so much to destroy.” It was banned by the BBC, he said, because they feared “the gangs would use it as an anthem”.

And at the London School of Economics, a young PhD student named Stanley Cohen became fascinated by the media response to Margate. The fruit of his research was one of the most influential works of sociology, Folk Devils and Moral Panics (1972). The phrase “moral panic” already existed, and the idea wasn’t entirely new — “We know no spectacle so ridiculous as the British public in one of its periodical fits of morality,” wrote historian Thomas Macaulay in 1831 — but it was Cohen’s book that formalised and established the concept.

At its heart, it was an understanding that a moral panic is a short-lived explosion of outrage that is rooted in a longer history. The media present an incident as being shockingly new, but it shocks only because it plays into an existing narrative.

In the case of the Mods and Rockers, there was the obvious precedent from the Fifties of the Teddy Boys, and before them, the Cosh Boys. There’d been a rise in juvenile crime in the post-war years, and in 1950 the Daily Mirror had asked its readers to identify the cause. “Films, radio, lack of parental control,” came the answers, together with a call for the restoration of corporal punishment for young offenders. (Judicial birching had been abolished in 1948.)

But even then it wasn’t new. There were reports in 1942 of a group of teenagers being attacked and robbed by a gang of men in south London, leaving one of them dead in the street. The previous decade, before the war, newspapers had noted that “knives, razors, knuckle dusters and sandbags were used by rival gangs in fierce street fighting” in north London. Going back before the First World War, shots were fired “during an encounter between rival gangs”. Further back still, to the days when judicial birching was at its peak, in 1888 the Pall Mall Gazette listed “the bandit gangs of London”, including the Prince Arthur Gang, the Gang of Roughs and the Jovial Thirty-Two. (All available for use by indie rock bands seeking a name.)

These late-Victorian delinquents were collectively known as Hooligans in London, but there were similar groups elsewhere, referred to as Scuttlers in Manchester, High Rippers in Liverpool, Peaky Blinders in Birmingham. What they had in common was low-level crime and street violence, though mostly they fought each other in turf wars. They tended to dress much the same as well: cap worn forwards over the eyes, no collar, a muffler or neckerchief instead of a tie, bell-bottom trousers, hobnailed boots and, in some quarters, a Newgate fringe — a shaved face with a beard running below the jawline, in imitation of where the hangman’s noose would be placed. Then there was the element of clothing as weaponry. “The most characteristic part of their uniform is the substantial leather belt heavily mounted with metal,” read a report in 1900. “It is not ornamental, but then it is not intended for ornament.”

In short, young men have always had a propensity to violence — and each generation discovers this anew when it gets to be old enough to talk about “young people”. It’s the moral panic that keeps on giving, because it’s a reflection of human nature. Also discovered on a regular basis is the shock revelation that this isn’t just a male preserve. In 1906, it was said that the gangs in Glasgow included “young girls of ages averaging from 14 to 17, with very long draggled skirt and hair in tightly twisted pigtail”.

Nonetheless, there was something different about the post-war youth subcultures. “Teddy boys were really narcissistic,” wrote Mim Scala in his memoir Diary of a Teddy Boy. “I mean Masai warrior, Beau Brummell, Bertie Wooster narcissistic…” And that reference to Beau Brummell was significant. It was Brummell in the early years of the 19th century who’d invented the concept of the dandy, using an obsessive attitude towards clothes as an entrée to the highest circles in the land. “A nobody, who made himself a somebody, and gave the law to everybody,” said novelist Catherine Gore, and his inspiration soon filtered down through society.

The young Charles Dickens, with his green velvet jacket, red waistcoat and long hair, was typical of those who aspired to dandy status. “We keep no horse, but a clothes-horse,” he wrote in the 1830s. Later, the music hall had a rich vein of songs that mocked those who came from working-class parts of London and dressed above their station: “The Marquis of Camberwell Green”, “Percy from Pimlico”, “Burlington Bertie from Bow” and more. “Tho’ I’m not worth a groat, I wear a decent coat,” sang Walter Laburnum in “Fashionable Fred”, a sentiment that resonated down the years, recognisable in Adam Ant’s dandy highwayman: “I spend my cash on looking flash.”

What the Teddy Boys did was to bring together these two strands from the 19th century: the street-gang tradition of the Peaky Blinders, and the working-class dandy. And then, with the arrival in Britain of rock ’n’ roll, they added a musical soundtrack.

The subcultures that followed took their lead from the teds. Mods and Rockers, skinheads and punks, metalheads and goths — all defined themselves by dress and by music. That connected them to a wider popular culture and made them national movements, not just local street-gangs as the scuttlers had been. They identified themselves as being outside the mainstream, yet helped to shape it.

The other thing that the fashion and the music did was to soften the violence. According to the police, teds didn’t resist when arrested; they’d spent too much on the outfits to risk damaging them. Despite the press coverage, no one was killed or seriously injured at Margate or in the Second Battle of Hastings. And not even the Skinheads, at their racist football-hooligan worst, were as violent as the Peaky Blinders had been, 70 years earlier.

“You could say it’s a fashion statement, but I think it’s more than that,” said Paul Weller in 2004. “The working-class love of clothes, looking good, rising above your station. I don’t think it’ll ever die. It’s really in our British fibre. These clothes, my haircut, reflect my attitude.”

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By then, however, the phenomenon had ceased to exist. Vestiges of the old world remain, frozen in time, but they’re museum pieces, not new creations; they’re the punks who hang around Camden Market in north London, selling themselves for tourist photos. Street gangs still exist, but they’re more akin to scuttlers than teds, fighting turf wars that are certainly more violent than their 19th-century predecessors.

What is long gone is the great British tradition of creating a new subculture every four or five years, along with a new form of pop music. Maybe it’s because music is no longer a badge of identity, but a massive online jumble of everything that’s ever been recorded. Clothes mean less, as well, in an era of body modification, from tattoos to piercings to surgery. Maybe it’s because there isn’t a shared culture anymore, and it’s hard for a group to define itself as outside the mainstream if there’s no mainstream in the first place.

Tribalism hasn’t disappeared, of course, the wish to belong, to go where the in-crowd goes. It’s just that, lacking a cultural escape-valve, it finds its place in internet “communities”, where identity comes with the political slogan and the hashtag. It’s much the same as the polka-dot shirt and pink half-mast trousers, but not as cool. 

The big beneficiaries were the Liberals, who gained over 200 seats — who only rubbed it in the Tories’ faces by creating the welfare state with pensions and National Insurance, by curbing the power of the House of Lords, and by legislating for Irish Home Rule. And as though that were not bad enough, the 1906 election also saw 29 MPs elected for the Labour Representation Committee, a grouping that promptly reconstituted itself as the Labour Party.

These were early days, and the Labour vote was less than 5% of the national total, but behind the parliamentary party were two million members of the trade unions. The demand to extend the franchise, to allow votes for the working class and for women, was growing and would become irresistible. The Conservatives had more to fear than even the radicalism of the Liberals: the future was surely socialist.

That, at least, was the conclusion of John Dawson Mayne, a former advocate-general of Madras and sometime Conservative election candidate whose dystopian fears serve as something of a precursor to our own Tory tailspin. So concerned was he at the terrible prospect confronting the nation that — at the age of 79 — he turned to fiction and wrote his first novel, The Triumph of Socialism, and How It Succeeded, published in 1908. Its premise is a landslide election victory for Labour as early as 1912. The new government introduces a minimum wage and an eight-hour working day, and nationalises the railways; it abolishes the House of Lords, turns churches into places of entertainment and makes divorce much easier. The King is exiled, and the National Anthem replaced by a hurriedly written new song, “God Save Ourselves”. The result is misery and mass starvation.

Mayne wasn’t alone in his concern. There was also William Le Queux, a prolific writer whose big hit had been The Invasion of 1910, which predicted — with great inaccuracy — the forthcoming war with Germany. Unperturbed by that event not happening on schedule, Le Queux published a new scare-story, in 1910 itself, entitled The Unknown Tomorrow: How the Rich Fared at the Hands of the Poor, Together with a Full Account of the Social Revolution in England. This was set at a more cautious distance, in 1935, and depicted a socialist revolution, under the slogan “Britain for the British”, that unleashes a Red Terror to rival Robespierre.

Then there was Ernest Bramah’s What Might Have Been (1907) — about a near-future when a Labour government has already been ousted by a more militant socialist regime — R.H. Benson’s epic Lord of the World (1907), set 100 years in the future but hinging on the election of a Labour government in 1917. Eclipsing all rival accounts, Benson’s ends with the rise of the Anti-Christ and the destruction of the Vatican in an air-raid, after which the only surviving cardinal flees to the Holy Land. “That place, father,” he asks a Syrian priest, gesturing towards a small settlement, “what is its name?” And the man replies: “That is Megiddo. Some call it Armageddon.”

No one else was quite that apocalyptic, but all these books had the same theme: the arrival of Labour in Parliament was a harbinger of national decline and disaster. The policies of the various fictional governments were much the same as well. Socialism means economic incompetence; the dismantling of defence; the abolition of the churches, the House of Lords and the monarchy. It was essentially unpatriotic, un-British.

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Were these concerns rooted in reality? Probably not. Labour wasn’t a revolutionary party even then, seeking reform through Parliament. Ramsay Macdonald, one of the new Labour MPs elected in 1906, could sound ominous when defining socialism — “The State is going to take over the means of production into its own hands, and private property will come to an end” — but he was also keen to soften the blow: “Suddenness and revolution are not the socialist ideal.” The role of Labour at this stage was to drag the Liberal government to the Left, securing, for example, legal rights for trade unions. In the great conflict between the Commons and Lords, Labour called for the abolition of the Upper Chamber, but that was as extreme as it cared to be.

And anyway, not everyone was consumed by doom. Despite the nightmare visions, some in high society adopted this fashionable new creed of socialism. Daisy Greville, the Countess of Warwick and a former lover of Edward VII, went beyond even the Labour Party, and disapproved of the trade union movement on the grounds that it “only postpones the revolution”. She joined the much more radical Social Democratic Federation, probably the only member of the party who ever hired a private train to take her home after a Marxist discussion meeting. Such figures proved irresistible to satirists. “I am nothing if I am not a socialist,” declares a countess in Philip Gibbs’s novel The Street of Adventure (1909). “I do so pity the poor Poor. I have taken them up as a hobby, and I find it ever so much more elevating and ennobling than poultry-keeping.” In Saki’s The Unbearable Bassington (1912), Lady Caroline Benaresq declares herself a socialist so that she can “disagree with most of the Liberals and Conservatives, and all the Socialists”.

There were also warnings that these wealthy patrons represented a source of temptation for decent working-class politicians. Saints in Society, the debut novel of Margaret Baillie-Saunders, was published in 1905 — even before the Party was officially created — and follows a poor printer from a South London slum who’s elected as a Labour MP. Embraced by the establishment, he loses sight of his roots, his values and himself. He loses touch with his wife as well. “Now, my dear, don’t be silly,” he tells her; “there are matters you can’t, as a woman, be expected to understand.” But of course, it’s she who remains true to their original ideals, while he is corrupted by wealth and prestige.

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What’s striking about all the fiction that poured out after the 1906 election is how rapidly the lines of attack on Labour were laid out. And then how very enduring they’ve proved to be. Workers on the boards of companies? Advocating that policy was evidence of Tony Benn’s lunacy in the Seventies. A minimum wage? It would lead to economic ruin, warned the Tories when it was finally introduced in 1998. High taxation? That’s a perennial, as is weakness on defence — hence Keir Starmer’s determination not to show an inch between him and the government on Ukraine or Israel.

The dystopian novels exaggerated, of course, but the fears they expressed were genuine and widespread at the time. Ramsay MacDonald complained that so many people saw socialists as “Mad Mullahs”, hell-bent on “the overthrow of ancient institutions, social organisations and the moral conscience”, and there was no shortage of those.

A century ago, MacDonald himself went on to become Labour’s first prime minister, embodying Margaret Baillie-Saunders’s fable of the worker seduced by society. Born the illegitimate son of a housemaid and a farmworker, now he could hobnob with the highest nobs in the land. And he revelled in it. As a contemporary commentator noted, MacDonald “enjoys the glory of richly embroidered uniform and white knee-breeches”.

And if that first Labour government didn’t achieve a great deal, it did at least, MacDonald believed, serve to reassure, ending the most extreme predictions of national ruin. As he told the King — he would have approved of that namedrop — he and his colleagues had done much “to dispel the fantastic and extravagant belief which at one time found expression that they were nothing but a band of irresponsible revolutionaries intent on wreckage and destruction”.

He was right. There was still talk of extremists bent on wrecking the nation, but by the Twenties it centred not on Labour but on communists. There was a newly popularised phrase, “the lunatic fringe”, to describe those who, in David Lloyd George’s words, “are always crying for the moon and will take nothing terrestrial in its place”. By definition, a party of government was not on the fringe; it was firmly in the mainstream. Macdonald had set the standard for the future — one where, as we saw yesterday, a Labour shadow chancellor can give a lecture to the City on the importance of “securonomics” and “long-term growth”.

Since Macdonald, just three Labour leaders have won a general election: two were public schoolboys, Clement Attlee and Tony Blair, while Harold Wilson, who went to grammar school, had his own children privately educated. In any event, despite his modest origins, Wilson was a thoroughly respectable member of society, an Oxford don and the recipient of an OBE for his work as a civil servant before he even entered Parliament. In the same way, Starmer — soon to become the fifth man to win — earned his knighthood as the Director of Public Prosecutions a year before he stood for election. Labour has been accepted as a government only when led by those who could move comfortably in establishment circles, smoothing away the fears of wild-eyed insurrectionaries.

Or, as one of Oxfordshire’s landed gentry observed after Macdonald’s government fell in 1924: “Well, we have been through a revolution, and our throats are still intact.”

Born in 1860, the only son of an East London tailor’s cutter, Bottomley lost both parents before he was five and was placed in a Birmingham orphanage, from which he ran away at the age of 14. From this unpromising background, and armed with little more than ambition, charm, and unshakable self-confidence, he made his fortune during the Australian goldrush in the last years of the 19th century.

London was awash with investors in search of profits, and Bottomley reinvented himself as a financier, launching companies that were forever just about to strike gold but never quite did. When his reserves ran low, he went back to the same investors and convinced them to throw good money after bad. Along the way, an estimated £3 million found its way into his pocket, and he was so brazen and jolly about his misappropriations that he got away with them. Challenged at a shareholders’ meeting about what had happened to £700,000 that had gone missing from the accounts, he came clean: “I have not the faintest idea.” He sat down to cheers.

In short, Bottomley was a “barefaced swindler” who “deliberately planned schemes to rob the public”, as one contemporary put it (Bottomley sued for libel and won), or “the cleverest thief in the Empire”, as a prosecuting lawyer in yet another case suggested. There were a lot of court cases in his life, and, despite a lack of legal training, he liked to defend himself. He normally won.

To the non-investing classes, he was a hero: the East End boy who had made good, thoroughly relishing a profligate life of champagne, racehorses and chorus girls, while still firmly on the side of “the despised, the rejected and the downtrodden”. Selected at short notice to be the Liberal candidate for slum-ridden Hackney South, he failed in the khaki election of 1900, and learnt his lesson. Thereafter, he nursed his constituency with a devotion that bordered on bribery, setting up soup kitchens and giving Christmas parties for local children (he appeared as Santa Claus). Come the great Liberal landslide of 1906, Bottomley took the Tory-held seat with a remarkable swing of 16.7% (the national average was 5.4%), winning the largest Liberal majority for a London constituency.

He wasn’t welcomed into the fold at Westminster, though. His reputation as a crooked businessman preceded him, and whenever he rose to speak, Liberal MPs talked loudly among themselves, trying to drown him out. He was unfazed. He “outfaces the cold displeasure with the most sublime effrontery”, said one commentator. He was “in the Liberal Party but not of it”.

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Indeed, at a time when temperance mattered to Liberals, he exuded the boozy bonhomie of the saloon-bar — to the extent that he inspired the brash, boisterous Toad of Toad Hall in Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows. Bottomley was short and stocky, with a large head and a soft, round face. In parliament, he tossed out policy ideas designed to attract the press. Abolish beer duty, and replace it with a tax on fizzy drinks, he’d suggest. Or he’d call for peerages to be sold on the open market to fund welfare spending. He was, in short, the Nigel Farage of his day.

His instincts, like Nigel’s, were distinctly tabloid. When he launched a weekly paper, John Bull — much of which he wrote himself — it featured a mix of salacious gossip, investigative journalism, highly opinionated comment and shock exposés of “the vilest habits of sexual depravity and degradation”. Surprisingly for a vanity project, it generated cash: any company that was repeatedly targeted in the pages of John Bull would be told that the attacks would stop in return for a financial consideration. At one stage, Bottomley was being paid a retainer by Harrods to investigate complaints by former staff — complaints for which he was the only source.

Relentless self-advertisement made him famous, but as an MP he clearly wasn’t deemed necessary. If he was ever to make progress, he needed to throw some grit into the political machine, to disrupt it sufficiently that the nation would realise how much it needed the expertise of Horatio Bottomley. So, in autumn 1909, he booked the Royal Albert Hall for the launch of his new venture, the John Bull League.

Bottomley’s platform was what you’d expect of a City man who’d gone into politics without any great vision: all the parties were the same these days, and we needed to get rid of professional politicians, replacing them with “a common sense, business government for a common sense, business people”. There was no need for a nanny state. “Molesting and restrictive legislation will be kept for the nursery. What people eat, what they drink, and what they play at will be a matter entirely for themselves.”

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Much of this seemed to be aimed at his Liberal colleagues. Likewise, the specially commissioned campaign song that celebrated anti-puritanism:

Would you utterly destroy
Faddists who would murder joy?
Born on purpose to annoy?
Join the League!

Bottomley also attacked professional charities for wasting money on administration and overpaid executives, and for sending funds overseas that could be used for the relief of social problems at home. He wanted an end to first-past-the-post, an appointed Senate to replace the House of Lords, and votes for women — why should a man waste his time voting while his wife “goes to the theatre or sits at home”? It was all good populist stuff.

He took the message out to mass meetings around the country, and staged benefit concerts with the support of music-hall stars, promoting himself remorselessly via the pages of John Bull — now claiming sales of a third of a million. He was a witty and engaging speaker, swinging between passionate outrage and jovial self-deprecation (it’s how he won so many court cases). He quickly gained fans. But it wasn’t clear what they were supposed to do next.

Bottomley didn’t seem to know either, unsure whether the League was a pressure group, a faction or an embryonic party. He stood under the Liberal banner in both the 1910 elections, and won both times, then — aware that he was running out of road — he resigned the party whip. In the autumn of 1911, his past finally caught up with him: for the first time, he lost a major case, sued by the estate of an investor for £50,000. The following year, he was declared bankrupt and obliged to resign as an MP. With his disgrace, the John Bull League withered on the vine. It did make a tentative stab at engaging with the political process, fielding candidates in two by-elections, in 1911 and 1913, but came second in a two-horse race on each occasion. Whole months drifted past now when the League wasn’t mentioned at all, even in the pages of John Bull itself.

And then came the war, and he reinvented himself as the great patriotic speaker. National crises are a gift to any self-regarding populist. When things go wrong, it’s time for the country to pull together and rise above and beyond party interests — and Bottomley was there to do his bit. For a fee of £200 (around £10,000 at today’s prices), plus a cut of the door money, he’d address a meeting anywhere in the country, initially to encourage recruitment, then to raise funds for war charities and to sell government bonds. Meanwhile, John Bull, which was in full jingoist mode, pumped and puffed his endeavours, rather like the Daily Mirror in the Eighties heyday of that other cheerful and crooked proprietor, Robert Maxwell.

Bottomley was so reinvigorated that when the war ended, he decided to go for his old seat of Hackney South again, this time as an Independent. He was still banging the same old drum, augmented now by demands for massive reparations from Germany. The Kaiser, he insisted, should be tried by an international court. In December 1918, he trounced the Coalition Liberal candidate, taking 80% of the vote, and headed back to Parliament. It ended worse than last time.

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In the aftermath of the war, the government issued Victory Bonds for £5 a pop. This was, protested Bottomley, unaffordable for the working classes. In the pages of John Bull, he proposed to block purchase bonds, then divide them and offer readers the chance to buy a £1 stake. The scheme was popular but, inevitably, much of the money raised never got any further than Bottomley. When an ex-employee published a pamphlet exposing this, Bottomley sued for libel, thereby drawing the attention of the authorities to his malpractice. The final court case came in 1922. Bottomley was found guilty on more than 20 charges of fraud and given seven years with hard labour.

Public support evaporated: fleecing greedy and gullible speculators in the City was all very well, but stealing from the working class in the name of patriotism was a step too far. Yet even in jail, some of the old ebullience remained. As he sat stitching-up mailbags in Wormwood Scrubs, a prison visitor tried to make conversation: “Sewing, Horatio?” and he replied, “No, reaping.”

So, Horatio Bottomley was never taken very seriously. But perhaps his chief problem — apart from the crookedness — was being ahead of his time. In those years before the First World War, his assaults on the political system appealed to many. The country was deeply unstable, riven by industrial disputes, Suffragette terrorism and incipient civil war in Ireland; he successfully exploited the unease. He was, above all, a great campaigner, capable of inspiring an audience, and not averse to underhand tricks: a speciality was recruiting men to attend rival candidates’ pre-election meetings and then walk noisily out, one-by-one in their hobnail boots, drowning out the speaker.

He had the egotism, the pulling power, the stage presence — but he had no staying power, no real vision for changing the nation, just an ersatz sense of destiny. As his time in the City had shown, he could write an eye-catching prospectus to attract investors, but there was nothing to back it up. He never returned to public life after his release from prison, and died, bankrupt again, in 1933.

Unfortunately for him, Bottomley lived in an era when politics demanded more than mere showmanship. He might have done more, had he been born a century later: nowadays he’d be in his element (if we momentarily set aside the 40 years of rampant criminality). Vain, self-promoting, undisciplined, a campaigner in poetry without the attention-span to govern in prose — well, you can fill in the name of your choice for which of our representatives he most resembles. Hence why Horatio Bottomley seems like so very modern a figure. He was wasted on the Edwardians.

This was — to avoid confusion — exactly 100 years ago, in December 1923. But the essential features of the controversy feel very familiar today. There was a Gadarene rush of commentators staking out their positions, and the views being expressed were exactly as they would be now. The key difference, to which we shall return, was the tone.

The thing that so upset Bath councillors a century ago was one of the most popular and enduring of children’s hymns, “All Things Bright and Beautiful”, written by Cecil Frances Alexander — also of “Once in Royal David’s City” fame. The hymn is an inclusive celebration of God’s Creation: not the most sophisticated theme, but not a particularly contentious one either. And then comes the third verse:

The rich man in his castle,
The poor man at his gate;
God made them high or lowly,
And ordered their estate.

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“Christ never meant children to sing such a verse,” protested one councillor: this was simply propaganda in support of the class system, the words clearly suggesting divine disapproval of socialism. They might have added that it was surely no coincidence that this reactionary attempt to shore up the status quo had first been published in 1848, the year revolutionary voices were being raised across Europe, as Marx and Engels were writing The Communist Manifesto. In case there was any doubt of where Alexander’s sympathies lay, exception was also taken to a verse in another of her hymns, “Day by Day the Little Daisy”:

God has given each his station;
Some have riches and high place,
Some have lowly homes and labour –
All may have His precious grace.

There had been criticism of “All Things Bright and Beautiful” before, and some schools elsewhere in the country had unilaterally chosen to omit the offensive words. But it was Bath that declared open season on the story. On the Left, Lady Clare Annersley — the socialist, pacifist, vegetarian daughter of the 5th Earl Annersley — said she was “horrified” by the verse; it would “have scandalised the prophets of the Old Testament”. James Adderley, a leading Christian socialist who was Rector of St Paul’s, Covent Garden, took a more performative approach: he would interrupt the singing of the hymn just before the offending passage, calling out: “Children, don’t sing the next verse, because it is a lie!”

From the Right came accusations that removing the verse would be a “mutilation” of the hymn, and that those who wished to do so were killjoys. The conservative press complained that these Socialists thought that “the Christian religion was inimical to the progress of their cause because it is aimed at making people happy and contented”. The charming innocence of a childhood favourite was being corrupted because “class hatred was being preached by certain poisonous sections of the community”.

The problem with starting down this path, some ruminated, was not knowing where it might end. “A great many hymns in school hymn books are not fit for children to sing,” said Dr Frank Ballard, a Methodist minister in Sheffield. “Fifty per cent of them are not fit to be sung in churches and chapels because they are not sensible.” And why stop at hymns? “What about Shakespeare, Keats and Tennyson?” asked the Daily Express. “There is hardly a classic which would not be disembowelled by majorities and minorities.” Further still: “The agnostic might demand a revised version of the Bible on the ground that his feelings were hurt by being described as a fool.”

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Then there were the facetious responses: really, who could afford a castle these days, what with income tax and supertax and death duties? And there were those who loftily dismissed the whole row as a tiresome irrelevancy. No one had sung that verse for 25 years anyway, wrote a Middlesex vicar to the Daily Mail: “Hymn books soon get out of date owing to a better understanding of social life and the different aspirations of the ages.” No one, however, could suggest any precedent for the censorship being proposed.

Besides, it was not as if the hymn’s suppression would do any good, observed a columnist in the Birmingham Gazette: “The banning of the verse will not eject any rich man from his castle, or give any poor man a permanent pass through the gate.”

And maybe, it was suggested, the Labour councillors were out of touch with the values and concerns of those they claimed to represent. The verse might be seen not as insult, but inspiration, a reassurance that the poor, too, were loved by God. “To me, as a working woman, it has been the greatest comfort,” said a Bath resident. She added: “I hope the poor man at his gate will not always be as poor, but I don’t think it will be brought about by dragging the rich man down to the poor man’s level.”

In the end, Bath council referred the matter to its own education committee, which — embarrassed by the national publicity — instructed schools to drop the verse. Elsewhere, in Nottinghamshire, there was a recommendation that it be retained, though only if accompanied by an advisory note that it could be omitted at the discretion of teachers. Complaints continued, however, and in 1939 the Church of England finally yielded to pressure and advised that the verse be removed, not because Alexander meant any harm by it, but because it was “open to misinterpretation”. They didn’t quite apologise if any offence has been caused, but they weren’t far off.

It was a mostly trivial episode, as any individual skirmish in a culture war tends to be, but it did illustrate the state of politics at the time. This kind of story proliferates when there is broad agreement on the big questions of government: the economy, tax and spending, international relations. That was the case 100 years ago, as a post-war consensus emerged.

The row in Bath came just days after the general election that produced the first ever Labour government, led by Ramsay MacDonald. It wasn’t exactly an electoral triumph, though. With barely 30% of the vote, an increase of just one point, Labour had 191 MPs – some way behind the 258 Tories — and was able to govern only with the informal support of the Liberals, and only on the assumption that it wouldn’t do anything that might be construed as socialism. No one had any great expectations and nothing much was delivered. All the talk of nationalising the railways and the coal industry had faded away, no concessions were made to the trade unions. The government didn’t last a year, and had little to show for itself, save the reassurance that Labour in office was not going to be red in tooth and claw. As MacDonald told the King, the Party had demonstrated that it was not “a band of irresponsible revolutionaries intent on wreckage and destruction”.

In the absence of real power, a marginal fight over a children’s hymn book provided a happy diversion from politics. Labour activists could take heart from making a principled stand for socialist doctrine, Tories could paint their opponents as inherently hostile to the nation’s culture and traditions, everyone else could get on with their lives. No one was hurt, and little was at stake. It was a very British culture war.

A century on, the treatment of such a story would be much the same, but with a level of bitterness that was not evident in 1923. The difference, perhaps, is the general acceptance then of the hymn’s central message: the wonder and harmony of God’s Creation. There was, despite the differences being voiced, a shared culture beneath the war. Now, the common ground is narrower.

And that perhaps reflects a much longer period of political stagnation. Ramsay MacDonald’s government had just ten months to disappoint his activists; Tony Blair had 10 years. There was an attempt, under Jeremy Corbyn, to redraw the lines on economic grounds but it failed, and — with little prospect of change — positions have become ever more entrenched.

But “All Things Bright and Beautiful” was part of that shared culture and, shorn of what one columnist called its “Victorian class-snobbery”, it remained a fixture in school assemblies for decades to come. It was even sung in radical institutions, such as the South Islington Socialist Sunday School — though they did, of course, rewrite the words:

The rich man in his castle,
The poor man at his gate,
They shall be gone for ever,
Completely out of date.

And yet, the evil of cigarettes has not been fully extinguished. Which is why the Conservative government of Rishi Sunak is proposing that those in their late teens should become the last generation ever to smoke legally in this country. Policy to be announced this week in the King’s Speech will eradicate tobacco from our society as surely and comprehensively as cannabis and cocaine have been.

None of this is particularly new, of course. Official disapproval of smoking goes back as far as James I’s 1604 pamphlet A Counterblaste to Tobacco, though it took another three centuries for the government to get fully involved. The spur then was the outbreak of the Boer War in 1899, which saw a flood of recruits to the colours, young men who were employed as servants, shopworkers, clerks and labourers. But if working-class patriotism was in fine fettle, the same could not be said of working-class health. Around three in 10 who applied to join the ranks were rejected on medical grounds. This worrying state of affairs, said some, was down to the advent of the cheap cigarette.

“The chief cause of unfitness was proved to be smoking,” declared Percy Everett, a magazine editor who later co-wrote Scouting for Boys with Boer War hero Robert Baden-Powell. The habit was responsible for “upwards of 80 diseases, including blindness and cancers of the lower lip and tongue, and is credited with killing 20,000 each year”. In short, it was “an evil which is sapping our boyhood’s strength, and so undermining our national manhood”. Smoking, like masturbation, was linked to blindness and insanity.

In response to such concerns came the Children’s Act of 1908, passed by H. H. Asquith’s Liberal government, which introduced the first restrictions. It became illegal to sell tobacco products to anyone under the age of 16, and policemen and park keepers were authorised to confiscate tobacco, cigarettes and cigarette papers from underage smokers; they could also search boys for such items — though, for reasons of delicacy and decency, not girls.

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Adults, however, continued to smoke freely for six decades, until the evidence of the harm it caused became too great to ignore. The medical profession demanded a government intervention and in 1965 — when 70% of men and 40% of women smoked — television adverts for cigarettes were banned. (Other tobacco products fared better: “Happiness is a cigar called Hamlet” ads were still being aired on TV into the Nineties.) The ensuing introduction, in 1971, of warnings on packets — “Smoking can damage your health” — wasn’t entirely successful. A 1975 poll showed that a third of smokers didn’t believe cigarettes could kill. The wording was accordingly ramped up, to include the word “seriously”.

There was also an effort to encourage switching to weaker cigarettes. A league table was published, showing the potency of the various brands. The implication was that if you were on Capstan Full Strength — which offered 38mg of tar per cigarette — you might be better off if you traded down. The Embassy Ultra Mild had just a tenth of those levels.

Advertising restrictions didn’t apply to sponsorship, though. Sport was a particularly attractive partner, since it enabled the brand-names and logos to be displayed on television. Snooker even offered the opportunity to see sportsmen light up while competing. There was also footballer John “Bionic” Osborne, a goalie for West Bromwich Albion, who was famously photographed having a quick smoke during a match in 1972, while the ball was down the other end.

Some, feeling that government action was painfully slow, took matters into their own hands. In 1971, the New Inn in Appletreewick, West Yorkshire declared itself Britain’s first no-smoking pub. It was reported that takings slumped. Later that year, a GP made the news when he refused to accept as patients a 45-year-old woman or her eight children because she had chronic bronchitis and wouldn’t give up smoking. She’d had a 15-a-day habit before the rejection; after, she claimed: “I have become so distraught that I now find I am getting through 30 cigarettes a day.”

Between government initiative and peer pressure, the number of smokers steadily fell, as did the number of places where one could indulge. The restrictions were not always popular, however. In 1982, British Rail banned smoking in the buffet cars of its Southern Region trains, but found itself overwhelmed by complaints and forced to back down. Two years later, smoking was prohibited on Tube trains in London, despite a survey showing only 18% of passengers in favour of a ban and 54% against. By then, only around a third of adults smoked.

It was around this time, though, that public attitudes really changed. Evidence for the negative effects of passive smoking began to accumulate, and there was no coming back from that. In the Nineties, diktats were issued from Brussels that radically reduced the maximum tar yield per cigarette — even as the Common Agricultural Policy was pumping millions into subsidising tobacco production. (An exception was made for Greece, which really liked a strong smoke, and negotiated an opt-out until 2006).

In response to this directive, the other John Osborne — the playwright, not the footballer — wrote a splendidly vitriolic letter to The Times, railing against those who had deprived him of his favourite Turkish cigarettes; “untipped, robust and fragrant”, they were “one of life’s few and reliable pleasures”. The restriction was “craven abasement” to “puny tyrannies”, to countries that had so recently been dictatorships. “As a schoolboy, I narrowly escaped from ‘European’ bombs on my doorstep,” wrote Osborne. “I can forgive this eagerness, but not the compounding of the insult by dashing the tobacco from my lips 40 years on.”

Those who objected to government action on smoking — and they tended, like Osborne, to be awkward individualists — insisted that this was a question of the liberty of the individual. The war against smoking was a “new Puritanism”, said Nicholas Ridley, Margaret Thatcher’s environment secretary: “A crusade to stop others doing what they want or taking risks with their own lives.” (Ridley refused to give up smoking even when diagnosed with lung cancer.) And when David Simpson, formerly of Amnesty International, took over the anti-tobacco lobby group Action on Smoking and Health in 1979, journalist Bernard Levin spotted an irony: “Have all those years of admirable work on behalf of the oppressed and persecuted taught him nothing about the indivisibility of freedom?”

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Like our modern culture wars, the division has not been between Left and Right: over the years, Conservative, Labour and Liberal governments have all been on the same page about tobacco. Rather, it’s been between polite society — those who know they know better — and those who need to be protected from themselves. John Reid, health secretary in Tony Blair’s government, described the war against tobacco as “an obsession of the learned middle class”, and Diane Abbott saw it in similar terms in 2006: “Under New Labour, the party has gone from speaking for the white working class to speaking at them — whether about junk food or the smoking ban.”

There was some truth in this. The four-decade-long campaign had successfully reduced the number of smokers, but its impact was shaped by income and social class. Cigarettes had become unfashionable among the middle classes, but 42% of unskilled workers still smoked, as did 55% of single mothers. According to the Office for National Statistics, the imbalance remains: those with no educational qualifications are four times more likely to smoke than those with a degree.

Education, taxation and location having not been enough, there now comes a new policy to stub out smoking altogether. Sunak’s proposal is to raise the age at which one can purchase tobacco products by a year, every year, so that those now too young to smoke will forever be too young. It’s based on a similar law passed in New Zealand last year, and it will presumably pass through Parliament without much of a hitch — because in government, and in public opinion, the war has been comprehensively won. A taste for tobacco has become the love that dare not speak its name. Smokers are down to fewer than one in eight of the adult population. A YouGov poll last month showed a third of people supporting the proposed age-restriction; when you added in the 29% who wanted a complete ban immediately, it’s clear that Sunak has the public onside.

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Those who fear similar net-zero campaigns elsewhere — against alcohol, the wrong foodstuffs, cars, fireworks, whatever — might note with concern the pattern of public response to every step of the anti-smoking pathway. First, complaints, then ridicule, swiftly followed by compliance and acceptance. It took a while, but there was no rebellion. That studio laughter on Yes, Prime Minister is the sound of a different world.

Admittedly, the suppression of tobacco was greatly aided by an increased understanding of secondary smoking, but once the principle of prohibition is established, it becomes easier to administer. There’s no known secondary harm from vaping, for example, but restrictions have still been imposed by the Conservative government, and there will be more to come. In particular, there are objections to flavoured vapes, since these are assumed to be more attractive to children.

That’s not new, either. The same thinking was seen in the European directive that banned menthol-flavoured cigarettes — though its most notable objector was not a child, but Helmut Schmidt, the venerable ex-chancellor of West Germany. As well as being possibly the last major European statesman to carry a snuff-box, Schmidt was a chain-smoker, and it was reported that he bought up a stash of 38,000 mint-flavoured fags, which proved sufficient to see him through to his last puff. It’s not clear whether he bought enough. He died just shy of his 98th birthday.

Its father was William Dugdale, who had been a rising star during the political ferment in the hard years that followed the Napoleonic Wars, which E.P. Thompson called “the heroic age of popular radicalism”. Dugdale gave his first public speech to a mass rally in 1818, calling for armed insurrection against the state. He was 18 at the time. He was also mixed up in the Cato Street Conspiracy, a plot to assassinate the cabinet, and as a publisher he brought out the first edition of Robert Wedderburn’s abolitionist pamphlet, The Horrors of Slavery (1824).

But the radical moment passed, the market for revolutionary tracts collapsed, and Dugdale turned instead to publishing obscene literature to make a living. By the 1840s, he had established himself in Holywell Street as importer and distributor, as well as publisher and retailer, with a thriving mail-order business on the side. An 1851 raid on one of his seven shops saw the seizure of goods worth, allowing for inflation, £350,000 at today’s prices. This was new. The trade in obscenity had previously been centred on market stalls and itinerant salesmen; there had never been anything on this industrial scale before. Mostly, Dugdale’s trade was in prints, etchings and books — with titles such as Confessions of a Voluptuous Young Lady, The Quintessence of Birch Discipline, The Curious and Diverting History and Adventures of a Bedstead. But he also published The Exquisite, the first recognisably modern pornographic magazine. Others followed him and by the 1850s, Holywell Street had become a byword for filth.

Inevitably, all this brought Dugdale into conflict with the law. He was repeatedly sentenced on obscenity charges, normally getting two years’ hard labour each time, though it is uncertain how long he actually served. He had some influential men among his customers, and a tendency to get out of jail on technicalities.

Anyway, he saw the prosecutions as proof that he was still an irritant to all the right people: the religious and secular authorities. Their condemnation of pornographic literature was rooted in a concern that it would fall into the hands of the working class, at a time when literacy was spreading rapidly. Time and again, judges thundered that this celebration of lust, at the expense of family and parenthood, was “subversive of the foundations of civil society itself”. And since Dugdale was subversive, he saw pornography as a continuation of the political struggle by other means.

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His enemies were also crusaders, part of the great evangelical revival that came to define Victorian Britain. Most of the prosecutions were initiated by the Society for the Suppression of Vice, co-founded by William Wilberforce in 1802 to combat all manner of immorality. By the middle of the century, though, the SSV was in decline, its membership dwindling, its funds exhausted. Nonetheless, its secretary, Henry Prichard, engaged in a decades-long war with Dugdale, as the two men brought cases and counter-cases against each other. Prichard, Dugdale claimed, allowed himself to be bribed by his rival shopkeepers in their attempts to avoid prosecution; he was also reputed to re-sell onto the market the material seized in raids. There was sufficient suspicion to prompt the passing of the first-ever Obscene Publications Act in 1857, which was specifically aimed at suppressing Dugdale, while also clipping the wings of the SSV: new powers of seizure were given to the police, assumed to be less susceptible to corruption.

Dugdale carried on trading, and carried on being prosecuted, right up to his death, in 1868, while serving yet another jail term. This time the charge sheet had included obscene photographs for the first time; even as an old man, he was still moving with the times. Dugdale has never been seen as a political hero. Even at the time, few of his radical comrades approved of his business. But the state saw him as a genuine threat, and it saw pornography as dangerous. One of the exhibits at Dugdale’s last trial was John Cleland’s novel Fanny Hill, published a century earlier and still banned a century later; the works of, say, Karl Marx faced no such suppression.

A century later, at the dawn of what became known as the Golden Age of Porn, much of the story was repeated. Dugdale’s belief that he was fighting the good fight was again evident in the political counterculture of the Sixties, especially in America. “Pornography was seen to be a vehicle of liberation,” remembered Andrea Dworkin. “Anything they tried to stop us from doing, we did.” The reality turned out to be grubbier than the idealism. Dworkin and other early feminists were horrified when former comrades, with whom they had marched side-by-side on anti-Vietnam War demos, embraced the money to be made from porn. “Suddenly they weren’t so anti-capitalist anymore.” The sense of betrayal fuelled much of the feminist anti-porn campaign that followed.

Meanwhile in Britain, Suck magazine — arty, radical, pro-feminist — was launched in 1969 by figures from the alternative press. It only lasted eight issues, closing after Germaine Greer lambasted her comrades on the editorial staff as “pseudo-revolutionary”. But Suck had been strictly underground anyway, published in Amsterdam, since it was far too explicit to be legal in Britain. That was the key difference: America had a First Amendment guarantee of free speech, which by the Seventies was being successfully invoked to defend porn; Britain did not.

The second Obscene Publications Act, of 1959, did largely free the written word, but visual imagery — as various trials established — was far more restricted. In America, the film Deep Throat, starring Linda Lovelace, was a massive box-office hit with its explicit sex scenes. It was banned outright in Britain, which had to settle for the home-grown Come Play with Me, a comedy that went a little further than Carry On Camping, but not much further.

It wasn’t always clear what was permitted, but the fear of prosecution meant that the trade self-censored to be on the safe side. Depictions of an erect penis, for example, were avoided, guaranteed to get a conviction. Accordingly, an eye was always kept on “the angle of the dangle”. Indeed, there operated a semi-joking Mull of Kintyre Test: anything steeper than a map of the Scottish peninsular was deemed to be too erect. In this semi-legalised world, the imagery was less explicit than it had been in Dugdale’s day, when everything was banned and one might as well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb. The result was that the permitted material reflected the dominant values of a still sexist society: unable to show intercourse, it opted for willing and waiting women. In such circumstances, it was hard to see pornography as “a vehicle for liberation”.

Instead, the rapidly growing porn industry was concentrated in the hands of the criminal fringe, who had been running strip-clubs in Soho since the turn of the Sixties, and now added sex shops, magazines and movies to their property portfolios. Following Dugdale’s model of multiple outlets in a tightly defined area, they made Soho synonymous with porn, just as Holywell Street — less than a mile to the east — had once been.

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As society became more liberal in sexual matters, the magazines that were sold over the counter in Soho gradually migrated to licensed sex-shops elsewhere in the country and, more significantly, to the top shelves of newsagents, where their presence became hard to ignore. Softcore porn became normalised to the extent that it could be joked about on mainstream television. In a 1977 episode of sitcom George and Mildred, she inadvertently donates his stash of magazines — including copies of Nudge, Wink and Titter — to the vicar’s jumble sale, leaving him to fret over their loss: “Be hard to replace some of them. Especially the Swedish ones.”

That reference to Scandinavian titles suggested something far more serious: the hardcore magazines and films that were smuggled in from the Continent. (A mark of quality was said to be if it smelt of bacon, since that meant it had been imported on a container ship from Denmark.) This stuff was illegal, of course, but it continued to arrive, partly because the profit margins were astronomically big, and partly because there were surprisingly few prosecutions. And that was because, in another echo of the 1850s, those who were supposed to be policing the industry were actively supporting it. Between 1975 and 1976, 15 members of the Obscene Publications Squad of Metropolitan Police were jailed for taking bribes and effectively running a protection racket. The legal definition of obscenity is material likely to deprave and corrupt; that has always been a difficult concept to pin down, but what is certain is that porn has repeatedly corrupted the guardians of society.

William Dugdale had seen pornography as a way of attacking the power structures of society; now Andrea Dworkin was arguing that it was actually an expression of those power structures. Porn, she said, was “the nerve centre, the Pentagon” of the war against women, the place “where strategies of sexual abuse were both planned and communicated”. Previously, the church, social norms, a shared morality — these had been enough to enforce male power, but they had been weakened by the rise of the women’s movement, and heavier weaponry was required. The modern proliferation of porn was a reaction to feminism, an attempt to intimidate women into subservience.

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Further, it was inherently totalitarian and genocidal. “Dachau brought into the bedroom,” was Dworkin’s assessment of pornography, an image that was adopted by others. In the Nineties, former editor of The Times William Rees-Mogg was shown the material being broadcast on European satellite TV station Red Hot Dutch; he was horrified: “It reminds me of films about concentration camps.”

For others, pornography defied rather than represented repressive regimes. Porn may have become an established part of life in America and Britain, but it was still being ruthlessly suppressed in the communist Soviet Union and in apartheid South Africa. When those systems fell in the Nineties, there was an explosion of porn comparable to that in the West a couple of decades earlier. The development felt like a manifestation of freedom.

Today, North Korea and Iran are not noticeably tolerant of pornography. It is still seen as subversive, a threat to religious and political control. In the liberal, individualistic world of post-Christian Britain, on the other hand, criticism has increasingly centred on the impact on the consumer. With the unprecedented availability of porn on the internet, are children acquiring a distorted, corrupted vision of sex? Is the instant hit of digital porn inherently addictive? Again, these concerns are not entirely new. Some 220 years ago, prosecuting counsel William Garrow, acting for the SSV, cautioned that obscene books and pictures were a very real danger to “young persons of both sexes, particularly of the female sex, addicting themselves to such publications”.

So, how subversive is porn? Historian Donald Thomas argued that it should be seen as akin to satire, attacking those things that are considered sacred to society. In William Dugdale’s day, incest was a favourite theme, a way of making light of 19th-century family values. It also meant that women were depicted as actively enjoying sex, something that was not spoken of in polite society.

The tone now is far more aggressive than it was then, or in the Seventies. Not all pornography is anti-women, but there is more overt misogyny in material aimed at men than there used to be — a response to the rise of women in employment and society. Lesser trends illustrate the same point: the continuing growth of cuckold porn, for example, or even the appearance, following #BlackLivesMatter, of fantasies centred on slave-owner Edward Colston.

The subversion, in other words, is negative and reactionary. Porn delights in poking at conventional morality — not in pursuit of revolution, but illicit thrill. The primary aim is arousal, the secondary to ridicule human aspirations to virtue. It is also remarkably ineffective in its subversion. Generations of those addicts that William Garrow warned about have been and gone. Holywell Street rose and fell, Soho rose and fell, and through it all, civilisation survived. Society has changed in the process, but porn, despite all the fears, has reflected, not initiated, those changes.

The Black Adder, as it was originally titled, is 40 years old this week, first airing on 15 June 1983. After a shaky start, it would run for four series, though in its day it was never as popular as the other great historical comedy of the decade, ’Allo ’Allo. But its 24 episodes, spread across four time periods, have secured a cherished place in the British TV pantheon: second greatest sitcom ever, according to a 2004 BBC poll of the public; 16th greatest programme ever made, according to the British Film Institute in 2000.

At the time, it wasn’t considered to be as controversial as Gove suggests, overshadowed by far noisier arguments about Britain’s history. A few months before Blackadder was first broadcast, it had been suggested to Margaret Thatcher that what she believed in were essentially “Victorian values” — and she leapt at the phrase with great enthusiasm. When she was asked to identify which bits of the 19th century she particularly approved of, she ran through the standard list — thrift, charity, personal responsibility — and added “the British Empire that took both freedom and the rule of law to countries that would never have known it otherwise”.

Her words were carefully chosen at a time when the public interpretation of the Empire was a contentious issue. It was an era of TV dramas such as The Jewel in the Crown and The Far Pavilions, of films Heat and Dust, A Passage to India and, biggest of all, Richard Attenborough’s Gandhi. When it won eight Oscars in 1983, an editorial in the Daily Mirror celebrated the man who “took on the mighty British Empire at the peak of its power and defeated it”. It was, it said, a film that had been made by a “new Britain” that Thatcher didn’t understand, one in which Gandhi was a hero and which “matched the mood of the moment, especially among the young”. (Though Attenborough also claimed that, were he still alive, Gandhi would have voted for the SDP.)

The other reason Blackadder wasn’t seen as controversial was simply that it was a comedy. When the BBC broadcast Alan Bleasdale’s First World War drama The Monocled Mutineer in 1986, its treatment of an Army deserter was met with a barrage of complaints; it was “blatant Left-wing bias”, complained Tory MP Neil Hamilton. Blackadder Goes Forth — the series to which Gove was to take belated exception — attracted no such condemnation in 1989, despite its depiction of the conflict as a futile, idiotic exercise in slaughter. Comedies weren’t taken seriously.

But even as the Right was winning the economic battles in the mid-Eighties, some were beginning to worry that it was losing on the cultural front. John O’Sullivan, later an advisor and speechwriter for Thatcher, wrote of how popular culture had been “invaded” by moral equivalence, undermining the West’s authority in the Cold War. It still wasn’t comedy that concerned him — more the replacement of John Buchan by John Le Carré as the country’s favourite thriller writer — but he was sure that there was a concern here: “This invasion may be more significant than at first appears. Popular culture, after all, is one important way in which national myths and loyalties are transmitted.”

And those myths were important in shaping national identity. The counter-balance was to be found in education, in the teaching of history, where the focus should be on social cohesion and unity. And if the “national myths” that were taught turned out to be not exactly the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, then that could be dealt with later on. “We must learn loyalty before we learn scepticism,” O’Sullivan wrote.

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This chimed with the views of Thatcher’s education secretary and mentor, Keith Joseph, who called for schools to foster “through the teaching of history, a sense of pride in one’s country and its achievements”. This was not happening because, as the Daily Mail explained in a 1990 editorial, for 20 years, “Left-wing educationalists have been given a free rein to denigrate this country’s past, to scorn its achievements, to make children almost ashamed to be British”. It was a particularly British phenomenon, argued John Rae, ex-headmaster of Westminster School: every American or French child learned about their respective revolution, but the same was not true in Britain of the Glorious Revolution. There was too much Peace Studies, not enough Civil War. Joseph’s successor as education secretary, Kenneth Baker, was shocked to discover that more children could tell the difference between a brontosaurus and a tyrannosaurus than could distinguish Charles I and Oliver Cromwell.

It was Baker who supplied the supposed solution: the national curriculum, a centrally approved agenda that would specify what was to be taught in primary and secondary schools. At its core, said Baker, should be “the history of Britain, the record of its past and, in particular, its political, constitutional and cultural heritage”. Or, in the words of a delegate to the National Union of Teachers conference, “the purpose of the national curriculum is to sell the ideas of present-day capitalist society, market values, profit, the beauty and joys of the British Empire”. As John McGregor, the next Tory education secretary, pointed out wearily: “History is by far the most political subject.”

The national curriculum was introduced in 1989 and was intended to be a decisive moment in reversing the advances made by the Left. You may have noticed, however, that it didn’t prove to be the last word in the debate. A 2021 Daily Mail editorial was still using exactly the same language when denouncing “those who love to denigrate this country’s history”. On the other hand, Sathnam Sanghera told a literary festival this week: “No country is as far behind in talking honestly about Empire than Britain.”

Much of the dispute comes down to the issue of what history is for. Sometime historian and erstwhile Labour MP Tristram Hunt once complained that “history on television is in danger of telling comforting stories about ourselves to ourselves, rather than confronting the past”. He was probably right — but there remained the question of whether that’s such a bad thing. Maybe people prefer comfort to confrontation. There’s a huge public appetite for television drama covering a wide spectrum of British history, from Wolf Hall and The Tudors, through Victoria and Downton Abbey, to The Crown and Call the Midwife. It’s possible to enjoy, to be engaged and stimulated, even to learn without having to confront.

In any event, confronting the past doesn’t necessarily bring any clarity. When an opinion poll in January 2016 asked how people saw the British Empire, 44% said it was something to be proud of, 21% said something to be ashamed of. When the same question was asked in August 2020 — at the height of the Black Lives Matter protests — both figures had fallen significantly, with the largest group now the 40% (nearly doubled since 2016) who couldn’t say whether they were proud or ashamed.

Maybe there’s a parallel between O’Sullivan’s “we must learn loyalty before we learn scepticism” and how most of us understand, say, physics. I’m aware, in an abstract, ill-informed sort of way, that Newtonian mechanics don’t apply at a sub-atomic level or when approaching the speed of light, but it doesn’t really matter to me; I find Newton perfectly sufficient in my life. I “know” — because I’ve been told — that the atoms making up the table at which I’m sat are mostly empty space, but I can still work on the assumption that it’s a solid surface.

I don’t feel the need to confront my simplistic understanding of gravity; rather, the predictability of matter is comforting in its certainty, even if it’s not the whole picture. Likewise, national myths. There’s a point to them, a usefulness in a common identity. Social cohesion is manifestly a good thing, and so too is patriotism.

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The stories that comprise that mythology change, of course (despite the slow-thinking likes of Otto English furiously tilting at windmills that were left derelict four decades ago). Michael Gove recognised that when he complained about the “myths which have grown up” around the First World War, and called for greater nuance in our understanding. He was right: the assumptions that underpinned Blackadder Goes Forth were crude and narrow. But that interpretation of the conflict — “a series of catastrophic mistakes perpetrated by an out-of-touch elite”, as Gove summarised it — is now part of the national mythology.

Even if it sometimes feels as though there’s been a 40-year stalemate in the culture war to end all war, myths evolve. And that process is influenced more by TV such as Blackadder than by the national curriculum. Which is one in the eye for Conservatives — or, as Edmund Blackadder called them, “fat Tory landowners who get made MPs when they reach a certain weight”.

It would be unfair to suggest that the same was true of his journalism, but his stint as political editor of the Daily Mirror, starting in the late Eighties, was not distinguished. He was tribally loyal to Labour, and these were dark days for the party, which had lost three elections in a row and was shortly to lose a fourth, in 1992. His response was to fill the paper’s news pages with relentlessly partisan abuse. As a hack, his best-known contribution to political debate was starting a rumour that John Major tucked his shirt into his underpants. (“I am only 90% sure of the accuracy of the claim,” he acknowledged.)

Perhaps some of the bitter triviality reflected his own thwarted hopes. In the run-up to the 1992 election, he was widely touted as the front-runner to become Neil Kinnock’s press officer should Labour win. But when Labour didn’t win, Campbell had to wait instead for the election of Tony Blair as leader in 1994 before getting the summons to become his press secretary. The job title didn’t reflect the role, Blair hastened to add; “it’s much more than that,” he said.

So it was to be. Campbell was generally referred to as a spin doctor, a relatively new term that had crossed the Atlantic in 1988 and entered the Oxford English Dictionary the following year. The job of the spin doctor, according to Peter Mandelson, the first British figure to be so described, was “to create the truth”. There were limits, though. “They can cajole and protest and manipulate and bully if they want,” Campbell explained. “They can explain their master’s thinking. But the master’s thinking and actions are what count.”

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That was the role occupied by Bernard Ingham when he was Margaret Thatcher’s press secretary, but many felt that the master-servant image was no longer entirely accurate. “When you heard Bernard Ingham speaking, you heard Margaret Thatcher,” observed ex-Labour aide Joy Johnson. “When you heard Tony Blair, very often you heard Alastair Campbell.” It was a common perception, and Blair did little that might correct it; in his memoirs, he wrote of Campbell: “He was indispensable, irreplaceable, almost an alter ego.”

In any event, Campbell was — with Blair, Gordon Brown, and Mandelson — one of the Four Horsemen of New Labour. Following the election triumph of 1997, he accumulated still greater power. He ran an ever-expanding empire of press officers and political advisers at the expense of the civil service, he attended cabinet meetings in a way that his predecessors had not, and he took on the role of party discipline at Westminster: in a symbolic move, the press team moved into 12 Downing Street, traditionally the preserve of the Whips’ Office. Charges of control freakery were widely aired.

He was, everyone agreed, supremely good at his job. A large part of that job, however, seemed to include dragging politics down to the level of his commentary at the Daily Mirror. “Alastair tabloidery,” Blair called it, the tendency to pursue headlines rather than deliverable policies. “Political coverage in this country is a joke,” Campbell complained in 1999. “Most of the national media treat politics as a soap opera.” He made his contribution to that.

He contributed too to the growing distrust of politicians. Blair had been elected as the alternative to Tory sleaze, but by 1999 The Sun, which had backed Labour in the general election, was calling the prime minister “Tony Bliar”. Much of the criticism was aimed at Campbell’s media operation. Back in 1996, he’d appeared in a libel case and been castigated by the judge for being “less than completely open and frank”; he was “not a witness in whom I could feel 100% confidence”. By the turn of the century, there were many who agreed with that judgement.

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It came to a head, of course, in the 2003 invasion of Iraq. An intelligence dossier was released to justify the war, and when the BBC queried the degree of political interference in its preparation, Campbell decided that the best form of defence was attack. The ensuing battle cost the jobs of the BBC’s chairman and director general, and the life of the UN weapons inspector David Kelly, who killed himself after being identified as a source for the story. “If Alastair Campbell hadn’t started his war against the BBC, then Dr Kelly would still be alive today,” said Sky’s political editor, Adam Boulton, while the headline in Campbell’s old paper the Daily Mirror was: “Spun to death — Iraq expert driven to tragic ‘suicide’.”

Campbell resigned in 2003, but returned to run the 2005 election campaign, completing Blair’s remarkable hat trick of victories. After that, though, the magic seemed to have been lost. He helped with the unsuccessful elections of 2010 and 2015 and was an adviser to the equally unsuccessful People’s Vote campaign to get a second referendum on Brexit. Nonetheless, it was Brexit that gave him a new lease of media life: he became editor-at-large of The New European, and launched The Rest Is Politics podcast with fellow Europhile Rory Stewart.

Now comes a new book, But What Can I Do?, about the deplorable state of politics today. His analysis will come as no great revelation. He’s sympathetic to the idea of a written constitution; he thinks social media “has done much to harm thoughtful public debate”; he deplores “the culture war distractions of the radical Right”; he recycles lame gags about “Kamikwasi Trussonomics”.

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As a state-of-the-nation address, it comes with inbuilt obsolescence, with all the temporary nature of journalism, full of references to what happened “last autumn” or “last November”. Despite which, it seems stuck in 2018, so that former US president Donald Trump gets five times as many mentions as current British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak. It feels like reading yesterday’s papers.

Much of it is a rambling, sometimes ranting, denunciation of “the Trumps, Johnsons, Netanyahus, Putins and Bolsonaros”, the populist leaders who have wrecked the democratic process. That’s a fairly disparate collection of individuals, but Campbell argues that there are common traits. Populists, he writes, are those who denounce “the elite”, and use the polarising language of “us” and “them”. And they’re not just to be found on the Right; there are also “populists of the Left”. There are those who divide the nation into “the forces of progress and the forces of conservatism”, while railing against “the cynics, the elites, the establishment”. Oh, hang on, that was Blair in a 1999 conference speech, which doesn’t get a look-in here.

These new populists are also barefaced liars. When did this casual attitude towards the truth start, one might ask? Certainly not on Campbell’s watch; he’s keen to point out that there were “several official and parliamentary inquiries” into Iraq, “none of which concluded that I lied”. In fact, not even his political enemies were deliberately deceitful in the old days. From Margaret Thatcher to Theresa May, he says of the prime ministers before Johnson, “none were in my view liars”. This wasn’t always his view. “Truth. Remember that,” he challenged in 1992. John Major and Norman Lamont “lie because it comes easy to them and because it is the only way they can survive”.

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He sometimes sounds like one of those academics who is triggered by the sight of a Union Jack and takes to Twitter to announce that we’re now living in a fascist regime. Mention referendums, for example, and we’re straight onto Vladimir Putin staging a rigged vote in the occupied parts of Ukraine. In 1975, Thatcher quoted Clement Attlee’s description of referendums as “a device of dictators and demagogues”; Campbell notes this approvingly, but forgets to mention that it was New Labour that made referendums part of normal politics in the first place.

Similarly over-wrought is Campbell’s claim that the British Right-wing press “would not look out of place in North Korea”. To be fair, though, it does take him until p. 34 to go for the inevitable comparison, segueing effortlessly from Nigel Farage to “Europe in the Thirties”. But once it’s out in the open, we get an entire chapter on “The Threat of Fascism”. This would all be more convincing if we hadn’t been here before. “Britain is being run by a dictatorship,” was Campbell’s implausible verdict on Major’s government in 1992.

One could go on. He’s shocked — shocked! — at the sight of Johnson’s government “attacking the BBC”. That’ll be the same BBC that he denounced as a “down-market, dumbed down, over staffed, over bureaucratic, ridiculous organisation”, even before the War of the Dodgy Dossier.

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But the point is not just that Campbell is wildly forgetful of his own time in politics and journalism. It’s more that, by airbrushing the past, he’s avoiding the issues. He leaves the big questions unasked, let alone answered. Why did Farage’s populist rhetoric about “the elite” resonate with so many? Might it be because of the extraordinary accumulation of wealth by the super-rich during New Labour’s time in office? Was disillusionment prompted by a government that the public thought was on their side proving instead to be “intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich”?

If you’re looking at disengagement from the political process, it’s worth considering the 2001 general election, when turnout was so low that the number of abstentions was greater than the number who voted for Labour.

In Campbell’s analysis, however, the rot only set in with the global financial crisis of 2008, an event so massive that it warrants an abbreviation: the GFC. His coverage is so brief, however, that those initials only get used once. Maybe he doesn’t like to dwell, lest he has to explain why Britain was so exposed to the banking meltdown that started in America. After the event, Gordon Brown complained that a “shadow banking system had proliferated without politicians being aware of it,” and it’s hard not to think that the man who’d been chancellor for a decade perhaps should have been aware of it.

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On a personal level, Campbell’s problem — the reason he worries about whether he’s “Dadsplaining” — is that he’s been overtaken by the world he helped to create. He would obviously disagree, but surely Boris Johnson and Dominic Cummings are part of his legacy. So too, perhaps, is Brexit itself. Partly because even Campbell’s famed tabloid instincts failed to alert him to the impact of the huge rise in immigration. But even more for squandering the chance of moving closer to the European Union.

Because the biggest issue in Blair’s first term — even if it was ducked — was the single currency, and the imminent arrival of the euro. Should Britain join this venture or not? Blair was in favour. Gordon Brown was not. Nor was Rupert Murdoch, whose views carried some weight. And Campbell? Well, he wasn’t much fussed one way or another. “I was not that bothered about the euro,” he wrote in his diary. “It didn’t move me like a Labour v. Tory battle did.”

Maybe he should have cared a little more. Regardless of whether one thinks it would have been good for the country, being part of the single currency would have been transformative. It would have tied Britain so closely to Europe that it would have made a Leave vote very unlikely, indeed would have made a referendum unlikely.

Without Brexit, though, where would Campbell be now? His belated rallying to the European cause has been the re-making of his reputation, wiping away much of the stain of Iraq. As he was during his time at the Daily Mirror, he’s now fighting rearguard actions for the losing side, and it’s a role that suits him admirably. The player of the pipes might not call the tune, but he does get his voice heard.

These were the exceptions rather than the rule in the cultural establishment. For the most part, there was an early dislike of Thatcher that rapidly hardened into hatred. She was, said TV dramatist Dennis Potter, “the most obviously repellent manifestation of the most obviously arrogant, divisive and dangerous British government since the war”. Or, in the words of Jonathan Miller, she “was loathsome, repulsive in almost every way, with her odious suburban gentility and sentimental, saccharine patriotism”.

No previous prime minister had attracted these levels of opprobrium, but more striking still was that she exerted such a strong cultural fascination even before reaching Downing Street. There were jokes about her in sitcoms such as George and Mildred and Fawlty Towers when she was leader of the opposition, and she warranted a mention in Linton Kwesi Johnson’s 1978 poem “It Dread Inna Inglan”: “Maggie Thatcher — on she goes with a racist show, but she has to go.” She went on to set a modern record both for the length of her premiership and for the number of negative appearances she made in comedy and music.

Part of the dislike came from the fact that Thatcher herself appeared so little interested in the world of culture. She was, said Malcolm Williamson, Master of the Queen’s Music, a “stupid mindless Philistine”. Even the former Labour MP Woodrow Wyatt, a friend and devotee, who liked to think of himself as an eminently civilised man, concluded sadly: “She has no taste.”

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That wasn’t quite right. As a teenager, she’d been a regular cinema-goer, dreaming of dancing like Ginger Rogers and enthusiastically reviewing the movies she’d seen in letters to her older sister. (“I can’t say I liked it,” she noted of the 1941 adaptation of Love on the Dole.) But her taste never seemed to develop much further.

As an adult, she had better things to do, and the arts were strictly peripheral in her life. She was a guest on Desert Island Discs in 1978, and opted for obvious pieces by Beethoven, Dvorak and Verdi. A decade later, when she was asked about her favourite books, she said she was currently re-reading Frederick Forsyth’s thriller The Fourth Protocol, a novel in which she herself featured (favourably, in this instance). The impression was that she didn’t know much, and cared slightly less. She was more clear about what she didn’t like; she dismissed Francis Bacon as “that artist who paints those horrible pictures”, which may have been the truth but wasn’t the whole truth.

It was all so appallingly middle-brow and — to use that insult of Miller’s — suburban: the most damning of all adjectives in British cultural circles. To make things worse, she disapproved of state funds being used to prop up uneconomic businesses and made no exception for the arts. After all, Andrew Lloyd-Webber was a man of the theatre and he managed to stand on his own two feet without relying on government hand-outs. “Why can’t you be more like Andrew?” she demanded of Hall, who was beginning to regret his 1979 vote. As Jim Hacker said in her favourite TV show, Yes, Minister: “Why should the rest of the country subsidise the pleasures of the middle-class few?” For her enemies, this wasn’t a culture war so much as a war on culture.

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As was sometimes the case with Thatcher, however, the rhetoric was not matched by reality. During her time in office, spending by the Arts Council in England and Wales increased by over 20% in real terms. (It fell slightly in Scotland.) There were major new initiatives, as well. One of the biggest projects of recent decades — the building of the British Library — was undertaken on her watch, and there was also the introduction, after decades of lobbying, of the Public Lending Rights scheme, which rewarded writers when their books were borrowed from public libraries.

And then there was Channel 4, launched in 1982 and charged with catering for minority tastes and interests. Jeremy Isaacs, the chief executive of the new channel, understood this as meaning “minorities” in a Ken Livingstone kind of way. “Should black Britons, should the young, should feminists, should homosexuals see themselves, canvass their ideas, on television?” he said. “I see no reason why not. They are of this society, not outside it.” That wasn’t what the government meant. “You’ve got it all wrong,” the Employment Secretary Norman Tebbit told Isaacs. “Golf and sailing and fishing. Hobbies. That’s what we intended.”

It was too late, and the new channel became in its early years a beacon of anti-Thatcherism, giving a platform — among others — to alternative comedians, who suited both the tone of the channel and its tight budgets. Altogether, noted The Times, Channel 4 was “just the sort of thing to inflame that school of opinion, so strong in the upper echelons of the Conservative Party, which believes that the Left is in control of the nation’s television”.

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The same law of unintended consequence also operated in Tebbit’s most substantial contribution to the arts. As the dole queues lengthened to three million and more, he launched the Enterprise Allowance Scheme under the slogan: “Inside every unemployed person, there’s a self-employed one.” If you’d been unemployed for at least 13 weeks and could find £1,000 of capital (possibly in the form of a bank loan), then the government would pay you £40 a week for a year to get a business started. The income was tax-free and was substantially higher than the current rate of unemployment benefit.

The intended recipients were the self-employed; plumbers and window-cleaners were the oft-cited examples, and it was reported that an early trial had helped “such diverse activities as a kissogram service, a hang-gliding school, a private detective agency and a lampshade manufacturer”. But there were also applications from people working in the creative industries. In 1984 a group from Solihull, Eye Do It, became the first pop band to release a single under the scheme, with “I Lost My Mind”. That didn’t make much impact, but others were more successful, including artists Tracey Emin and Rachel Whiteread and comedians Alan Davies, Harry Enfield and Sean Lock.

Inadvertently, Tebbit had turned into one of the great patrons of culture in modern Britain. Again, though, there was little gratitude on display. “We weren’t children of Thatcher; we hated her,” insisted McGee. Viz comic, on the other hand, which was another beneficiary of the Enterprise Allowance Scheme, always seemed to have an ironic affection for her; as late as 2009 it pictured her on a “True Blue” cover of Playboy magazine with the headline: “Maggie! Maggie! Maggie! Tits Out! Out! Out!”

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The cultural antipathy to Thatcher continued throughout her premiership, but it changed as it went on. The evolving mood was captured most concisely in pop music. Her first term saw the high point of Rock Against Racism and of protest songs. Mass unemployment produced the riposte of UB40’s “One in Ten” (1981) and the Specials’ “Do Nothing” (1980). The B-side of the latter was a cover of Bob Dylan’s “Maggie’s Farm”, which had gained a new relevance: “I ain’t gonna work on Maggie’s Farm no more.” The Beat went with the more direct “Stand Down, Margaret” (1980).

She didn’t heed that advice, and after her re-election in 1983, the tone became more fearful, with a spate of anti-nuclear hit singles by Iron Maiden, Culture Club, Sting and Genesis. The real trend, though, was away from politics and towards charity. The Live Aid concert in 1985 featured Paul Weller’s band the Style Council performing politically engaged songs “Walls Come Tumbling Down” and “Internationalists”, but the central impulse was one that chimed perfectly with Thatcher’s espousal of Victorian values of faith, self-help and charity. Elsewhere, the most memorable song directly addressing Thatcher in 1985 was the Exploited’s punk anthem “Maggie”, not so much a protest as a howl of impotent rage: “Maggie, Maggie, Maggie, you fucking cunt!”

And then, as the years wore on and on, a sense of fatalism descended. Thatcher looked immovable and the fantasies started of her death: the Blow Monkeys’ “(Celebrate) The Day After You” (1987), Elvis Costello’s “Tramp the Dirt Down” (1989), Morrissey’s “Margaret on the Guillotine” (1988). There was still a visceral hatred, but no hope, just a weariness. A decade after she left office, the same theme was to be found in “Merry Christmas, Maggie Thatcher” in Billy Elliott: The Musical (2000), cheerfully celebrating that we were “one day closer to your death”. On 8 April 2013, the day she actually died, the audience at the show was asked if it should be excluded from the night’s performance; overwhelmingly, they opted for it to be left in.

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And still, the cultural fascination continues. In the forthcoming movie Reagan, Lesley-Anne Downe will become the latest in a long line of actresses to give us their Margaret, which can be traced all the way back to Janet Brown in the James Bond movie, For Your Eyes Only (1981). Best known was Meryl Streep’s incarnation in The Iron Lady (2011), which in turn inspired the pornographic satire The Iron Lady Garden (2012), with Rebecca More as Aggie Snatcher.

It’s been a long, strange affair, this relationship of Thatcher with the arts. She knew it sort of mattered, which is why, in her first conference speech as Tory leader in 1975, she denounced “those who gnaw away at our national self-respect, rewriting British history as centuries of unrelieved gloom, oppression and failure”. (The context made it clear that she was talking specifically about the BBC.) But it wasn’t really important enough, and there were so many other dragons to be slain.

So while she was busily rewriting the political norms on public ownership, trade unions and the economy, she was losing all the cultural arguments. And since cultural artefacts have a longer shelf-life than do inflation rates, they have increasingly shaped the memory of Thatcher. The further we get away from her, the more public attitudes are shaped by hostile depictions of her and her policies. She still looms large, even for those born after her defenestration in 1990, but she’s seen more and more negatively.

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It is worth remembering, though, that when it really mattered, Thatcher’s instincts were absolutely sound. For most of the Eighties, Salman Rushdie was one of the loudest voices of condemnation. Hers were “the politics of the Victorian nursery”, he mocked, and in The Satanic Verses (1988) he referred to her as “Maggie the Bitch”. That was the book that saw Iran offer a $6 million bounty to anyone who would kill Rushdie. In the ensuing tumult, Thatcher saw only a simple principle. “It is a fundamental matter of freedom of speech,” she said. Whatever else she thought about the role of the state, she was sure that one of its duties was the protection of its citizens from foreign governments, and for the best part of a decade — until he withdrew it — Rushdie was given full-time police protection.

He and she only ever met once, at Scotland Yard. Given their very different characters, it seemed unlikely that they could ever find a personal rapport, but somehow a connection was made. “She was very touchy-feely,” remembered Rushdie. “She was, like, pawing at me, and I thought, ‘I’m being groped by the Prime Minister!’”

Music hall grew out of pubs in the mid-19th century and reached its peak in the 1890s, the most popular form of entertainment in the country. It provided a full evening’s show of short unrelated acts, including singers, comics, acrobats, jugglers, dancers, eccentric dancers, trick cyclists, drag performers, animal acts, and any permutations of the above. It was like Britain’s Got Talent. With talent.

Older viewers may also remember The Good Old Days, a stalwart of BBC television for 30 years, up to 1983, with contemporary TV stars reviving old material in front of an audience dressed up in Edwardian outfits. That was a heavily sanitised version. The original halls were raucous, boozy venues, with crowds who weren’t reticent in expressing their opinion of the performers verbally and even physically. These stages were no place for the faint-hearted. Nor for the understated: there was no amplification to help in projecting across the pit-band, through a dense fog of pipe and cigar smoke, to a couple of thousand drunken patrons. Towards the back of the hall, prostitutes plied — and sometimes practised — their trade. And then, right at the back, was the bar, from where the waiters emerged to provide table service, sometimes with the bottles chained to the trays, to prevent them being seized and used as weapons. If you could make it here, you could make it anywhere.

Unsurprisingly, all this met with extreme disfavour in polite society. It was coarse, vulgar and degrading. First, the entertainment onstage was disgraceful. When the can-can arrived from Paris in the late 1860s, it was so scandalous that the Alhambra in Leicester Square and the Highbury Barn in North London both had their licences suspended for staging what The Times called “this daring outrage on public decency”.

The behaviour offstage was equally reprehensible. In 1894 the London County Council (LCC) insisted that screens be erected at the back of the hall in the Empire in Leicester Square so that decent-minded punters might be shielded from the prostitution. That didn’t work, though; on the first night, the screens were torn down by a group of young hearties, led by a Sandhurst cadet. “Ladies of the Empire, I stand for Liberty!” declared Winston Churchill (for it was he), in what he described as his “maiden speech”.

The fact that it was the Empire that was being targeted by moral campaigners was revealing. There were working-class halls in the East End of London where immorality, and even obscenity, was far more prevalent, but the great fear was that the corruption was seeping out, infecting those places frequented by wealthy young men — in the same way that, a century later, the moral panic over gangsta rap was prompted by its spread beyond the black ghettos where it had originated.

It wasn’t just the Right-wing moralists who objected to the music hall. In 1907 the LCC voted to ban from London stages the tableau vivant. This was an act in which a woman wearing a sheer, close-fit bodystocking (“so nearly naked that you can’t tell the difference”, according to the papers) struck poses based on classical statues. And it was noticeable that most of those voting for the ban were sober-minded Liberals, while all but two of the 43 who voted against were fun-loving Conservatives.

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Liberals objected to music hall partly on moral grounds and partly on cultural: all that drinking didn’t go down well with the nonconformist rank and file, who had a leaning towards teetotalism. But there were also political problems. Particularly suspect was the intense patriotism of the halls, shading into jingoism. Indeed the word “jingoism” itself came from music hall, from a bellicose song performed by the Great MacDermott in 1878, when conflict with Russia seemed imminent: “We don’t want to fight, but by jingo if we do / We’ve got the ships, we’ve got the men, and got the money too!”

The Boer War brought that tendency to the fore. The message coming from the stage was encapsulated in the song “Stand by Your Country, Stand by Your Queen”, while the Boers were promised there’d be “A Hot Time in the Transvaal Tonight”. Decent-minded folk were quick to condemn politicians who exploited such “music-hall jingoism”, and chief among the alleged offenders was the Colonial Secretary, Joseph Chamberlain. Formerly on the radical wing of the Liberal Party, now serving under a Conservative prime minister, he was a populist figure for whom politics was a question of drawing dividing lines. “A seat lost to the government is a seat won by the Boers,” he declared during the Khaki Election of 1900.

Three years later, Chamberlain left the Cabinet to campaign for the policy of imposing tariffs on goods imported into the Empire — imperial preference, as it was called, one of the regular occasions on which the Conservatives have torn themselves apart over the question of free trade. In that campaign, he allocated a substantial budget to getting the issue raised in music halls and related arenas. It was said that at the Christmas of 1903, more than 200 pantomimes featured a pro-tariff song such as “The John Bull Store” and “Good Old Joe”, the majority of them paid for by Chamberlain. He was the first British politician to recognise the power of popular culture, and his patriotic arguments — as broad-brush as any comic of the time — got a good reception. Possibly, though, he was too far ahead of the game: barely half of adult males had the vote, and the predominantly working-class audiences in the halls were disproportionately disenfranchised.

They remained, though, stubbornly patriotic. And stubbornly attached to the Tory cause. There were songs that grudgingly gave Asquith and Lloyd George credit for introducing pensions, but the latter’s supposed weakening of ale during the First World War couldn’t be countenanced. “At the brewery, there’s nothing doing; all the water works are brewing Lloyd George’s Beer,” sang Ernie Mayne mournfully, and he concluded: “The worst thing that ever happened in this war is Lloyd George’s Beer.” Come the National Government of the early Thirties, when ex-Labour leader Ramsay MacDonald fronted a Tory-led coalition, it was Stanley Holloway, king of the music-hall monologue, who provided the most vocal endorsement: “No government ever was perfect, but the National’s the best in the land, so let them as thinks they’d do better, stop grousing and lend them a hand.”

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By then, though, the music hall was on its last legs. The rise of cinema, radio and paperback fiction had already dismantled its cultural dominance, and television and rock ‘n’ roll were shortly to deliver the final blow. Though it survived in the working men’s clubs, those were far from the centres of media power and consequently attracted little attention.

Beyond that, the cultural memory began to fragment. Yet there were occasional sightings, even in the world of politics, and especially in the Labour Party. When James Callaghan, born in 1912, wanted to address media speculation about an early election in the autumn of 1978, he choose to do so by singing Vesta Victoria’s music-hall classic “Waiting at the Church” to the TUC Congress. (He misattributed it to Marie Lloyd, whose song “A Little of What You Fancy” had been used by Harold Macmillan 20 years earlier to sell the introduction of Premium Bonds.)

And when Michael Foot, born in 1913, wanted to mock the Conservative government in 1980, he told a long, rambling story about visiting the Palace Theatre of Varieties in Plymouth as a child. One of his favourite acts, he said, was a stage magician, who would take a watch from an audience member, “enfold it in a beautiful red handkerchief, place it on the table in front of us, take out his mallet, hit the watch and smash it to smithereens”. Then a look of utter bewilderment would descend on his face, as he was obliged to admit: “I am very sorry. I have forgotten the rest of the trick.” And this, Foot suggested, was precisely the same look that could be seen on the face of Keith Joseph, the Industry Secretary, as he surveyed the wreckage of the British economy in the midst of the first Thatcherite recession.

Then the Labour Party decided to skip a generation, and elected as leader Neil Kinnock, an honorary member, and sometime Vice President, of the Gene Vincent Appreciation Society. As in real life, rock ‘n’ roll seemed to have displaced music hall. In both cases, though, that wasn’t the whole story. “Bryan [Ferry] and I always joked about the fact that rock and roll was basically music hall,” said Andy Mackay of glam-rock group Roxy Music, and that trio of figures with whom we started suggest that the same is true of politics.

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The ability to play a crowd at a rally, or in the bearpit that used to be the Labour conference, has become much less important, but the House of Commons remains a tough gig. “Prime Minister’s Questions often resembled my father’s description of a raucous night at the Glasgow Empire,” observed John Major. And even though he himself wasn’t particularly good at PMQs, nor at delivering big speeches, it was striking that his finest moment came in the 1992 general election; standing on a soapbox in town squares and market-places, facing down hostile crowds and demonstrators, he looked surprisingly at home. “I often reflected that my chosen career was akin to show business,” he wrote in his (rather good) history of the music hall.

His successor, Tony Blair — born more than four decades after the previous Labour Prime Minister — was the grandson of Charles Parsons, better known as Jimmy Lynton and described in the press as a “comedian, illusionist, conjuror, thought-reader, lightning cartoonist, paper-tearer and anything else common to the music hall”. Blair’s middle names, Charles Lynton, honour his memory, though his own performing career was less impressive, singing in a band named Ugly Rumours while a student at Oxford. “We were rather tragic, and had precisely zero presence on stage,” remembered the future music journalist Mark Ellen, who played bass. As a politician, on the other hand, Blair could play the role of entertainer better than any of his contemporaries, especially in the pre-Iraq years, when he could deliver jokes and put-downs like a pro. And no one was better at wrapping himself in the Union Jack.

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But the one who really seemed in touch with his roots was Ken Livingstone, whose mother had been a dancer with a trio called the Kenleigh Sisters (maybe his name pays tribute, as well). When Livingstone became leader of the Greater London Council in 1981, he was cast as the pantomime villain of politics. “The IRA-loving, poof-loving, Marxist leader of the GLC” (to use the words of the Sunday Express) was, said The Sun, “the most odious man in Britain”. But he rode out the barracking like a trouper and re-emerged with a new act as cheeky cockney chappie, thumbing his nose at the government. In this role, he became, said the Daily Mail, through gritted teeth: “The man running rings round Maggie.”

Much of his new-found popularity in the mid-Eighties was achieved through a use of popular culture that echoed Joe Chamberlain. Livingstone’s GLC staged a long string of concerts, festivals and comedy gigs, attracting huge crowds, and then slipping in the political messages amid the entertainment. This time, it wasn’t even his campaign funds footing the bill, but the public purse.

And, like Joe, he found himself feted in song. “I know one thing,” declared Kevin Rowland on a Dexys Midnight Runners track; “Ken Livingstone’s a folk hero.” Or, as Kate Bush sang: “Ken is the man we all need, Ken is the leader of the GLC.” Admittedly, that was tongue-in-cheek, recorded for an episode of The Comic Strip, but still: he got namechecked by Kate Bush. When The Smiths played a GLC show, he posed for a publicity photo with Morrissey, an artist greatly indebted to music hall. And when Billy Bragg and Paul Weller toured under the banner of Red Wedge to campaign for Labour, the only politician allowed to travel on the musicians’ coach was Livingstone. His mum would’ve been proud. Not of his politics, though: she was a Tory, like so much of the music hall.

Kosovo then was a province in the south of Yugoslavia, a landlocked area slightly smaller than the Falkland Islands. It was officially part of Serbia — the largest of the Yugoslav republics — but was heavily disputed: 90% of the population were Albanian by ethnicity, Muslim by faith. And Kosovo had, for differing reasons, a revered place in the histories of both Serbia and Albania, integral to each’s sense of national identity. As George Orwell noted in 1945: “Yugoslav politics are very complicated and I make no pretence of being an expert on them.”

The Kosovars were a small minority in Yugoslavia, who had long faced discrimination, and long sought independence. That had seemed an implausible hope, but by the time the province came to Blair’s attention, things were looking very different. In the first half of the Nineties, Yugoslavia had been ripped apart, with Slovenia, Macedonia, Croatia and Bosnia splitting to become independent countries, the latter two after wars of a bloodiness not seen in Europe since 1945. The Kosovars were still a minority, but — with Yugoslavia reduced from six constituent republics to just two, Serbia and Montenegro — they now made up a fifth of the country’s population. Not so small anymore.

In 1995, the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) began armed actions; by 1998, the insurgency had escalated into serious conflict. The Yugoslav military was attempting to suppress the KLA by terrorising the population: hundreds were killed, thousands raped, and hundreds of thousands displaced. This was the point at which the situation forced itself into the international spotlight, provoking a sense of horrified déjà vu: the earlier Yugoslav Wars had cost the lives of up to 150,000, and made the term “ethnic cleansing” common currency. Many in the West were, retrospectively in some instances, feeling ashamed that such destruction had been allowed to run rampant in Europe. Then, the United Nations had tried to contain the killing with an arms embargo and the deployment of some ineffective peacekeepers; mostly they had looked on sorrowfully. And now it was happening again.

“I saw it as essentially a moral issue,” wrote Blair in his memoirs. There was a humanitarian disaster unfolding, and — as in Ukraine today — the blame lay at the feet of one man: in this case the president of Yugoslavia, Slobodan Milošević. Action was needed. By June 1998, Britain was talking with its Nato partners about the possibility of an air and land operation; it was another nine months before, in March 1999, Nato began bombing Yugoslavia. “We have learned from bitter experience not to appease dictators,” explained Blair, who largely drove the initiative. “We tried it 60 years ago.”

There was — again, as today — political consensus, with backing for the government’s actions from the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats, then led by William Hague and Paddy Ashdown respectively. Even Blair’s own party was mostly in support. A few on the Left pointed out that the lack of UN authorisation made the bombing entirely illegal, but a motion condemning Nato’s actions was signed by just six of the usual suspects, including Tony Benn, Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell. Notably absent was Ken Livingstone, who joined Blair in comparing Milošević to Hitler. Robin Cook and Clare Short — who would both later resign from the cabinet over Iraq — were fully on board, the former as foreign secretary, the latter dutifully doing the media rounds to defend the government.

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Television news played its part in preparing the public for military action, with extensive coverage of the appalling suffering being endured by the Kosovars. In the press, the most notable cheerleaders were to be found at the Guardian. As early as April 1998, an editorial was calling for “intervention if only on humanitarian grounds” and for “the deployment of troops”. On the eve of the bombing, the leader column was headlined: “The sad need for force.” We have become familiar with that sense of sorrowful necessity in the last 12 months.

It was confidently predicted that 72 hours of bombing would be sufficient to force Milošević into retreat. That didn’t happen, and the days stretched out into weeks and months. Along the way, there was a series of Nato errors: the accidental strike on the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade; a cluster bomb aimed at an airfield that hit a market, killing more than 60 Serbian civilians; the deaths of 87 Kosovar refugees in a bomb attack on the village of Koriša. In the face of these blunders and the absence of a swift victory, Blair ramped up the moral rhetoric: “This is no longer just a military conflict. It is a battle between good and evil; between civilisation and barbarity.” To prove the point, Milošević was indicted for crimes against humanity by a UN tribunal.

But the public was losing faith. Although an early opinion poll showed two-thirds supporting the use of ground troops, the Labour Party’s own focus groups reported far less enthusiasm. At a time when public spending was still under tight control, people wanted to know, why was money being spent on waging war? Philip Gould, Blair’s much-trusted pollster, urged him to ignore the findings and carry on, but press secretary Alastair Campbell was furious with the electorate’s lack of gratitude: “It made you wonder why we bothered sometimes.”

In the event, it took 78 days before Milošević agreed an unconditional withdrawal of Serbian troops, and even then, it was Russian diplomacy and the threat of a Nato land invasion that proved decisive. There was a limit to what bombing alone could do (as Martin McGuinness of the IRA helpfully pointed out). Nonetheless, the operation had achieved its objective. Indeed, it went further. So damaged was Milošević’s standing among Serbs that the following year he lost the presidential election and was dragged from office. (He was subsequently extradited to The Hague to face charges of war crimes, dying before the trial could conclude.) Regime change had not been the war’s aim, but it was achieved.

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Insofar as Kosovo is remembered, it’s seen as, to use Blair’s description, “a just war”. The comparisons between Yugoslavia and Nazi Germany were historically illiterate — and tone-deaf, given the history of the country in the Forties — but there was a clear aggressor, who everyone agreed had to be defeated. It was also, from a British perspective, a clean war. There were around 13,500 dead, most of them civilians, but Nato had no combat fatalities at all. And it was welcomed by those in whose name it was being fought. Hundreds of thousands were displaced, but it was notable that they blamed Milošević, not Nato. The Kosovars were overwhelmingly in favour of the military intervention, and Blair in particular was seen as a hero. When he visited the capital, Pristina, a few weeks after the cessation of hostilities, he was greeted by huge crowds, chanting his name, waving Union Jacks and presenting him with flowers. “Tonibler” and “Bler” became popular names for male children born in Kosovo that year (as with the Kosovan footballer Bler Thaçi).

“War is never civilised,” said Blair in his moment of triumph. “But war can be necessary to uphold civilisation.” It was the kind of paradox that appealed to him and was so integral to his oratory: the civilising war, the imposition of democracy. The victory, he believed, confirmed his “doctrine of international community” — which he outlined during the conflict: those with military power, he argued, had the right, indeed the duty, to intervene where possible against “a despotic, dictatorial regime”, even if there was no “immediate threat to our interests”.

It was the philosophy that later fed his fervour for the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, and of Iraq in 2003. There was the same talk of good and evil, of how we should never appease dictators; the same predictions of swift success. And in the case of Iraq, there was a similar failure — much more controversially this time — to get UN backing. But by now, Blair was, said Labour’s ex-deputy leader Roy Hattersley, in a “messianic mood”.

Neither of those ventures, of course, ended well. There was no repeat of the welcome in Pristina, and the unforeseen consequences were catastrophic. The destabilising of Iraq led to the emergence of Islamic State; Afghanistan reverted to Taliban control as soon as western troops departed. Nor was Nato’s later bombing of Libya in 2011 any more positive: Muammar Gaddafi was overthrown, but then another, longer and more costly, civil war broke out. All are, by any normal measure, failed states. The Foreign Office currently advises British citizens not to travel to Afghanistan, Iraq or Libya.

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It also advises against all but essential travel to northern Kosovo, and there’s a warning for the whole country: “Terrorists are likely to try to carry out attacks.” Media attention has long since moved on, but even with the continuing presence of KFOR — the Nato-led peacekeeping force, now much reduced in numbers — Kosovo is still not stable. Maybe that was inevitable. In public, this was “a battle between good and evil”. In private, Blair acknowledged that “the KLA were not much better than the Serbs”. The Nato victory was followed by Kosovan retaliation. There was an exodus of Serbs and Roma in a further wave of ethnic cleansing; churches were attacked, just as mosques had once been; and there have been frequent outbreaks of violence over the years: more than 200 KFOR personnel have lost their lives.

There have also been knock-on effects internationally. In 2004, Amnesty International published a report revealing how women were being trafficked into the province from Albania to work as prostitutes, meeting the demands of the 50,000 peacekeeping troops stationed there. And it wasn’t just adult women. “I was forced by the boss to serve international soldiers and police officers,” a 12-year-old Albanian girl told the researchers. Amnesty concluded that the UN and Nato forces were “not only failing to protect the human rights of the women and girls, but are in many cases themselves using them for sexual gratification and are even allegedly involved in trafficking itself”.

By the time the report was released, the sex industry created for KFOR had grown, becoming the centre of a network that sold woman and girls into prostitution in western Europe — 1,400 were being smuggled into Britain every year, it was estimated. When in 2005 ex-cabinet minister Harriet Harman analysed the successful prosecutions for people trafficking, she concluded that, “in nearly every case the culprit was Albanian or Kosovan, some of whom had been allowed in as refugees”.

The legacy of Kosovo was also seen in the transformation of Nato, now an organisation prepared to initiate war beyond the UN: a fact that ensures Kosovo still has traction in Russian propaganda. Answering western criticism of the invasion of Ukraine last year, Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov was quick to talk of Nato’s “illegal use of force” in 1999. And, in the context of Ukraine, it’s hard not to see Blair in Pristina as the model for Boris Johnson, or indeed Keir Starmer, in Kyiv. (How envious they must be to see all those Toniblers.) Adoring crowds and moral certainty are a seductive combination, particularly for a politician feeling a lack of honour in his own land.

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Ukraine, of course, is not Kosovo. In one sense, the argument today is even more clear-cut: Ukraine is an independent, sovereign nation, whereas Kosovo had no such status. (Indeed, it is still not recognised by all member states of Nato.) The Yugoslav claim that its forces were suppressing an internal terrorist threat carried some weight; the same is evidently not true of the invasion of Ukraine. The real difference, though, is the nature of the opponent. Blair’s interventionism depended, he said, on answering the question: “Are there military operations we can sensibly and prudently undertake?” Nobody seriously thinks that Nato taking on Russia directly is either sensible or prudent.

Nonetheless, the rhetoric remains, despite all that has happened since Kosovo. The Ukraine War is seen in the moral terms advocated by Blair. Emotion is the order of the day, realpolitik is out of favour, and the political and media consensus is that this is again a fight between good and evil. The danger is of over-simplification. It is not hard to identify an evil, but good is a much less clearcut phenomenon. “War is an imperfect instrument for righting humanitarian distress,” conceded Blair. More than that, it brings unintended consequences, which can amount to evils.

If Blair’s military adventuring had ended with Kosovo, foreign policy would be seen as a minor part of his legacy, rather than the dominant note that it now is. And the Kosovo War would be regarded as a qualified success, the negatives — including the lack of an exit strategy — outweighed by the positives. Few doubted that the cause was just, and most agreed that the violence and the death toll would have been worse had Nato not got involved. It might even be remembered for making the case for Blair’s doctrine of liberal intervention. There was an emergency, a clearly defined solution, and a task that was accomplished. There was also, however, the hazardous, illusory hope that the solution could be replicated in very different circumstances.

John Osborne, the world’s principal Angry Young Man, was incensed by that sort of talk. There was a “trough of Queen worship”, he raged, “the National Swill”. And he described monarchy as “the gold filling in a mouthful of decay”. His attack was only to be expected, of course — there’s no point in having Angry Young Men unless they’re working themselves up about something or other.

But other isolated voices of dissent were beginning to be heard, and some were harder to ignore since they came from within what had recently been dubbed “the Establishment”. There was, for example, Woodrow Wyatt, then a Labour MP though later a disciple of Margaret Thatcher. “Mooning about the Royal Family is one of the main contributory factors to Britain’s plight,” he complained in 1956. “It saps our dynamism. It makes us dwell on the past.”

Or there was John Grigg, who could hardly have been more Establishment: Eton, Grenadier Guards, Oxford, Tory parliamentary candidate, latterly the 2nd Baron Altrincham. So when he said rude things about the Queen in his 1957 article “The Monarchy Today” — published in the magazine he edited, the National and English Review — it proved especially controversial.

He was no republican, Altrincham insisted, he was merely seeking to reinvigorate the monarchy, which was too remote, surrounded “almost without exception by people of the ‘tweedy’ sort”. But at the centre of his criticism was the Queen herself. Five years into her reign and she really needed to buck her ideas up. Her public persona was that of “a priggish schoolgirl, captain of the hockey team, a prefect, and a recent candidate for Confirmation”, while her “style of speaking is frankly a pain in the neck”. What was to become of her “when she has lost the bloom of youth”?

The article didn’t win him many new friends. It was roundly condemned by pretty much everyone, from the Archbishop of Canterbury (who hadn’t read it), down to the leader of the Conservative group on Altrincham Council in Cheshire, who wanted to distance the town from the man who bore its name. Nor did the abuse stop there. “Altrincham, if we ever see you in the street, we’ll do you in,” said one of the many letters he received. “You go too flamin’ far when you criticise our Queen.” It was signed: “Eight (loyal to the Queen) Teddy Boys”.

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Nothing came of that threat but he was thumped in the face by the Deputy Chairman of the League of Empire Loyalists (a far-Right group that went on to co-found the National Front). The assailant was 64-years-old and didn’t pack much of a punch, so he got off with just a one-pound fine, together with the sympathy of the magistrate: “96% of the population were disgusted and offended by what was written”.

A couple of months later, journalist Malcolm Muggeridge — still then in his incarnation as iconoclast — joined in with his own article, “Does England Really Need a Queen?”, written for the Saturday Evening Post. His analysis was hardly startling. “The British monarchy does fulfil a purpose,” he wrote. “It provides a symbolic head of state transcending the politicians who go in and out of office.” But as he made his way to his somewhat obvious conclusion, he dropped in some wonderfully scandalous titbits of upper-class gossip. “It is duchesses, not shop assistants, who find the Queen dowdy, frumpish and banal,” he revealed. The whole thing had become “a kind of Royal soap opera”.

Like Altrincham, Muggeridge found himself under severe and sustained criticism. Angered by the distorted, misquoted accounts of his article, he consulted a lawyer on whether he could sue for libel, but was told that, while there undoubtedly was a case, “in view of the circumstances, and the particular matter at issue, I could not count upon a jury or a judge taking an unprejudiced view”.

What these early critics demonstrated was that in a world of sycophancy, there was a good deal of media mileage to be made from thumbing one’s nose at the royals. Played right, there was a career in this.

The man for the job was Willie Hamilton. He was a Labour MP from 1950 to 1987, yet the only national coverage he ever received was in his role as an outspoken republican, “the Hammer of the Windsors” as the press liked to call him. He complained about the cost of the monarchy, describing the royal family as “scroungers”, but there was a deeper complaint that sometimes surfaced: the Queen represented a class that had “deeply hurt the class to which I belong and which I represent in our sovereign Parliament”. For years he was Fleet Street’s go-to guy for a bit of outrage on a royal news story; a happy event such as a wedding wasn’t complete without Hamilton carping about the cost. His autobiography was titled Memoirs of an Anti-Royalist, because this had become his identity; effectively he’d been subsumed into that great royal soap opera, the pub cynic who knew the price of everything and the value of nothing.

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Others were drawn in as well. Come the Queen’s Silver Jubilee in 1977, John Grigg, the former Lord Altrincham (he’d renounced his title in the interim), returned to the storyline. This time he praised “her exceptionally steady character” — which was pretty much what he’d condemned her for back in the Fifties. “She looks a Queen,” he now wrote. “She behaves decently because she is decent.”

The Silver Jubilee also saw the soap opera acquire an alternative theme-song: “God Save the Queen” (1977), the second single by punk band the Sex Pistols, sneering about a “fascist regime” and how the Queen (who “ain’t no human being”) “made you a moron”.

It was incendiary stuff, and would have been so at any time, let alone when the Jubilee was reaffirming the nation’s love of monarchy and providing a desperately needed moment of unity in the midst of strife. The promotional artwork, picturing the Queen with a safety-pin through her lip, added visual injury to aural assault. The record was banned by radio and television; it was deplored by MPs; leading retailers declined to stock it, and pub chains refused to have it on their jukeboxes. Meanwhile members of the group were assaulted on the streets by the contemporary equivalents of the “Eight (loyal to the Queen) Teddy Boys”. But the single still shifted 200,000 copies in Jubilee Week alone.

Punk now being associated with anti-monarchy sentiment, others followed, from the underachieving — the Exile’s “Jubilee 77” and the Drones’ “Corgi Crap” (both 1977) — to the over-ambitious: Derek Jarman’s movie Jubilee (1978). But it was the Sex Pistols who became so closely associated with the moment that they got dragged into the soap, not as regular characters, but always there or thereabouts at special times. When the Queen celebrated her Golden Jubilee in 2002, it was marked by a band reunion, accompanied by yet another greatest hits compilation (inevitably titled Jubilee), and a re-release of the offending single, now seemingly part of the ceremonial trappings.

The single was back 10 years later for the Diamond Jubilee, with excited talk of it getting to #1 in Jubilee Week. (It didn’t.) This time, singer John Lydon disowned the whole thing: “I wish for no part in the circus that is being built up around it.” The band also declined an invitation to appear the opening ceremony of the London Olympics that year, though a snippet of “God Save the Queen” was included. It didn’t upstage the Queen’s double-act with James Bond, though.

As the Sex Pistols’ rebellion faded into the warm haze of nostalgia, the problem for others was that there was nowhere much further to go, short of summoning up the spirits of Oliver Cromwell, Madame Guillotine and Yakov Yurovsky. And there was no call for that.

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In any case, republicanism had rather lost its forbidden allure. This was apparent even before the martyrdom of Diana in 1997. Five years earlier, Alastair Campbell, then the political editor of the Daily Mirror, denounced the royal family as “the apex of a class system that exposes John Major’s ‘classless society’ for the slogan that it is,” and called for Betty Boothroyd, the Speaker of the House of Commons, to be elevated to the monarchy: “Queen Betty has a rather truer ring than Queen Diana.”

The same year, Sue Townsend’s novel The Queen and I was premised on the election of a republican government, leading the royal family to be rehoused on a rundown council estate. The Queen and Princess Anne are sufficiently practical to adapt to their changed circumstances; Prince Philip not so much. Less seriously, there were books such as Stephen Haseler’s The End of the House of Windsor and A.N. Wilson’s The Fall of the House of Windsor (both 1993).

And then in 1994, the Independent on Sunday became the first mainstream paper to declare itself in favour of the abolition of the monarchy. We needed an elected president, the paper declared, and it asked its readers who that should be. Again, Betty Boothroyd won support, coming in second, ahead of Jarvis Cocker, the singer with Pulp, but behind the people’s choice, Tony Benn. (The highest ranked royal was Princess Anne in eighth place, just behind Richard Branson.)

In such a climate, it was hard to make a mark, though many continued to try. In his first book, God Save the Queen? (2002), Johann Hari, then writing for the New Statesman condemned the Queen’s “cruel neglect of her children”, and said the abolition of the monarchy was necessary “for the mental health of those involved”. The book helped launch Hari on a career that saw him win the Orwell Prize for political journalism (even if that was subsequently withdrawn), but it was incapable of generating the same notoriety as Lord Altrincham or the Sex Pistols had managed.

And maybe it was all grist to the mill. The monarchy has survived the centuries by adapting to new social demands. Its function, as Malcolm Muggeridge pointed out, was as “a useful unifying element in a society full of actual and potential discord”. And if society wanted a pantomime villain or two to express republican views, then that requirement could also be accommodated. “God save history,” sang Johnny Rotten. “God save your mad parade.” And then he too took his place on the periphery of that mad parade, forever associated with the institution he so disparaged. In his respectful tweet to mark the passing of Elizabeth, he included the picture of her that had been used to promote “God Save the Queen”. This time, there was no safety-pin.

In its defence, the magazine could point to a multitude of other media outlets that had similarly been caught out by the sudden death of the Princess of Wales on 31 August 1997. And, more than the event itself, caught out by the public response.

Because the week that followed — between the fatal car crash in the early hours of a Sunday morning and the funeral the following Saturday, 25 years today — was an extraordinary moment, a week of all-consuming grief or hysteria (depending on taste), when nothing else seemed to happen, and nothing else mattered. There was only one subject of conversation, certainly in the media: radio phone-in shows experienced record numbers of calls, newspaper sales soared, and rolling news really came into its own.

There were two poles of attraction that week; two households, both alike in dignity. There was Kensington Palace, where Diana had lived. It became the centre of the people’s mourning: flowers costing an estimated £50 million were laid at the gates in a rising (and rotting) tide of tribute. And then there was Balmoral, where the Royal Family, including Prince Charles and his young sons, was on its annual visit. No visible expression of grief was forthcoming from that quarter, and even if that was understandable — after all, two children had just lost their mother and might wish for some privacy — the public was not in an understanding mood.

As the shock of the news began to recede in those days, the sorrow turned to anger, directed at the perceived failure of the royals to lead the national bereavement. “It is as if no one in the Royal Family has a soul,” raged The Sun, anxious to direct attention away from the paparazzi from whom Diana had been fleeing, and on whom the tabloids relied so heavily.

And since this was a time when flags were important to us, the anger focused on a third site: Buckingham Palace, where there was no flag flying at half-mast. The reasoning for this was protocol: only the Royal Standard flew over royal palaces, and then only when the monarch was in residence, and never, ever at half-mast. But that was precisely the sort of inflexible convention that Diana, the rebel daughter of an 8th Earl, had stood against. “I do things differently, because I don’t go by a rule book,” she’d said in her 1995 Panorama interview, “because I lead from the heart not the head.”

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That was the division that Diana Week exposed: head vs heart, duty vs feeling, the stiff upper lip vs the trembling pout. The Royal Family, wrote Daily Mirror columnist Tony Parsons, were stuck in the past, “undemonstrative, buttoned up, reluctant to show their emotions in public”, while the multitudes outside Kensington Palace were “very much a part of new Britain – emotional, passionate, willing to show their feelings. Just like Diana herself”. And if the nation was divided, the battle of the flag seemed to show who had the upper hand: on the Thursday, a Union Jack was duly hoisted to half-mast over Buckingham Palace.

There was much speculation that week about the end of the monarchy. Indeed, even before Diana’s death, republicanism had been on the rise. The year had started with an ITV show, Monarchy: The Nation Decides, filmed before a 3,000-strong audience at the NEC in Birmingham (more familiar to viewers as the arena for Gladiators). Less a debate than a forerunner of reality TV, it broke the record for Britain’s biggest ever phone-vote: 2.6 million calls were taken, with a third supporting the abolition of the monarchy.

A more orthodox poll by ICM in mid-August produced the same result: 30% said Britain would be better off without royalty, up from 13% a decade earlier. The upheavals of Diana Week seemed to have accelerated that trend.

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What halted the forward march of republicanism was the deployment of Princes William (aged 15) and Harry (12). They were carefully shielded from the media for the first days, but the pressure grew too great. On the Thursday, they appeared before cameras at Balmoral; on Friday they looked at the flowers and tributes outside Buckingham Palace; and on Saturday they walked behind their mother’s coffin in a funeral procession, the broadcast of which attracted a near-record of 32.1 million viewers — just shy of the 1966 World Cup Final. And the country felt better for having wept over the poor motherless mites. A poll by MORI immediately after the funeral showed just 18% in support of Britain becoming a republic.

It was, though few were prepared to say so, a bit ugly. A large part of Diana’s appeal had been her identification with the vulnerable. “I understand people’s suffering, people’s pain,” she’d said, in a leaked phone conversation. “It’s not only AIDS; it’s anyone who suffers. I can smell them a mile away.” Now, in her name — and in the interests of showing that we were a kinder, gentler nation — we demanded that her children parade their suffering on our behalf.

Then came the comedown. On Sunday there was nothing to do or to see, but still three million people found their way to the royal parks in London, seemingly reluctant to let go of the sense of a shared experience. And on Monday there began the process of forgetting just how bizarre that week had been, the sheer enormity of the public display of emotion, the “Latin American peasant hagiolatry”, as Boris Johnson called it.

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“We live in an age where feminism is a fact,” concluded Johnson, “where giving vent to emotion in public wins votes.” And that seemed to be the lesson. Tony Blair, who’d been elected just four months earlier, was the big winner of the week. He was convinced that his mantra of “New Labour New Britain” was in tune with the country that Diana symbolised. “In temperament and time, in the mood she engendered and which we represented, there was a perfect fit,” he wrote in his memoirs. And he might have been right; in the aftermath of her death, the opinion polls showed him with an approval rating of 93%, the highest ever recorded for a prime minister.

The Conservatives, on the other hand, were nowhere. Already reeling from their worst election defeat since 1906, they simply couldn’t fathom the mass mourning at all. “I walked through the crowds,” reflected one Tory ex-cabinet minister, “and realised this was no longer a country I truly understand.” In due course, the party decided to put that right with the election as leader of David Cameron, a man who, as a 14-year-old, had camped out on the Mall to witness the wedding procession of Charles and Diana. The assumption was that Diana had won. We’d finally shed the Victorian values championed by Margaret Thatcher. We were all emotionally literate now.

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Except that it doesn’t really feel like it. The clash of values that made such an impact in 1997 hasn’t been resolved one way or the other. It’s become more intense, more bitter, so that we now talk of a culture war, a conflict in which the two sides are pretty much the same as they were then. It’s still about heart and head, the subjective vs the pragmatic. The injunction to “be kind” still comes with an element of emotional bullying, and those who dissent are still, as John Redwood wrote of Diana Week, “well advised to keep their thoughts to themselves given the surge of public sentiment”.

And since this is Britain, the Royal Family is expected to play its part. So Harry is the champion of the Kensington Palace tendency, albeit transplanted to California. He’s prepared to tell anyone who’ll listen about his “genetic pain and suffering” and about his wife’s “lived experience”, in terms more Spencer than Windsor. (“I’ve never discussed private matters and I don’t think the Queen has either,” snapped Prince Philip, back when Diana was still alive.) Harry is not reluctant to share his truths. But every time he does so, he comes under increasingly heavy fire, and sheds more support. A YouGov poll in May this year showed just 32% seeing him in a positive light; even among those aged 18 to 24 — supposedly his constituency — this only rose to 42%.

William, on the other hand, is the heir to Balmoral, though with better PR advisors. There’s no radical departure from tradition here, just a steady adaptation. And the result is that he’s polling second only to the Queen as the most popular royal, with his wife in third place. The month after the funeral, the Queen mused: “I sometimes sense that the world is changing almost too fast for its inhabitants, at least for us older ones.” But she’s still with us, still quietly adapting.

Over the last 25 years, the noise from those rolling news channels, amplified by social media, has given the impression that society is in a state of frenzied change. Technology may be, but human beings are not. There is a generational evolution, as there always is, but what appeared to be a major step-change in 1997 was deceptive. Diana Week turned out to be an exception, not the making of a new rule. “Papa doesn’t embarrass me,” William was quoted as saying in 1995. “Mama does.”

It wasn’t one of Morrissey’s more successful gigs. He was the support act at a much-anticipated reunion of Madness, a band who drew a very different crowd to him, and he wasn’t entirely appreciated. He looked increasingly displeased, truncated his set, and then withdrew from the second of the two nights, complaining about “the abysmal behaviour of a small group of loathsome yobbos”. (He later refined this to “a small selection of rather dull North Londoners”.) Meanwhile in America, tickets for his forthcoming show at the Hollywood Bowl sold out in 23 minutes, beating the record set by the Beatles. Now he knew how Jesus felt: a prophet being without honour in his own country and among his own kin.

It was ironic, then, that “Glamorous Glue” should have been, in part, a lament for a lost British culture, swamped by a wave of Americanisation. “London is dead,” he sang — to fans of the most London act this side of Ian Dury (also on the bill).

It wasn’t the Union Jack that irked the hostile sections of the crowd. Their reaction was more to do with long hours of drinking, an impatience to relive their younger days with the Nutty Boys, and a suspicion of a bloke from Manchester wearing a gold-lamé shirt, split to the waist, prancing about in front of images of androgynous-looking skinhead girls. The previous year Morrissey had said his perfect audience would be “skinheads in nail polish”, but there weren’t many of them in Finsbury Park 30 years ago.

On the other hand, it very definitely was the Union Jack that provoked the NME to devote its front cover and five inside pages — some 6,000 words — to that question of whether he’d gone too far this time. Because the flag had been seen as deeply suspect in Leftish culture for some time. It conjured up images of the Empire, now regarded as a Bad Thing in progressive circles, and it had become associated with extreme-Right groups. There was a fine line between patriotism and racism, and the national flag was seen to sprawl all over it. There was, proclaimed the NME, no room for irony when it came to “the Union Jack, with all its ambiguities”. The paper’s charge sheet against Morrissey cited song lyrics and quotes from interviews, to show that he had long been “toying with far-Right/fascist imagery, and even of racism itself”, with the flag as the last straw. Stopping short of calling him a racist, the paper concluded that “he has continued to pick away at the scab of race relations”.

Revisited three decades on, the striking feature of the NME’s denunciation is how dated it all seems for the time. The reference points are those of the Seventies: skinheads, football hooligans, the National Front. And there’s mention of previous transgressors Eric Clapton and David Bowie, whose comments in 1976 had prompted the creation of Rock Against Racism. (Clapton had spoken in support of Enoch Powell; Bowie nominated himself as a fascist dictator for Britain.) It feels like a rear-view mirror, looking back to the dawn of Margaret Thatcher’s premiership, when post-punk pop could be both oppositional and successful, and when the circulation of the NME was twice what it now was. It’s like the last shout of a passing era.

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Ten months later, a new Manchester band, Oasis, began circulating a demo tape, the cover of which had an image of the Union Jack swirling towards the centre as though disappearing down a plughole. “It’s the greatest flag in the world and it’s going down the shitter,” explained Liam Gallagher. “We’re here to do something about it.” It wasn’t long before the Union Jack was all over popular music, from Noel Gallagher’s guitar and Geri Halliwell’s mini-dress to David Bowie’s distressed frock-coat designed by Alexander McQueen. A new day had dawned, had it not?

In this era of cultural branding — Britpop, Cool Britannia, the YBAs — the Union Jack was flown proudly as the national trademark. The associations now were with the Swinging Sixties, when Britain was losing an empire and finding a new role as purveyor of music, movies and style to the world, when the flag had been ubiquitous, celebrated as a classic design by commerce and culture alike. In the Nineties resurgence of popular culture, the Union Jack spoke of Peter Blake and The Who rather than Enoch Powell or the Raj.

And where culture went, politics was sure to follow. Tony Blair’s speech to the 1996 Labour conference ended with a projection of the flag, much to the horror of the old Left. “It was the National Front,” shuddered Tony Benn, in his diary, “and it made me absolutely sick.” But Benn was stuck in the past as well, and couldn’t appreciate that things were different now. The title of Blair’s recently published book spelt it out: New Britain: My Vision of a Young Country. The Union Jack was the symbol of this reborn nation. “We have reclaimed the flag,” declared Peter Mandelson. “It is restored as an emblem of national pride and diversity. Restored from years as a symbol of division and intolerance.”

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It was fun, it was colourful, it had no baggage, none of those “ambiguities” that once troubled the NME, because New Labour memories were too short to include the imperial past. Admittedly, there was a moment when one of Blair’s speeches in the 1997 election campaign was initially written to address a longer history, but only in celebratory terms: “I am proud of the British Empire.” And even that didn’t happen, because Robin Cook, the shadow Foreign Secretary, had the sentence deleted from the draft.

Meanwhile, the fear of neo-Nazis had receded so far that the Euro 96 football tournament even saw the Cross of St George adopted by England fans. This wasn’t a reclaiming, since it had never been much-used except by the far-Right. It became sufficiently popular to attract politicians, and, come Euro 2004, Downing Street itself was flying the St George Cross — believed to be for the first time ever — to celebrate England’s triumphant progress to a quarter-final defeat on penalties. It annoyed some Scots, but it was typical of Blair’s gesture populism.

Just as characteristic was that Gordon Brown should decide to fly the same flag over Downing Street on St George’s Day 2008. Brown worried a good deal that the English might take against him for being so Scottish, but his fears were just an acute form of New Labour’s wider obsession with being seen as patriotic. Seeking to spike Tory guns, Blair’s party laid claim to the entire nation. “New Labour is the political arm of none other than the British people as a whole,” declared the manifesto in 1997. “Our values are the same: the equal worth of all, with no one cast aside; fairness and justice within strong communities.”

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If that seemed a little vague, there was no greater precision forthcoming. Blair later talked about “standing up for British values — for example, rights coupled with responsibilities, duty, fair play and open-mindedness”, which got us precisely nowhere. His spokesperson blurred the picture even more: “Britishness to us is about issues as varied as how you manage the economy, the approach you take to issues like unemployment, your vision of society.” And Brown merely reheated the same thin gruel, speaking of “common qualities and common values that have made Britain the country it is.” If none of it quite made sense, you could always clutch at the flag to cover a multitude of meanderings. For a while, bolstered by the imagery of Cool Britannia, it did help deflect criticism of a government that sought greater integration into the European Union, that encouraged immigration on an unprecedented level, that allowed the US to set its foreign policy.

But the tide was turning, both culturally and politically. There was a slow Tory resurgence: from their low-point in 1997, they increased their share of the vote in the next six elections. And by the time of the 2009 European Parliament elections — when Labour was beaten into third place by Ukip and the BNP picked up close to a million votes — the talk was of recession, illegal war, MPs’ expenses and grooming gangs.

If the NME’s attack on Morrissey provided a full stop to a period of politically engaged, alternative culture, then Danny Boyle’s opening ceremony for the 2012 Olympics did the same for Cool Britannia and New Labour. Which is why it’s so fondly remembered by so many, a last hurrah for a happier time. The Industrial Revolution, the NHS, post-1960 popular culture — it was enough to make you feel proud of a creative, communal, cool nation.

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Things are different now. Flags are different.

On the day of the Rochester & Stroud by-election in November 2014, Emily Thornberry tweeted a photo of a white van parked outside a nondescript yellow-brick house, on the side of which hung three St George flags. The picture was captioned “Image from #Rochester”, and it was widely seen as being a patronising, Islingtonian sneer. Even as Ukip was winning the by-election, Thornberry resigned from her post as shadow attorney general, and historian turned Labour MP Tristram Hunt spelt out the official position: “We are hugely in favour in the Labour Party of people expressing pride in their national identity and national symbols.”

No one was convinced. No one believed for a second that Hunt, let alone Thornberry, would ever dream of draping a flag from their own houses. It wasn’t the kind of thing that was done in polite society, and anyway the flags — both the Union Jack and the St George Cross — were again being treated with suspicion: they were, to put it bluntly, a bit Ukip-y.

This is all the more so since the 2016 referendum, of course. The Union Jack is now seen by some — on both sides — as anti-European. A photo of it on Twitter will prompt a wave of denunciations of “flag-shaggers” (often from those with an EU flag in their profile). And since the creative industries — to use Blairite terminology — were and still are predominantly pro-Remain, popular culture takes a less celebratory line. The modern equivalent of Geri Halliwell’s frock at the 1997 Brit Awards was Stormzy’s Union Jack stab vest, designed by Banksy, at Glastonbury in 2019, a much darker vision of the nation. The artists and musicians have moved on.

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All of which gives Sir Keir Starmer a problem. Post-Brexit, post-Corbyn, like Blair he’s anxious to assert his patriotic credentials. But popular culture isn’t with him, and the brazen flag-waving of the Nineties isn’t appropriate now. Instead, he treats the Union Jack with reverence, a furled flag on either side of the quasi-presidential podium for a speech, or next to him behind a statesman’s desk as he talks frankly and seriously to the nation. It’s meant to be prime ministerial, but that also means that he’s using the same imagery as the actual prime minister, both the current incumbent and his likely successor. In his glory years, Blair went further than that, arguing that it was the Tories who were unpatriotic: “It is no good waving the fabric of the flag when you have spent 16 years tearing apart the fabric of our nation.”

On the other hand, the Union Jack has made a notable comeback in retail circles. Culture and commerce have parted company. As the post-Brexit advertising for Vauxhall cars — “a British brand since 1903” — suggests, the market is convinced that there’s mileage in the old flag yet. The meat aisle in Aldi is adorned with the Union Jack, and it appears on products from milk and chicken thighs to Shreddies and strawberries — even on sugar that has been grown and refined abroad but packaged in Britain. It’s also to be found on Scotch beef, to the irritation of those Scottish nationalists who would rather see the use of the Saltire. And, presumably, to the fury of the militantly vegan Morrissey.

There was a new mood in Britain, evident in the buoyant state of popular culture. It was the year of Parklife and Definitely Maybe; of Four Weddings and a Funeral, The Madness of King George and Shallow Grave; the year when Antony Gormley won the Turner Prize, and when the National Lottery and Loaded magazine were launched; when Harry Enfield’s TV show moved from BBC Two to BBC One, while Paul Merton became the first alternative comedian with a residency at the London Palladium.

Cool Britannia (though the term was not yet being used) was already having it large, and over the next couple of years, Blair clung to its Union Jack coattails. “I am part of the rock and roll generation,” he explained, rather too earnestly, as he made his triumphal tour of awards ceremonies.

By the time he got into power in May 1997, though, it was all pretty much over and done with. The frothy, showy optimism of Cool Britannia was not to be the cultural tone of the New Labour years. It seemed appropriate that Radiohead’s OK Computer was released that month, a much darker, more unsettling vision of modern life than Britpop had offered. More significant yet — though few could have guessed it — Swedish television was airing the first episode of a series called Expedition Robinson.

This was a show developed by British company Planet 24. They’d earlier given us The Big Breakfast and The Word, but this was a very different proposition. This was a game show in which a group of strangers were put on a remote Malaysian island, given tasks to complete, and asked to vote on which of the other contestants should be eliminated from the competition. In its English-language versions, the franchise was to be called Survivor, but the Swedish incarnation was the first to reach the screen, and can therefore claim to be the foundation stone of what would become known as reality TV. And that was the cultural trend that would dominate the Blair years.

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The point of reality TV was not that it recorded normal life — as had docusoaps such as Airport or Driving School — but that it invented an environment and dropped people into it, poking them with sticks to see how they’d respond and encouraging them to gang up on each other. “It’s life as a game show,” enthused Granada Television’s controller of entertainment.

In this world, normality was not rewarded, the trick was to distort one’s own reality into attention-winning caricature. This was particularly so after the arrival of Big Brother in 2000, which allowed viewers to play Caesar, deciding who should survive and who be banished. The star of the first series of Big Brother was “Nasty” Nick Bateman; his exposure as a devious manipulator of his housemates gave Channel 4 its best ratings since it premiered Four Weddings and a Funeral.

The influence of reality TV spread rapidly. Unable to compete with the prize money on offer in ITV’s quiz show Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, the BBC came up with The Weakest Link in 2000. The sums won were mundane, and instead the selling point was a ruthlessness new to British quizzes; the contestants voted each other off, while the aggressive presenter Anne Robinson abused them for their stupidity, their clothes, their lifestyle choices. It was a “theatre of cruelty”, said Magnus Magnusson, the recently retired host of Mastermind, who came from a kinder era of television. The show’s catchphrase was Robinson’s dismissive “You are the weakest link. Goodbye.” What she really meant, said Magnusson, was: “Goodbye! You’re getting bugger all! Fuck off!”

The press called Robinson “the rudest woman in Britain”, and reported that she was the second-highest paid TV presenter in the country. (Only David Starkey, himself never knowingly polite, was said to earn more.) She insisted that the contestants willingly entered into the bantering spirit of the game. “I’ve never had a complaint from them, only the critics,” she protested. But that rather missed the point of the criticism: that the style of the show was inherently antisocial. “The inference is that it’s incredibly funny to belittle people,” wrote veteran Daily Mail columnist Lynda Lee-Potter. “In fact, it’s the hallmark of the bully and the sadist, and it ruins lives.”

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In the same way, it didn’t matter much whether David Cameron minded being asked by Jonathan Ross about his teenage years: “Did you or did you not have a wank thinking about Thatcher?” What mattered was the decline of decency in light entertainment, and in the treatment of politicians.

There was a certain nastiness, a cold cruelty, that was becoming evident in culture. The new stars of comedy were those such as Jimmy Carr and Frankie Boyle, causing tabloid outrage with bad-taste jokes. Or there was sketch show Little Britain, with its blackface and its fat-suits, its skits on vomiting, incontinence and gerontophilia. The most recognisable creation here was Vicky Pollard, the chav schoolgirl who gets pregnant and swaps her baby for a Westlife CD. Similarly the character who made the most impact in The Catherine Tate Show was another chav schoolgirl, Lauren Cooper, with her catchphrase “Am I bovvered?” Mocking the working class seemed funnier now than it had back in the days of Cool Britannia, when Pulp had sung Common People.

“Bovvered” was named the Oxford Dictionaries Word of the Year in 2006, and the following year Tony Blair played opposite Lauren in a Comic Relief sketch, giving a pitch-perfect performance. “He is one of the finest comic actors of his generation,” gushed Tate, which was overstating the case, but certainly no leading politician had ever engaged so convincingly with popular culture. Nonetheless, it didn’t feel entirely comfortable, coming from a Labour prime minister. It was only a short step from Vicky Pollard and Lauren Cooper to the real-life ridiculing of working-class participants on The Jeremy Kyle Show, Fat Families and Benefits Street. (Frankie Boyle suggested the Jeremy Kyle audience was recruited “by firing tranquilliser darts into Primark”.)

If television was becoming harsher and more coarse, that development was perhaps being driven by the emergence of a rival medium, the first serious challenge TV had faced since its rise to cultural dominance half-a-century earlier. The internet, even in its early, pre-social media days (MySpace and LinkedIn launched in 2003), was already a noisy, demanding presence. Unregulated and chaotic, it could ignore all standards of decency and taste — not just the restrictions imposed on television, but the values at the very core of society.

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Far more extreme pornography was easily accessible online then than it is now. Amongst the ugliest was “crush fetishism”, a genre of sadistic videos that showed women in high heels trampling to death small animals, from worms and fish to hamsters and kittens. This came to wider public attention in 2002 when one of the leading practitioners, Tracey Seward, aka Stiletto, was given a life sentence at Manchester Crown Court for murdering her (human) partner.

More generally, animals didn’t come well out of reality TV. The RSPCA objected to a pig being slaughtered on Shipwrecked, to the neglect of chickens in the Big Brother house, and to Rebecca Loos masturbating a pig on The Farm. (“It was horrible,” complained one viewer of this latter episode. “I could barely watch.”) It also stopped the airing of a British version of American show Man vs Beast.

Partly the concern was about dignity — that of the viewers as well as of the animals — but there was also a suggestion that there had been a rise in incidents of domestic animals being abused and tortured. RSPCA head, and former Lib Dem MP, Jackie Ballard said: “People are becoming de-sensitised after seeing stars eat live insects and kill chickens on shows like I’m a Celebrity.”

And beyond even that, there was a fear that, as the case of Tracey Seward had shown, those who abuse animals will not necessarily stop at animals. There was to be a good deal of horrified outrage when a man killed himself in 2019 after appearing on The Jeremy Kyle Show, and the series was immediately cancelled. But it’s also worth remembering that the first person to be voted off Expedition Robinson, way back in May 1997, didn’t live to see the broadcast. He had already committed suicide.

There was, in short, a dark undercurrent to the culture of the time. By the time Jade Goody died at the age of just 27 in 2009, she had been canonised by the media, and the Prime Minister and the Archbishop of Canterbury were among those paying tribute, but it was hard to forget the crowds outside the Big Brother house in 2002, with banners saying “Jade, go to Hell” and “Slaughter the Pig”. “Don’t feel sorry for her,” urged the Sun’s showbiz editor. Or, as Germaine Greer was reported to have said in the Newsnight green room: “That fat slag deserves all she gets.” The Two Minutes Hate predated social media.

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When he became Prime Minister in 1990, John Major had promised to build “a country at ease with itself”, and Tony Blair — as so often — followed in his path. But the casual cruelty, the mob mentality evident in the reality TV era implied that we were maybe drifting in the opposite direction. The raucous, disruptive tone was all a far cry from the world of mainstream politics, increasingly populated by nice, shiny interchangeable young men in bland suits. And when politics and popular culture drift out of alignment, it tends to indicate a coming fracture.

“More people have voted in recent Big Brother polls than voted in the European elections,” observed Charles Kennedy, and while that wasn’t actually true (more votes, yes, but not more voters), it was shocking that in the 2004 elections to the European Parliament the incumbent government could attract the support of just 8.5% of the electorate. Voters were becoming disengaged. On the other hand, so reality TV seemed to indicate, if people felt that their verdict would actually count for something, they were more willing to participate.

So it proved come the 2016 referendum, when turnout returned to the level of general elections in the Eighties. The era of reality TV was passed now, gone the way of Cool Britannia, but the cruelty remained, directed increasingly at those shiny, young men: David Cameron, the “heir to Blair”, was voted out of the house and found himself a washed-up has-been before his 50th birthday. Big Brother contestants were given a clear warning by producers at the outset: “We tell them they will become the most hated people in Britain, they will never get a job, they will never be taken seriously again and won’t make any money out of it.” Apart from that last bit, the same was now true of politicians.

For the first time, O’Brien’s listenership has overtaken Ferrari’s. And for those of us who love phone-in programmes, it’s a symbolic moment in the evolution of the format.

I should acknowledge, incidentally, that it’s terribly unfair to bring up Sawyer’s joke. It dates back to 2006, when O’Brien was still struggling to make the transition from showbiz hack to grown-up broadcaster. In those days, you were as likely to find him interviewing Dick and Dom as Ken Clarke. And he wasn’t above a bit of old-fashioned union-bashing; during a 2007 tube strike, he suggested that Londoners retaliate by boycotting the leader of the RMT: “If Bob Crow turns up at your shop, pub, cafe or minicab firm, don’t serve him.” 

His biggest story came in 2009 when he joined in the tabloid baiting of Frank Lampard over his treatment of his ex-girlfriend, only to find the footballer, somewhat enraged, calling in. Lampard gave rather better than he got, though it is possible that he didn’t quite grasp the nature of the phone-in. “Sometimes you should think about things before you speak about them,” he said, which isn’t really how it works.

But O’Brien is more serious than that nowadays. Certainly that’s the view of his bosses. We know this because there’s a simple measure of how a radio station sees its presenters: the calibre of the person chosen to sit in for them when they’re away. In 2004, O’Brien’s cover on Easter Monday was James Hewitt, famous for having committed adultery with Princess Diana; fifteen years later, it was Labour MP Jess Phillips. Much more serious, you see.

The critical moment in his transformation came during the 2014 election campaign for the European Parliament, when he got a chance to interview Nigel Farage, a man he clearly loathed. The Ukip leader had recently remarked that he’d be concerned if a group of Romanian men moved in next door, and O’Brien demanded an explanation. What’s the difference between that situation and a group of German children moving in next door? he asked, and Farage was nonplussed. “You know what the difference is,” he replied, but O’Brien denied any such thing: “I honestly don’t.”

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He did know. Obviously. Everyone listening knew what Farage was nudging towards. A leader column in the Sun spelt it out: “This is racism, pure and simple: Romanians, he is suggesting, are criminals to be feared.” Indeed he was, and he might reasonably have expected the Sun to be onside, given some of its previous headlines: “Our crime wave is good news for Romania”, “Beasts from the East”, “Capital hit by 28,000 Romanian criminals”.

For the purposes of the interview, it didn’t really matter whether Romanian men were more likely to be criminals than were German children. The point was not to explore the issue, but simply to display open hostility to Farage, and maybe even trap him into saying something overtly racist.

The incident followed in the wake of a celebrated television encounter the previous year, when Eddie Mair (now the host of LBC’s drivetime show) said to Boris Johnson: “You’re a nasty bit of work, aren’t you?” And it was equally effective. Just as Johnson’s career wasn’t arrested by Mair’s rudeness, so Farage — despite claims in the Left-wing newspapers that he’d been “hamstrung”, “skewered”, “humiliated” by O’Brien — went on to lead Ukip to a stunning victory in the Euro-elections.

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Since then, O’Brien’s stock has continued to rise, largely because he’s very good at his job. He has a range of tones, from sympathy for callers with tales of suffering, through to patronising sarcasm for those who don’t agree with him. Most common is a shrugging, brow-furrowed resignation about the state of the nation. It’s the result, perhaps, of having been on the losing side of every national vote since his run-in with Frank Lampard, and because it’s not possible to sustain three hours of anger every day. “We are where we are” — that’s his world-weary catchphrase. Or alternatively, after he’s run through the charge-sheet yet again on how the country has let itself down: “And that’s why we are where we are.”

He reserves a good deal of his scorn for the “cap-doffing, forelock-tugging” types who aren’t as articulate as him. But he is at least aware of his own humble place in the pantheon of polite society: “When did you realise you were clever?” he fawningly asked the fox-killing, kimono-wearing celebrity tax-lawyer Jolyon Maugham. He often comes across as sanctimonious, superior and smug, of course, but that’s part of the schtick, integral to his appeal. Because while the tone of more-in-sorrow-than-anger piety may irritate some, it provides a self-righteous safety-blanket for others.

He is, in short, a master of the new media world, one in which opinion and tribal values count for more than a pursuit of the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. In the social-media age, he is one of the finest practitioners of Radio Twitter. Instead of it just being the callers who are opinionated, partisan and given to repetition — as always on a phone-in — the host now adopts the same approach.

And consequently he embodies many of the flaws found on social media.

His political analysis is broad-brush, to put it politely. He has told us so often that Boris Johnson is Britain’s Donald Trump, that the two have eventually blurred into one, and a diatribe against the former is invariably laced with references to the latter. Meanwhile, pretty much everything comes back to Brexit in the end, even ball-tampering in cricket.

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​​In common with many Twitter users, he likes to use hypotheticals against hypocrisy in a can-you-imagine-if-that-were-a-Labour-MP way. It’s a form of whataboutery that sits on the fence — we seldom learn if the response to X’s comments is correct; only that it’d be different if Y had said that — but it does provide an opportunity to attack the newspapers.

And if there’s one thing guaranteed to rile social media it’s the old media on which it still depends entirely. O’Brien has an animus against the Sun, the Daily Telegraph and, particularly, the Daily Mail — though he is quieter about the Express, where he once edited the paper’s gossip column. His anger can lead him into strange territory: critics of the Leveson Report get dismissed as people “bleating about how the government shouldn’t control the press”.

All of this works equally well from the opposite political position, of course. So although he’s the best at it, O’Brien’s not the only one on this tack. Among his rivals, the most convincing for a while was, ironically, Nigel Farage, who had his own show on LBC for three years and who proved — like George Galloway on TalkSport — to be genuinely interested in having an argument with dissenting callers. (After Farage’s departure in 2020, O’Brien tweeted in triumph: “We got our station back.”)

Others have fallen by the wayside. Katie Hopkins in 2017 and Maajid Nawaz this year both lost their LBC shows for Twitter offences. She called for a “final solution” to the problem of terrorism, while he spoke against the Covid vaccine and railed against the “network of fascists who seek a New World Order”. The latter comment seemed to be straying into conspiracist territory, a sometimes unclear but always present danger on social media.

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“I don’t do conspiracies,” says O’Brien. “I just don’t.” But he is happy to suggest that democracy is dictated by a small group of press barons — “the non-dom billionaires who installed Boris Johnson in Downing Street” — and even to allude to “the one at the back of the room, pulling all the strings”. Most notoriously, he indulged the patently absurd lies told by Carl “Nick” Beech about VIP paedophile-rings, a conspiracy theory that hurt actual people.

Unless your life was horribly affected by Beech’s fantasies, this is mostly good knockabout fun. But it does lose sight of what used to be the central value of the phone-in show: the way it served as a mass focus-group. O’Brien long since drove away most of those who might not share his views on such subjects as Trump, Johnson, and Brexit, and his show resembles a familiar social media echo chamber.

But there’s no doubt that this is the future of the format in a fractured and partisan world. LBC has decided that the requirement for balance in broadcasting can be made right across the schedule, rather than within any one show, so that each presenter is allowed, indeed encouraged, to be one-sided. This requires a different attitude, which is why O’Brien never really made the grade when presenting Newsnight. It’s also why LBC has — with the exceptions of Eddie Mair and Shelagh Fogarty — not poached presenters from the BBC.

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If you want the old-fashioned version of the phone-in, where you find out what people are thinking and how public opinion is shifting, then you have to go to the man who was LBC’s number one until last week. Nick Ferrari is just as opinionated — if less predictable in those opinions — yet he allows a far greater diversity among those who get put on air. And he remains courteous to all but the most extreme, giving the impression that he means it when he says, “I want to hear your calls”. But last week’s listening figures suggested a changing of the guard.

Personally, I’m a little saddened by this development, because I do want the old-fashioned version. I’ve been addicted to the phone-in for forty years, ever since I first heard the magnificently irascible Brian Hayes in what is now O’Brien’s slot. But even then there were naysayers. 

“The more I hear commercial radio the more repellent I find it,” the comedian Kenneth Williams noted in his diary, back in 1973, the year LBC became Britain’s first legally approved independent radio station. “The din created by the half-baked talking to the half-educated is horrible.”

This was also the first conference since Margaret Thatcher had been ousted as leader and — after sixteen years — many of the party faithful were far from reconciled to their loss. It should have been a tub-thumping, morale-boosting rally to send her successor, John Major, out on the campaign trail. Instead it saw the opening shots fired in a civil war that would go on to wreck that fourth term, drive the Tories out of power, and put the country on the road to Brexit. Because this was the conference when talk of a referendum on Europe began to take hold of the Right.

At the time, the European Economic Community (EEC) was entering a state of transition. In December 1991, the leaders of the twelve member-states would meet in Maastricht to negotiate the future path, and the following February meet again to sign the treaty that was to create the European Union (EU). This was a new incarnation of the great project, designed, as it said, “to advance European integration”.

The bit of that “integration” that was causing concern among some at Blackpool was the near-certainty that it would include a commitment to a single currency across all the EU nations. And the person most concerned was Thatcher herself. It was she who led the call for a referendum on the subject of what would one day become known as the euro.

In fact, she’d floated the idea before, nearly a year earlier, in the last throes of her premiership; it was part of her pitch against the leadership challenge of the Europhile Michael Heseltine. Amid the personal psychodrama of those final days, however, something as mundane as monetary union made little impression, and the referendum proposal wasn’t a big story. But if the public didn’t notice, her colleagues did, and it was one of the reasons why some cabinet colleagues turned against her; in characteristic fashion, she hadn’t consulted any of them about the proposal before announcing it.

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Apart from anything, it was out of political character for Thatcher. One of her first tasks as Tory leader had been to respond to the referendum on Britain’s membership of the EEC, called by Harold Wilson’s government in 1975. She had been forthright in her condemnation of the vote, accusing Wilson of trying to “pass the buck” and seeking to “bind and fetter” parliamentary democracy. And she stayed true to her word: during her eleven-and-a-half years in Downing Street, she did not hold a single referendum.

But now, the scale of the changes being suggested in the European negotiations, and in particular the spectre of a single currency, had banished those reservations. This was too big a step, too much of a threat to parliamentary democracy itself, to be undertaken without the approval of the people.

That was the message she brought to Blackpool. She didn’t address the conference directly — she didn’t need to: just her presence on the platform ensured a five-minute standing ovation. But she did speak to the press to make her position clear. And Norman Tebbit and Cecil Parkinson, two of her most loyal lieutenants in the glory days, publicly supported the idea.

“If the decision is a case of changing the relationship between parliament and the people then there is a case for the people to be consulted,” argued the latter. Most significantly, Norman Lamont, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, also hinted that he was in favour of a referendum. “I will not allow a single currency to be imposed on this country,” he insisted . “We don’t want laws to be made and taxes to be raised in Brussels for which the British people have not voted.”

The clamour became so great that the Foreign Secretary, Douglas Hurd, felt obliged to intervene. “It is not on,” he said. “It is simply not a subject for a referendum.”

Yet a split opened up at that Conservative Party conference, and in the following months it widened further. The headlines in the build-up to the Maastricht negotiations were dreadful: “Maggie blasts ‘arrogant’ PM”; “Thatcher urged to back Premier and halt Europe feud”; “Tebbit fans the flames in civil war over Europe”. This had become a personal and open fight between the Prime Minister and his predecessor: “Iron Lady v Quiet Man,” as the Daily Mail summarised it.

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It was against this background that Major insisted on Britain not participating in two of the key elements of the Maastricht Treaty. There was the Social Chapter — which set out common employment protections — and there was the single currency.

Even with Britain’s half-hearted involvement, Maastricht was a big deal. It conferred citizenship of the EU on all those within it, ensuring the right to live, work and vote equally in any of the member states. It strengthened the European Parliament, extended co-operation on policing, justice and foreign policy, and reduced the need for unanimous decision-making. It created the European Central Bank. This was “a new and decisive stage,” said Helmut Kohl, the German chancellor, “which within a few years will lead to the creation of what the founding fathers of modern Europe dreamed of after the last war: the United States of Europe”.

The Conservative manifesto at the 1992 election boasted that “The Maastricht Treaty was a success both for Britain and for the rest of Europe”, and even if many Tory MPs didn’t agree, the fact that Major won an unexpected victory meant that he had a mandate; the calls for a referendum receded.

Instead, the fight was resumed in the Commons, where the treaty had to be ratified and where the Conservative majority of 21 was far from comfortable. Major faced opposition not only from Labour, demanding he sign up to the Social Chapter, but from those on his backbenches who objected to the whole thing. In a long series of votes, extending through to the summer of 1993, there were repeated rebellions by Tory MPs against their own government.

Thatcher’s private response to the treaty was that “the country is being sold down the river,” and although she had stepped down as an MP at the election, she was now in the Lords and still commanded much support. She spoke out against Maastricht in public, and urged on rebel MPs in private. Meanwhile, her predecessor Edward Heath, who was still in the Commons, weighed in on Major’s side, and the ensuing bitterness soured the party for years to come.

“In the voting lobbies it was not unknown for one Conservative MP to spit at another,” remembered Michael Spicer, one of the rebel MPs. “Physical violence occurred during the course of one or two crucial votes.” He also recalled a senior MP being dragged by his hair into the government’s lobby. Nicholas Soames, a Major loyalist, was particularly unimpressed by the married rebels Ann and Nicholas Winterton: “You’re cunts,” he told them after yet another vote, “and ugly ones to boot.”

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In scenes of great excitement, the final vote to ratify the treaty was lost in July 1993 by eight votes and Major responded by calling a vote of confidence in his own government. This was an unmistakeable sign of weakness and failure, the first time since the war a government had resorted to such a desperate measure. But Major was weak, and he was failing.

As a procedure, however, it was clever. If he lost the vote, Major said, he would call a general election, and there was a strong chance that the Tories would lose over a hundred seats. The rebels had little choice — “The PM’s got the Party by the goolies,” as one of them, Teresa Gorman, put it — and the confidence vote was won with relative ease. The Government was to limp on impotently for another four years.

But the party was badly damaged. And the unsatisfactory ending of the episode failed to bring closure.

As the Maastricht debate approached its end-game, a by-election in Newbury saw a safe Tory seat fall to the Liberal Democrats on a massive 28-point swing, a reflection of how low Major’s government had fallen. Little noticed was the fourth-place finish of Alan Sked, representing the Anti-Federalist League. He got just 600 votes, but this was the first stirring of what became UKIP, launched by Sked later in 1993.

And this was also the by-election where veteran anti-European Enoch Powell made one of his last-ever public appearances. He was driven to a rally at Newbury Racecourse by a young city trader named Nigel Farage, who later cited the experience as the moment that inspired his own political career. It wasn’t obvious at the time, but that European referendum floated by Margaret Thatcher was destined to return.

There were deep-rooted problems here, of which the street-fighting was merely a symptom. Economically, this was a world that had been hit by waves of de-industrialisation, most notoriously during Margaret Thatcher’s premiership, and then, after a period of stabilisation, in the late 1990s. As more and more manufacturing industry was moved to the Far East, so jobs were lost at home. In the eight years between Labour’s election victories in 1997 and 2005, manufacturing output fell from 16.8% of the UK’s economy to just 11.8%, and the impact was felt most acutely in those old towns of the Industrial Revolution in Lancashire and Yorkshire. There weren’t big, dramatic closures that attracted national attention as in the 1980s, just a steady erosion of employment as plants with dozens, rather than thousands, of workers were shut down; places like the Ondura rubber-compound factory in Keighley, or Hillcross Pharmaceuticals in Burnley.

Running alongside this were racial tensions that had again been building for many years. Back in 1989, there had been violent clashes when a meeting in Dewsbury of the British National Party (BNP) was met by an anti-racist rally, with dozens of arrests. The problems, however, were more complicated than the simple antagonism implied by that conflict. In many places, there was rivalry and sporadic fighting between Hindus and Muslims, often sparked by developments in India, as well as conflicts between British Asians and white youths, and between all these groups and the police. Even before the riots in Oldham in May 2001, police statistics showed that there were more racist attacks in the area by Asians on whites than by whites on Asians.

Which is not to say that the BNP weren’t a factor, alongside — according to Labour home secretary David Blunkett — “the Socialist Workers Party and hangers-on who made matters worse and played directly into the hands of the far-Right”. Indeed, it was the presence of the BNP that gave the riots a national significance far beyond the immediate unrest.

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The party had been founded in 1982, but had amounted to very little until veteran neo-Nazi John Tyndall was voted out as leader in 1999, replaced by the less extreme figure of Nick Griffin. A 40-year-old who’d studied law at Cambridge, Griffin began to reposition the BNP, seeking to create a more electorally acceptable image, emphasising culture rather than race, talking about Europe and crime as well as immigration. His approach soon began to pay dividends.

The 2001 riots raised the party’s profile, and at the general election that June, Griffin stood in Oldham West and Royton, coming third with 16.4% of the vote. The following year, a milestone was reached when three BNP councillors were elected in Burnley. They gave their first press conference on a derelict piece of waste ground surrounded by boarded-up houses in Burnley Wood, and the deprivation of the area was clearly a major factor in the party’s growth. So too was a feeling that the political establishment had failed to remedy the situation. “I only voted for the BNP because Labour isn’t doing anything around here for whites,” said one resident. “Someone has to step in and make sure the whites get their fair share,” agreed another. “I’m disgusted with my Labour candidate. Where the hell was he when we needed him?”

In 2003 a further seven councillors were elected in Burnley — at one point the BNP was (albeit briefly) the official opposition on the council — and there were other successes elsewhere. The national media began paying serious attention.

Two television programmes in 2004 added fuel to the fire. In July, the BBC screened The Secret Agent, a documentary containing undercover footage of BNP members. One boasted of having committed a violent assault during the Bradford riots, another of pushing dog excrement through an Asian business’s letterbox. A third fantasised about machine-gunning Muslims. Nick Griffin also featured, calling Islam a “vicious, wicked faith”. Despite the party’s claims to democratic legitimacy and its new focus on bread-and-butter issues, the violence and racism beneath were still very much in evidence.

The second programme was Channel 4’s Edge of the City, which included the stories of young girls in Bradford who had been systematically abused by gangs of men. One of them, a thirteen-year-old, was said to have had more than a hundred sexual partners. Worse, these cases appeared to be just the tip of an iceberg, with a host of similar instances, widespread pattern of offending. In recent months, one man had been convicted, and others charged. Comparable accounts were also being heard elsewhere, and over the next decade there would be convictions of what became known as street grooming gangs in Aylesbury, Banbury, Bristol, Derby, Halifax, Huddersfield, Newcastle, Oxford, Peterborough, Rochdale, Rotherham and Telford.

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It was a horrific story, to which was added a racial dimension. The victims were predominantly white, the abusers predominantly of Asian heritage.

Edge of the City was scheduled to be broadcast in May 2004, but was postponed for three months at the request of the police, deeply worried that its revelations might provoke a new spate of race riots. “The broadcast will increase community tension across Bradford with the consequent risk that it will provoke public disorder,” said Colin Cramphorn, the chief constable of West Yorkshire.

And behind that was the fear that, with elections to the European Parliament due in June, the documentary might — in the words of Lee Jasper of the National Assembly Against Racism — “inadvertently act as a recruiting sergeant for the BNP”.

Why would the stories of the grooming gangs benefit the BNP? Simply because so few of those in positions of authority seemed interested in talking about the scandal. It had taken years for the abuse to be uncovered and still there seemed a reluctance to act. There were exceptions, of course, social workers and police officers who expressed concern, but all too often they found their seniors unwilling to pursue the issue.

There were also some mainstream politicians prepared to speak up, most notably Ann Cryer, Labour MP for Keighley, who had conducted her own enquiry even before Edge of the City. Hers was a lonely voice. “There must have been councillors and MPs all over the country who knew what was going on but were terrified,” she said in later years, as the scale of the abuse was uncovered; “terrified of being labelled a racist”. Denis MacShane was the former Labour MP for Rotherham, where there were an estimated 1,400 victims over a sixteen-year period, and he regretted he had not done more, but as a “Guardian-reading liberal leftie”, he was just following the prevailing orthodoxy: “I think there was a culture of not wanting to rock the multicultural community boat.”

The result was that the BNP — who inevitably talked a great deal of the grooming gangs — had a virtually clear field, posing as the defenders of white girls.

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Despite the non-screening of Edge of the City, the party won 4.8% of the national vote in those 2004 European elections. That was less than the Greens and didn’t result in any seats, but it still meant that over 800,000 people had voted for a far-Right party, the largest number since 1979, and twenty times more than the BNP had achieved at the last general election. And there were marked regional variations: support was low in Southern England, Wales and Scotland, but strong in Yorkshire and the Humber (8%). Next time round, in 2009, came the breakthrough, with two MEPs elected.

Later that year, Nick Griffin was invited onto BBC One’s Question Time, a controversial decision that many feared would legitimise the party, though the electorate seemed to have done that already. Certainly the public interest was there: the episode gave the show its highest ever audience figure of 7.9 million viewers. It proved, though, to be the BNP’s high-water mark. Griffin’s attempts at respectability provoked splits in the ranks, while anti-fascist groups raised the level of their campaigning, and the public exposure tended to repel rather than attract new support.

While the electoral threat of the BNP faded rapidly, the damage had been done. In particular there were two consequences of these events. First, the twin fears of appearing racist and of igniting racial violence worse yet than the 2001 riots had left thousands of children vulnerable to appalling crimes. The impression given was that the lives of these girls — many of whom had been in care homes and young offenders’ institutions — were not seen as being significant enough when weighing up political and policing priorities.

Second, much of the public felt betrayed by an establishment that was complacent at best, perhaps even complicit in those crimes.

By the time the full horrors were revealed, the story had also broken of Jimmy Savile’s long history of abuse, again aided by silence in official quarters, which only served to underscore the point. As with the grooming gangs, far too many had turned a blind eye, including — in Savile’s case — the BBC and the NHS, on whose property abuse had been perpetrated. It was hard to have any faith in institutions that had failed so badly.

And it was that sense of betrayal that was the real legacy of the 2001 riots. The looting was bad, but would be eclipsed by the nationwide spate of riots that erupted in August 2011, in which five people were killed. In any event, damage to property can be remedied. The loss of trust was harder to restore, and it fed into a much wider feeling of disillusionment with politicians, the police and the media.

In the wake of the banking crisis, the MPs’ expenses scandal and the revelations of tabloid phone-hacking, this was perhaps the greatest charge of all to be laid at the door of the governing classes: that fear of civil unrest had trumped a primary duty to protect vulnerable children, that silence had been seen as preferable to rocking that “multicultural community boat”.

Alwyn Turner’s All in It Together: England in the Early 21st Century is available now.

Coming on stage to an enthusiastic audience chant of “You fat bastard!”, Chubby Brown was a skittle-shaped, bespectacled figure wearing a garish patchworked suit, topped with 1930s flying helmet and goggles. He’d greet the audience – “Ey-oop, cunts!” – and then for the next ninety minutes he’d deliver an old-fashioned mix of one-liners, stories and songs. His material centred on sex, full of women who were up for it and women who were not, men who were frustrated or cuckolded or who had fantasies way out of their league; above all, it was rooted in his own grubbily implausible exploits and failures. Like the suit, the act was a vulgar, bastardised reminiscence of Max Miller half a century earlier, delivered with foul-mouthed glee.

He wasn’t welcome on television, but he built a sizeable audience with audio cassettes in the Eighties (Thick as Shit, Fucked If I Know, Kiss My Arse), and then with live videos and ultimately DVDs. They emerged every November and did very good festive business: in the run-up to Christmas 2009, his Too Fat to Be Gay was reported to be outselling Hello Wembley!, the latest Michael McIntyre release.

The two men could not have been further apart, in terms of style, appeal, even geography. As its title suggested, the BBC-approved McIntyre had recorded his DVD during his record-breaking six-night stint at the Wembley Arena, London; Brown’s was filmed at the Civic Hall, Wolverhampton. His heartlands were not London and the south-east; over the course of the Noughties he also filmed in Billingham, Birmingham (twice), Blackpool, Glasgow, Manchester, Newcastle upon Tyne, Northampton and Stoke-on-Trent.

His live audience was mostly male, almost exclusively white, rarely sober. They were considerably younger than him, and they were working class. “I entertain lorry drivers, road sweepers and people like that,” he said. “Fitters, welders.” You were more likely to encounter lagered-up lads on a stag weekend than students on a gap year.

Amid the filth, there were occasional dips into politics. “I was a Labour man all my life,” he reflected in an interview. “My father was a Labour man. We’re not posh people, we’re off council estates.” His response to the death of Margaret Thatcher in 2013 was to put ten minutes of abuse into his act: “Where I’m from, everybody hated her.”

He wasn’t New Labour, though. “So what has Iraqi freedom meant to you, then?” he challenged his audience. “Is your petrol cheaper? Does your lager taste better? Are you getting more pussy than you can handle?” Behind the typically earthy set of priorities, there lay a distinct lack of interest in “punching above our weight’”. And he was clear where he stood on Iraq. “Tony Blair should be hung,” he said in an interview. “He got us into a war that we should not have been involved in.”

And then there was the racist material, a minor but significant strand. Some of these gags were constructed in conventional fashion. “They’re fucking taking over,” he’d say (assuming we knew who “they” were); “before long, that fish shop’ll be called fucking Harry Ramadan’s.” Other bits, though, didn’t quite work as comedy. “I’m not saying that all Muslims are terrorists,” ran one line. “But isn’t it funny how all terrorists are fucking Muslims?” The rhythm is right, but the structure promises wordplay that doesn’t come. That was unusual. Brown wrote his own material and was a good technician — he had to be to achieve and sustain his level of success — yet when it came to immigration, he seemed to neglect his craft. And there were occasions when there was simply no joke at all, just frustration: “I don’t mind asylum seekers driving taxis, but I wish they’d learn to speak fucking English.”

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That line got a massive roar from his audience. It wasn’t, though, a howl of hatred. Rather it resembled the dark delight of a football crowd cheering a particularly heavy tackle by a defender who was one of their own. He was the village idiot, licensed to say the unsayable on behalf of the serfs, to mock the morals that govern society, and ridicule the po-faced puritans who would police speech and culture. This stuff didn’t have to be crafted; simply the fact that it was uttered was sufficient. The audience reaction was the punchline.

Brown was, in effect, creating a bubble in which normal rules didn’t apply, a place where impure thoughts could be spoken aloud. But it was very definitely a comedy gig, not a political rally. The audience was not being incited by the clown onstage, not being wound up and charged to go out into the world. On the contrary, the roar sounded like a release of tension, so that the punters might return to normal life, having been purged. It was a comic catharsis.

It did, though, have a political element. Brown said in a 2007 interview that he’d noticed a change in how this material was being received. “When asylum seekers first started coming here I was talking about it on stage, but now that it’s in the news, when I talk about it people are on their feet applauding.” And he was clear that he meant what he said in his act: “behind every joke a comedian makes there’s a serious point”. The roar of approval was also the sound of the audience registering their acknowledgement of the serious point.

“I’m not a racist, or a sexist,” he protested, when those charges were laid against him; “I’m a humorist”. But the vocabulary alone — with its “poofters” and “cunts” — was enough to see him condemned. And increasingly he faced restrictions on where he could perform. Many of the medium-sized theatres in the country were owned by local councils, and there were some, particularly Labour administrations, who didn’t like the idea of him being on their property. He was banned at various times from civic venues in, among others, Ashfield, Bradford, Cambridge, Cardiff, Egremont, Hamilton, Ipswich, Leeds, Leicester, Llandudno, Oldham, even his home town of Middlesbrough.

Those bans enhanced his outsider status, but they were also a threat to his livelihood, and they left him bemused. “Compared to Jimmy Carr’s act, I’m like the archbishop of Canterbury,” he protested.

It was an intriguing comparison to invite. Because Carr’s material was based on a similar offence against politically correct politeness, with jokes about disability, homosexuals, paedophilia, the Holocaust, rape, domestic violence. The same could be said of Frankie Boyle. Each was creating a comfortably unsafe space where people could come together and listen to wicked thoughts that were forbidden in the real world. They were doing what comedians have always done: cheeking their betters, poking fun at public morality, pointing up the fallen nature of humanity and the frailties of the human body. And a huge part of the appeal was saying naughty things that jarred with the state-endorsed, non-judgemental celebration of diversity and inclusion.

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There remained, though, a stubborn disparity between these comedians. However much outrage Carr and Boyle were said to provoke, it didn’t stop them appearing on television; indeed, they still present shows on mainstream channels. Brown, by contrast, was a broadcaster non grata throughout his career. There was little doubt who was the truly transgressive artist. But what precisely was his offence?

In Brown’s early days, the language he used was sufficient to keep him off the screen, but the standards of what was permissible had changed since then. In any event, he was intelligent enough to know that, like Carr and Boyle, he’d have to tone it down should he ever get the chance to appear on television. Nor was ribald material quite as frowned upon as once it had been.

In truth, it wasn’t vocabulary or subject matter that kept Brown off television, it was the fear that he meant what he said. As Ricky Gervais, another often controversial comic, explained, “You tell a sick joke with the express understanding that neither party is really like that.” It was doubted that Brown and — more importantly — his audience had that understanding, and the reason for the doubt was class. “Roy Chubby Brown is the most significant English male comedian of the past quarter-century,” wrote the academic Andy Medhurst; “he is a living, breathing, swearing, shocking (to some) reminder that class matters.” More specifically, Brown’s problem was one of education. He hadn’t been to university, and neither had his audience, so it was suspected that he and they were not properly schooled in modern manners.

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Here was the great division in British comedy and, perhaps, in society more generally, a line drawn in the sand by tertiary education. From John Major onward, governments pursued a policy of increasing the number of students, and the gulf in society between those who had been to university and those who had not was becoming ever more apparent.

That gulf was cultural more than economic or even academic. In addition to their educational role, universities passed on orthodox values of liberal decency. In the context of comedy, a degree certificate was a licence to laugh at taboos, because it proved you knew why those taboos were important and could be trusted to place an ironic fig leaf over the offending areas. The subject of the degree mattered less than the fact it existed.

There was a potential danger here, of course. If taboo-breaking comedians did have a cathartic role, acting as a pressure valve to release feelings we knew we shouldn’t have and wished to vent safely, what were the consequences of denying this to half the country? Brown’s absence from television, combined with the council bans, made it look to his fans rather as though they themselves had been deemed unacceptable, too ill educated to be allowed access to their own culture. The fact that it was the same councils that had been responsible for their education merely added injury to insult.

Alwyn Turner’s All in It Together: England in the Early 21st Century is available now.