Rob Blackhurst

And so to dinner last night in Covent Garden with my publisher friend Andreas. He came bearing a copy of Andy McSmith's new book "There's no such thing as Society", a history of the 1980s that we'd jointly conceived a couple of years back when I worked with him at Constable Robinson publishers.

---

I swear that in the week of Back to the Future's rerelease, Marty and the Doc have been at work with the flux capacitor and pointed us back to 1982. Headlines about Thatcher, the Ark Royal, and predictions of another sugar-glazed Royal Wedding. As Margaret heads towards the last lap, one can almost sense the obituaries being tweaked, draft Prime Ministerial statements being updated, and the gun-carriage polished.

The brilliant Urban Woo has written this week about "Thatch" <http://theurbanwoo.blogspot.com>- the name Ben Elton and the alternative comedians spat out in the early eighties. These days, of course, Elton is writing musicals with Lloyd Webber, who with his Irish estates, racehorses and Eton Square address was the embodiment of Thatcher's dream.

I suspect, even for Elton, it's difficult to remember quite how hated Thatcher was by a huge coalition of people in the eighties – from the Tory Squierachy right through to the public sector Left. Her early exit from the national stage as her health failed has made the pit-of-stomach anger of those years seem light years away. For many, that constricted, mannered, condescending voice defined everything that was wrong with Thatcherism. And its premature silence has robbed her of that ability to send people into paroxysms of adoration or rage.

As we reminisced about the decade, and Andreas remembered the Red Wedge posters in his Winchester dorm, it occurred to me that whatever statement is made to sum up the eighties, the exact opposite is also true. People say it was a decade of consumption. Perhaps for the brace-twanging city boys shouting into their mobile bricks But for the rest of us, times were far more ascetic than they are now. The Left was still a force to be reckoned with: the bearded products of Universities in the seventies were finally in positions of power - dominating the staff-rooms,local councils, and trade unions.

As a kid at a state school, my abiding impression of the eighties is that it was a time of hippyish educational experimentation, whatever "mad monk" Keith Joseph was saying in his speeches about a return to the three Rs. As Andy McSmith does a good job of telling, the eighties might have been a time of Upstairs Downstairs and Audi Quattros. But it was also a time of Gay Rights and fantasic, oddball English music like the Cure and the Smiths. Even for Thatcher herself – it was a decade of unintended consequences. I wonder if the daughter of Alderman Roberts, in her more cogent moments, worries about the pleasure Britain of beer barns and sexual libertinism that she did so much to unleash?