A book about the failures of the Left in the last 28 years could have been very much longer than this one. The success of Mrs Thatcher’s revolution was such that it made her, and her immediate heir, ultimately redundant. The ordinary political positions put forward by the mainstream of Labour policy as recently as the 1983 election have been abandoned to the point where they are only believed in a very few mad rumps. Wage control policy, exchange controls, direct political power exerted by the trade unions, state ownership of airline companies and car manufacturers (let alone ‘the commanding heights of the economy’, as they used to say) all these have long ago gone into the bin. We are all effectively Thatcherites now.

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