Talking about their generation: Britain’s golden youth

28 October 2006

Interviewing applicants for a research job, Boris Johnson was astonished by their accomplishments, pleasantness and lack of anger. Life is very good for these beneficiaries of Thatcher’s Britain, the memories of its conflicts long forgotten

On the other side of the argument there was a symmetrical sense of engagement. Some of our girlfriends even went to Greenham Common or held hands outside South Africa House, and two decades later I know a prosperous barrister who still goes ‘oink, oink, oink’ and hisses ‘piggies’ whenever she sees the police. When poor Keith Joseph made his doomed attempt to reform university finance in 1984, he was so pelted with eggs that he backed off. What’s happened to today’s student body? Why don’t they pelt Labour ministers with eggs? They introduced top-up fees, for heaven’s sake. Just imagine the reaction if the scenes from today’s Iraq had been beamed into the JCRs of Thatcher’s Britain. How would 1980s students have behaved if Margaret Thatcher had been co-responsible for a war in which anything between 58,000 and 655,000 innocent Iraqis have been killed? It is true that large numbers initially turned out to protest against the war; but those protesters were not noticeably in the first flush of youth, and more people turned out to object to the closure of rural post offices.

Where is the anger? It’s all iPods and jeans around yer hips and chill, man. We had rock stars called Sid Vicious and people who bit the heads off pigeons and electrocuted their girlfriends in the bath. Nowadays we’ve got the beany-hatted James Blunt, pouring his genius treacle into our ears. He’s brilliant, but he’s not exactly a rebel, is he? My generation spawned loads of tub-thumping right-wing journalists, and we are all still at it, fizzing and puttering away. But where are their equivalents today? Where is the new Charles Moore, Noel Malcolm, Simon Heffer, Matthew d’Ancona, Andrew Roberts, Niall Ferguson, et al? That tree has stopped fruiting, which may or may not be deemed a mercy. But it is certainly a change.