EastEnders wanted to show Thatcher’s Britain. These days it would make Maggie proud

Albert Square full of Thatcherites? You ’avin a larf? No, it’s true. EastEnders, conceived 30 years ago partly as a means of enraging the Conservative party, has blossomed into a Tory commercial.

Iain Duncan-Smith could watch all the wealth-creating activity in Albert Square with a syrupy smile; George Osborne could visit Phil Mitchell’s garage in a hi-vis jacket and look perfectly at home (Boris Johnson has already had a cameo pint at the Queen Vic). EastEnders portrays small businesses built up through hard work; it implies that turning to the state won’t get you anywhere; they even sent swotty teenager Libby Fox to Oxford. Never mind the affairs and addictions, the murders and rape, Walford is rammed full of aspirational, hard-working families. No wonder so many posh folk gather round the TV to enjoy it with their M&S fish pie.

Albert Square’s drift to the right appears to be unintentional. When the series began, at 7 p.m. on 19 February 1985, the real East End of London was a sumpland. Shoreditch was somewhere to inject drugs in doorways; Dalston was noted for its spectacular murder rate; the old London docks were dead. The opening episode angrily reflected all this. The body of a poor, elderly murder victim is found in a grimy flat; one of the men who discovers the body has been unemployed for months, and is on the brink of depression as a result. Later, in the very brown pub on the corner, where a fight between two snarling lager louts is taking place, an old woman in a charity-shop anorak complains that there is no such thing as community any more. As the production team stated in 1985, the series was set ‘uncompromisingly in Thatcher’s Britain’.

Quite so: and we might say that it is now set in the Britain Mrs Thatcher wanted.