Here’s a parlour game for the political geek in your life. When did Tony Blair win the 1997 general election? Don’t accept the reflex answer – 1 May of that year – because the one you’re looking for is 16 September 1992, Black Wednesday, when interest rates were briefly set to 15% and the Conservatives trashed their reputation for economic competence.
Now ask when Gordon Brown lost the 2010 election. The correct answer could be 17 September 2007, with the run on Northern Rock that presaged the financial crash of 2008; or perhaps 6 October 2007, when Brown ducked an early election, allowing his critics to cast the onetime iron chancellor as a bottler. Thatcher’s victory in 1979? It didn’t come on election day in May, but more probably in January, when the binmen and gravediggers went on strike, thereby providing some of the iconic motifs of the winter of discontent, just as James Callaghan was on the front page of the Sun reported (inaccurately) to be asking: “Crisis? What crisis?”
