"Yes."

"What would you call it?"

"I dunno. Ploughman's Lunch."

"Ploughman's Lunch. Traditional English fare."

"U-huh."

"In fact it's the invention of an advertising campaign they ran in the early Sixties to encourage people to eat in pubs. A completely successful fabrication of the past."

The alternative to McEwan's vision of the British as the dupes of smooth manipulators was that they were the selfish, racist filth of Rushdie's imagination, a thought that occurred to many as the Left lost election after election.

You cannot understand anti-Thatcherism, and the 13 years of New Labour rule that followed it, unless you grasp the pessimism it generated. It was a severe movement, motivated by a bleak imperative: just get rid of them by any means necessary. Labour spin, the gesture politics, the selling of one line to the Mail and another to the Observer and the smirking deceit that characterised Tony Blair's premiership were born of the conviction that the British were an essentially conservative people who had to be sold a Labour government with the same shady means they were sold a Ploughman's Lunch.

However brilliant the oppositional writers were — and a line-up that included Coe, Martin Amis, Rushdie, McEwan and Mortimer was about as good as it could have got — they shared a further characteristic, which also had implications for the future. They displayed little interest in why millions of sensible people voted Conservative. Representations of the crisis of the 1970s, the pervasive feeling of national decline, the Marxist-Leninist takeover of much of the Labour Party and the fear that the unions were making the country ungovernable are almost entirely absent from literature. Working in Birmingham at the height of the monetarist recession of the early 1980s, I was fascinated by the manufacturers who dominated the local Conservative associations but stood back while their own government in Westminster crucified their businesses with dear money and an overvalued pound. When I asked them why they bit their tongues, they replied that they would rather run the risk of their companies closing than see a return of union power.

Coe, as so often, is the exception. He tries to come to terms with Thatcherism with The Rotters' Club, about boys growing up in Birmingham in the Seventies, and its sequel, The Closed Circle. But he veers away from a confrontation and his story ends up turning on the aftermath of the 1974 Birmingham pub bombings and the growth of neo-fascist politics. Trade union power features but not the antagonism it provoked. The only true Thatcherite is the hero's precious and insufferable little brother, who by the time of The Closed Circle is an absurd New Labour MP who gets caught up in a sex scandal. Coe was under no obligation to write about the conservative backlash, of course. Indeed, to treat him or any of the other authors who were stamped by the experience of Thatcherism as "political writers" is to diminish them. No novelist with any talent just deals with political themes, and readers who scour their books for ideological clues have the souls of secret policemen. Nevertheless, it is telling that The Rotters' Club was published in 2001, about half way through the phenomenal global boom, which ran from the fall of the Berlin Wall to the fall of Lehman Brothers. By 2001, engagement with Thatcherism felt pointless because the Right seemed to have won the economic war and nowhere more so than in the Labour Party.