Coe's notion that self-serving conspirators are destroying the best of England runs through the anti-Thatcher literature of the period. The title of John Mortimer's Paradise Postponed summed it up. After 1945, the welfare state held out the prospect of making Britain a more decent country. (Simeon Simcox, the socialist vicar in Paradise Postponed, greets Clement Attlee's victory with a sermon drawn on the line from the book of Revelations: "And I saw a new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and earth had passed away.") Then everything unravels. Sometimes, the anti-Thatcher novelists blame the educated middle class. Leslie Titmuss, the Thatcherite MP who represents all the forces that are ruining Mortimer's Chilterns valley, turns out to be the bastard child of post-war social democrats — literally so. More often, they write as if a barbarian army is occupying the country. In Martin Amis's Money, John Self, the junk-eating, porn-consuming, alcohol-guzzling yob and his friends from that most Thatcherite of businesses, an advertising agency, pour themselves into a classy restaurant. As they throw food at each other and break into choruses of "We are the champions," Self notices that the "middle-aged pair at the next table retract slightly and lower their heads over their food...No, the rest of the meal isn't going to be much fun for these two, I'm afraid. I suppose it must have been cool for people like that in places like this before people like us started coming here also. But we're here to stay. You try getting us out." 

Coe remains the most emblematic writer, however, because for him and most leftists of the Eighties the paradise that was lost was not the genteel world of social democracy's great and good, which we were never going to join, but a provincial England of full employment where working- and middle-class families could have secure jobs protected by strong unions. The hero's girlfriend in What a Carve Up! dies because of the NHS cuts the Winshaws help the Tories implement. His adoptive father's pension vanishes in a Maxwell-style scam facilitated by Robert's banks. These did not seem like outrageous plot devices to his readers.

Nor did the feeling he articulated that a Maoist mania had gripped the Conservative Party, inflicting permanent counter-revolution on Britain. Thatcherism was one outrageous thing after another to its opponents: a series of apparently never-ending defeats with each disaster being topped by the next. The conventional wisdom held that no government could survive if unemployment went above one million. Margaret Thatcher proved that the voters did not "give a hoot" and she could be re-elected with three million, four million or more out of work — a truth I wish politicians had never learned. My earliest political memory is of my father turning up the radio to listen to the 1975 Conservative leadership contest between Margaret Thatcher and Edward Heath. I wanted Heath to hold on, but my father explained that I should be supporting Mrs Thatcher because "the Tories would never win an election with her in charge". We never saw it coming, and were outraged and disorientated when it did.

Virtually every serious writer felt the same. We forget that before the Ayatollah Khomeini ordered his murderers to target him, Salman Rushdie had a far stronger hatred of Thatcherism than of Shia Islamism. Margaret Thatcher appears in the The Satanic Verses none too subtly disguised as Mrs Torture. In 1982, Rushdie called on blacks and Asians — we never dreamed of identifying minorities by the communalist labels of Muslim, Hindu or Sikh in those innocent times — to revolt against the Thatcherite order. "Britain had never been cleansed of the filth of imperialism," he roared at Channel 4 viewers. Until "you the whites" face up to the business of "eradicating the prejudices within almost all of you, the citizens of your new and last empire will be...required to launch a new freedom movement."

Anti-Thatcherism will soon be back in fashion. Somewhat predictably, liberal broadcasters are responding to the likely arrival of a Cameron government with a retro-chic revival of the books they read when they were young. The BBC is adapting Money — God only knows how when most of the novel is a stream of consciousness inside John Self's befuddled head. Meanwhile, Channel 4 has an adaptation of the more
obviously cinematic What a Carve Up! in development, which will go into production later this year, all being well.