As far as reporting is concerned, the new discourse can be traced to the so-called "New Journalism" of the 1960s and 1970s, in which writers such as Truman Capote, Norman Mailer and Tom Wolfe deliberately blurred the boundaries between narrative and fiction. It was especially stimulated by the "gonzo journalism" of Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1972), which was written entirely in the first person and highlighted interior experience to the exclusion of everything else. In theory an account of a political convention in Las Vegas, it focused on the adventures of a drug-crazed reporter sent to cover it. Norman Mailer's Miami and the Siege of Chicago is an earlier and even more brilliant example. This writer-foregrounding reportage works because these writers were incomparably better stylists than their followers. Furthermore Fear and Loathing had a moral premise of sorts: the conference and American society were themselves so crazy that they made sense only to a hallucinating observer.

Their techniques were copied, though without conviction, in Britain. In the 1980s Julie Burchill would attend party conferences where, colleagues recall, she would establish herself with large quantities of drugs and alcohol in her hotel room to watch the coverage on television, thus foregrounding the experience of the reporter and converting politics into background. Will Self followed suit, taking heroin in the Prime Minister's plane while following John Major in the 1997 general election.

Will Self ("So I was smacked out on the Prime Minister's jet—big deal.") was writing for the Observer, Burchill ("You don't learn about the state of the party from sitting in the conference hall.") for the Mail on Sunday. For the most part, however, this British version of gonzo remained a minority pursuit. It has only entered mainstream reporting over the last few years. Caitlin Moran, a gifted Times journalist, has developed a technique which collapses conventional grammar while placing herself at the heart of the narrative. She has a growing number of imitators, and is probably the most influential British journalist of her generation.

However the changes in British reporting cannot be explained simply in terms of journalistic fashion. In his famous essay George Orwell observed that "the decline of a language must ultimately have political and economic causes: it is not due simply to the bad influence of this or that individual writer."

The solipsism which now lies at the heart of so much contemporary prose is a consequence of the very profound social and economic shift that has changed Britain over the last 25 years. In the aftermath of World War Two identities were collective: regiment; trade union; community; church; country; family; political party. The most admired qualities were duty, courage, self-sacrifice—all of which required individuals to submerge their personalities in the interests of a broader struggle.

For generations, patriotism had been drilled into schoolchildren. Orwell recognised that it nurtured a capacity for selflessness and courage. In "My Country Right or Left", he writes of "the spiritual need for patriotism and the military virtues, for which, however little the boiled rabbits of the Left may like them, no substitute has yet been found".

From the second half of the 20th century, patriotism was confused with jingoistic nationalism and racist imperialism and was entirely abandoned, by state schools at least. Contemporary state education does an outstanding job of teaching tolerance, and respect for other cultures and other people; there is a good deal of old-fashioned British decency in all this. But the "spiritual need for patriotism and the military virtues" has never gone so unmet.