Except that the spat between those two figures, however fascinating it may have been, is not the clash that now matters. A fair proportion of the seminar's attendees must have read The Times that day. Could they not see that the main story on its front page was screaming at them, loud and clear, that the Thatcher revolution is history? Sixty-eight years after the publication of The Road to Serfdom a senior journalist on The Times could write twaddle about "Whitehall reviving the private sector". Of course The Times can no longer pretend to be "the top people's paper", but it is representative of current political trends and is widely read. 

The contemporary intellectual challenge remains, as when Hayek was writing his best-known book, to refute the socialists of all parties.