British political comedy reflects the shifts on the Left, which Alwyn W. Turner captures well in his forthcoming history of the 1990s, A Classless Society (Aurum Press). Left-wing entertainers of the Thatcher era were politically correct, and I mean that as a compliment. They saw themselves in opposition to mainstream materialist culture. They were puritanical, committed and often paranoid — quite unlike their modern contemporaries. Ben Elton once announced that if he saw a woman walking alone at night, he would cross to the other side of the street so she would not think an attacker was stalking her. You could never imagine a comedian on Mock the Week admit to such gentlemanly thoughts. If he wanted a laugh, he'd boast to the audience about how he frightened women into believing he was a rapist.

That world went in the early 1990s. The Left had lost. The Tory victory in the 1992 general election convinced them that the electorate was incurably right-wing. Besides, there was money to be made for both comedians and the broadcasters who commissioned them in "selling out". Everything became permissible: the pornographic humour of David Baddiel and Frank Skinner; the vulgarity of the New Lads; the money grubbing of comedians from Stephen Fry to Lenny Henry, who fell over their feet in the rush to take advertisers' money — everything, that is, but overt support for right-wing politics in general and the Conservative party in particular. As with Tony Blair, a pro-forma dislike of conservatism was their sole taboo.

A young satirist setting out today could start by satirising satire. But conservatives should not join in the mockery. "Selling out" is just another way of saying "joining in". The comedians who sold out were immense successes. They gave Britain a culture that produces very rich and very popular political entertainers, who please their audience by being right-wing in everything except their politics. They may be hypocrites, but their success illustrates the truth of Alwyn Turner's words, that Margaret Thatcher won the economic argument but lost the moral argument.

When he was younger, David Cameron understood the dangers of cultural defeat. Right-wingers who argued against his attempt to "decontaminate" the Tory brand could not have been more foolish. They should be full of foreboding now that Cameron's "project" has so clearly failed. The misery of the Britain the coalition presides over, its accumulation of profits, its suppression of wages, its proliferation of food banks and homelessness, its neglect of the aspirations of the young, are confirming all the stereotypes that the Conservatives are a party of the rich, by the rich and for the rich. So much so, that even rich political comedians cannot bring themselves to support it — or not in public at any rate. Unless this changes soon, Britain will revert to what it was before 2010: a conservative country where voters could do anything except elect Conservative governments.