Summary
How different Tony Blair seemed from the grey man he had replaced at Downing Street: he was our first politician-as-celebrity, articulate in the language of popular culture, at ease on television, whatever the cultural register of the programme on which he found himself, relaxed in the company of rock stars and the new rich, and apparently uninhibited by the old class anxieties. There is no doubt that even as membership of political parties continues to fall exponentially - Labour would not tell us for this piece how many of its members are aged 35 or under - engagement with political issues, such as climate change and third world debt and poverty, continues to rise.
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Extract
The Politics of Excitement
Ian McEwan's latest novel, On Chesil Beach, returns us to the summer of 1962, and to the hopes and aspirations of a young, newly married couple in a stilted and repressed Britain that is soon to be transformed for ever by the political and cul tural turbulence of what we simply know now as "the Sixties". They are from respectable, upper-middle-class families, and yet they long for convulsive change and a new kind of politics.
"Edward and Florence would be voting for the first time in the next general election and were keen on the idea of a Labour landslide," McEwan writes. "In a year or two, the older generation that still dreamed of Empire must surely give way to politicians ...See the full content of this document
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