So as you raise a glass to the Eighties tomorrow night, drink with me to the awakening of Britain. If it is to be a dynamic decade for us all, these will be difficult and dangerous years. But we are drinking to a country with a future.

Margaret Thatcher, New Year’s message (1979)

I pointed to the thriving stock-market our wealth-creating government had encouraged, the lads scarcely out of their teens making six-figure salaries in futures and commodities; she pointed to the inner-city slums, the unemployment figures, the bolshy pinched faces of underpaid nurses and teachers.

Terence Blacker, Fixx (1989)

MRS MIGGINS: So who are they electing when they have these elections?

BLACKADDER: Oh, the same old shower. Fat Tory landowners who get made MPs when they reach a certain weight. Raving revolutionaries who think that just because they do a day’s work that somehow gives them the right to get paid. So basically it’s a nice old mess.

Richard Curtis & Ben Elton, Blackadder the Third (1987)