If I had to summarise, in a word, the mood of the nation in 2025, I’d probably plump for fraught . There is something in the air that I can’t quite recall having sniffed before, the kind of crackle that might be quite exciting or intriguing if you were standing a little bit further back from it, flicking through the pages of a history book, maybe. But it’s rather different to live through it.

How quaint Britain’s big worries of the 1990s now seem

People like me, and probably you, were socialised in a more stable and reliable world, where everyone and everything muddled along. So we find it very hard to adjust to the return of history with a capital H.

That lost age on the domestic front in Britain, which lasted from about the end of the miners’ strike in 1985 up to the subprime crunch

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