Sixty years of Britain, decade by decade: the stories that carried the country, and the ones that sank it

In Part One I told you about a boy on a window sill, kept quiet with stories and shown the way out by them. A childhood like that teaches you what stories are for. They are not entertainment. They are infrastructure. They hold people up, or they hold people down. And what is true of one boy in an end terrace is true of sixty million people at once. A nation is just millions of people agreeing to live inside the same story.

So here is my core claim. We do not elect governments. We elect stories. Policy is what a government does. Narrative is what a nation believes it is doing. When the two align, countries surge. When they drift apart, countries stall. And when a government has power but no story, the vacuum gets filled by whoever tells the best one. True or not.

You can track this through the decades. The pattern, conveniently, lands on the years ending in six, which also happen to be the mile markers of my own life. And football keeps showing up as the honest mirror. That is my first mildly controversial claim: the England team has told us more truth about the state of the nation than any Budget speech. Sport is narrative with the spin doctors removed. You cannot media-manage a scoreline.

1966: The story that outlived the facts

Harold Wilson won a landslide in March 1966 selling modernisation. The white heat of technology. A meritocratic Britain shaking off its class-bound past. It landed at the exact moment the culture caught fire. The Beatles were becoming the biggest band on earth. London was swinging. In July, England won the World Cup at Wembley.

Story and culture in perfect alignment. It felt like a hinge point in history.

The facts were awful. That same summer brought a sterling crisis and the seamen’s strike. Days after the World Cup final, Wilson imposed a wage freeze, spending cuts and a credit squeeze. The empire was unravelling. The white heat never really arrived. With hindsight, 1966 sits near the start of a long national decline, not a launchpad.

And yet ask anyone what 1966 means. They will tell you about possibility, youth and renewal. The story won. It outlived the facts so completely that the facts barely register in the national memory. First lesson: a strong enough story can carry an era even when reality refuses to cooperate. Inspiring or terrifying, depending on who holds the pen.

1976: The year the story ran out

Ten years later I was one year old, just starting to notice the world. The world I was noticing had no story left. Wilson resigned in March 1976, exhausted. Inflation was rampant. By autumn, Britain was at the IMF asking for a bailout. That was the moment the modernisation myth formally died.

What filled the vacuum is instructive. Punk. The Sex Pistols formed in this window and were soon snarling about no future. When the official story collapses, the counter-story is rarely polite. Remember that. It comes up again.

1986: The story that chose winners

Thatcher ran on the opposite kind of narrative. Not renewal but toughness. There were winners and losers, there was no alternative, and consensus was for the weak. By 1986 she had crushed the miners’ strike, privatisation was in full swing, and the Big Bang was about to deregulate the City. A coherent story, brutally so. It just needed a large chunk of the country cast as the villains.

Then, in June, England met Argentina in a World Cup quarter-final. Four years after the Falklands. Maradona punched the ball into the net and called it the hand of God. Minutes later he scored the greatest goal ever seen, as if to prove the first one was a choice.

Second provocative claim. Thatcher and Maradona understood the same thing. Narrative beats fairness. Maradona did not apologise for the handball. He mythologised it, instantly, on camera. Argentina absorbed it as poetic justice for a lost war. He grasped that the story of the goal mattered more than the legality of it. Thatcher governed on the same principle. Win, then narrate the win so powerfully the cost becomes invisible.

It works. It also splits countries down the middle. Britain in 1986 was two nations living inside one story, and only one of them got to be the hero.

1996: The rarest thing of all

Euro 96. Football’s coming home. Three Lions on every radio, Britpop everywhere, Cool Britannia stirring. England lost the semi-final on penalties to Germany, and even that fed the story. We had come so close. It felt like the end of a chapter, not a failure. The anticipation of something.

The something was Blair, a year later. Here is what makes the nineties genuinely unusual in this sixty-year pattern. For a few years, the story and the substance actually matched. Minimum wage. Serious NHS investment. Devolution. The creative industries booming. It was not hollow like 1966. Things were being built underneath the optimism.

I know because I was inside it. I marched against tuition fees in the late nineties. The detail people forget is that fees were substantially a Tory-initiated agenda, arriving via the Dearing Report, and Blair was largely railroaded into them. But the point is the marching itself. We protested because we believed power was negotiable. You only take to the streets when you think the story is still being written and you might get a hand on the pen. Nobody marches on a vacuum.

Cool Britannia gets sneered at now. I think that is revisionism. For six or seven years this country had a story it believed and evidence it could point to. That combination is so rare we have spent most of the time since failing to reproduce it.

2006: Running on fumes

Ten years on, Blair was still in office and the story was dead. Iraq had poisoned it beyond recovery. By September 2006 he had been forced to announce he would go within a year. The narrative of progress had curdled into scandal management. Power without belief. A government still administratively functional and narratively bankrupt.

That was the year I released the original King of Defenders. I mention it partly for the symmetry, which amuses me, and partly because it taught me the same lesson from the other side. A game is nothing but a story a player agrees to believe. If the story holds, they forgive your rough edges. If it breaks, no amount of technical competence saves you. I was learning in miniature what Downing Street was demonstrating at scale.

2016: The fracture

Then the hammer. On 23 June 2016, the referendum split the country almost exactly in half. Whatever you think of the result, be honest about why it happened. Leave won because it was a story and Remain was a spreadsheet. Take back control is a narrative with a hero, a villain and an arc. GDP projections are not. The campaign that understood 1966, 1986 and 1996 beat the campaign that thought facts vote.

Ten days later, England lost to Iceland. A nation of 330,000 people. The manager resigned before the cameras had cooled. Political fracture and sporting humiliation in the same fortnight. The mirror doing its job.

I have particular reasons to remember that summer. I was recovering from the cancer. I was climbing out of the wreckage of a deeply damaging marriage, one I had stayed in for years because my children needed at least one functioning parent in the building. My own story fractured at the same moment the national one did. I do not claim the country felt my pain. I claim I recognised the country’s. I knew exactly what it looks like when the narrative holding everything together stops working and nothing has arrived to replace it.

2026: Power without story

Which brings us to now, and the collapse of the Starmer government.

Labour won a huge majority in 2024 and it was hollow on arrival. Around half of Labour’s own voters said they were mainly voting to get the Tories out. That is not a mandate. It is an eviction notice with Labour’s name on the envelope. Starmer took office with power but no story, and never acquired one. One pollster put it perfectly: he became a vessel for people’s frustration with the system. A vessel. Not an author.

Within two years his ratings had fallen further and faster than any prime minister in half a century. Reform surged into the vacuum. In June 2026, after catastrophic local elections and a cabinet coming apart, he resigned.

Here is my most provocative claim, made cleanly. Starmer did not fail on policy. He failed because he confused competence with leadership. He is the endpoint of a thirty-year drift towards managerialism in British politics. The belief that governing is administration and that narrative is spin, something slightly vulgar that serious people delegate. But narrative is not decoration on top of governing. Narrative is the part of governing that tells a country what the sacrifices are for. Remove it and every hard decision reads as pointless cruelty, because nobody knows what chapter they are in.

Wilson had a story without substance and owned a decade. Starmer had substance without a story and lasted two years. If you want a controlled experiment in the power of narrative, British politics has just run one for you.

And then there is the football. For every other decade in this piece, the story was finished before I could write about it. This one is live.

England nearly went out in the round of 32. DR Congo took the lead in the seventh minute and held it for over an hour. Then Harry Kane equalised in the 75th minute, matching Pelé’s World Cup goal tally, and won it in the 86th, breaking a record that had stood for fifty six years. Two goals in eleven minutes, both when it mattered most. That is what leadership actually looks like. Not a title. Behaviour, at the exact moment the story needs an author.

And here is the detail that made me smile. It was England’s first men’s World Cup win after conceding first since the 1966 final. The sixes again.

That story carried the team to the Azteca, where Mexico were waiting with the crowd and the history. On paper England should not have won. They scored three. They conceded two, one of them a soft penalty. The story held.

Norway on Saturday in the quarter final. Then, maybe, a semi final. Then, maybe, the whole thing.

Meanwhile, the next build of King of Defenders lands on Wednesday. Two unfinished stories running side by side. If England win, everyone gets another chapter. If they lose, it was all worth it anyway, just for the story. Which is rather the point of this piece.

That is sixty years of the pattern. Held, broken, stolen and lost. What it means for the next ten, and who gets to hold the pen, is where this series ends.

Finish with Part Three: What Happens Next.