The incredible memory of Daniel Hannan

“My first clear political memory is of Margaret Thatcher’s victory in May 1979,” writes Daniel Hannan, Tory peer and self-styled ‘Brain of Brexit’ on the Conservative Home website.

Young Hannan was struck by “the sense of despair that hung about the country like a cold mist in the late 1970s,” he writes. “I recall being shocked at the way adults talked. Britain was finished, they were forever telling me. Things were going to the dogs. It was time to emigrate. Remarkably similar to how people talk now, in fact.

“A three-day week, a Conservative government setting prices and incomes, trade union barons being better-known household names than cabinet ministers, double-digit inflation, 83 per cent income tax, power cuts, strikes. It did indeed feel as if Britain was finished.”

Fun fact: Daniel Hannan was seven years old when Margaret Thatcher was first elected on May 4, 1979. It would have been precocious of Hannan that, at a time when his schoolmates were preoccupied by Star Wars and Multi-Coloured Swap Shop, he was fretting about inflation and income policy.

But it’s even more bewildering when you consider that Hannan – born, like Paddington, in Peru – didn’t move to Britain until he was sent to boarding school in the Cotsworlds at the age of eight, meaning he was learning the name of trade union barons from a poultry farm outside Chaclacayo, 6,300 miles away!