A dismal decade when defeat was in the air Sandbrook explained, correctly, that Heath saw himself, when he became prime minister in 1970, as a sort of chief executive for Britain, trying to remake it on entirely modern lines. But what he did not make clear was that things had gone wrong already. Harold Macmillan, followed by Harold Wilson, had seen to that. Strikes and inflation dominated daily life. It is an appalling fact - one which young readers will find hard to believe - that about a dozen trade union leaders were household names. Jack Jones (who later turned out to have been a KGB agent), Hugh Scanlon, Clive Jenkins, Moss Evans, Mick McGahey - so great was the power of such men that the nation of Shakespeare, Milton, Wellington and Churchill actually had to take them seriously. Within 18 months, all Heath's ideas to put things right had failed, and he led the country more incompetently than anyone before or since, except for Gordon Brown. What the programme did bring out, and will develop in the coming episodes, is the key point that the British people's growing ardour for things like foreign holidays and homes of their own was unmatched by much idea about how to make the money these required. "You get as much," Sandbrook quoted Arthur Scargill, "as you are prepared to go out and take." Note he said "take," not "make." When you are now taught - as you are, at school and university - that Mrs Thatcher "tore the heart" out of Northern industrial communities in the Eighties, what you are not told is that these cities had already ceased to compete in the world. In the Fifties, Germans wanted a British car as a status symbol. By the Seventies, they would have laughed in your face at the idea. In the Seventies, all the talk was about "saving" such and such a heavy industry. By the time that word is used, it is almost always too late. And that, in my memory, was the dominant feeling of the Seventies - that it was almost too late. Virtually everything in Britain had been better done before, and was now being better done by the Germans or the French (not, interestingly, the Americans, who were also going through a bad patch) or (where are they now?) the Japanese. In May 1979, a woman won the general election who had quite other ideas. It may be part of Dominic Sandbrook's case in the later episodes that she, too, was symptomatic of the Seventies. But if she was, it is only in the way that Charles de Gaulle was symptomatic of France in the Forties - a leader against the spirit of the time, part of the "righteous remnant" who would not contemplate defeat.