we should also go back to the Thatcher period's opening months, and Eton Rifles, in which Weller imagines the class war being fought out at the titular school's gates, and a clarion call going out to what remains of the proletariat: "Sup up your beer, and collect your fags/There's a row going on, down near Slough." Inevitably, the wrong side loses: "All that rugby puts hairs on your chest," sings Weller. "What chance have you got against a tie and a crest?" Cameron says he remembers listening to Eton Rifles ("I was one," he says), which leads you to wonder: did it not cause him and his pals even a faint pang of unease? When it comes to Cameron's supposedly beloved Smiths, younger readers might want to factor out Morrissey's recent strange views about immigration and his all-round post-Smiths embrace of a crabby kind of small-C conservatism, and think instead about the themes - republicanism, vegetarianism, the rejection of paid employment, you name it - that implicitly put the Smiths at 90 degrees to their time. In January 1986, Morrissey's creative partner Johnny Marr played every date on Red Wedge's opening tour; the whole band performed when the show pitched up in Newcastle. History records that within a week, the Smiths were putting in an appearance at a Liverpool concert titled From Manchester with Love, put on in aid of the 49 Liverpudlian councillors who were facing personal financial ruin thanks to their battles over the thinly veiled cuts policy