Writing about anniversaries is deceptively hard to do – as I’ve recently discovered

The past few weeks I’ve had a couple such challenges, from Margaret Thatcher’s era to the MPs’ expenses scandal

Anniversary journalism, it might be thought, is what you write when you’ve run out of ideas.

There’s something in that, of course, but the form is much underrated in terms of its value for the present. It is also surprisingly tricky to do.

The past few weeks I’ve had a couple such challenges. Forty years on from Margaret Thatcher’s 1979 general election victory, what do we make of it? Too young to vote then, but having lived through the era, it felt historic and the start of process of radical and painful reform. So it proved.