In 2008, another Times piece raised the spectre of the Winter of Discontent in warning Labour, then in government with Gordon Brown as prime minister, not to allow the TUC to set the party's agenda again. Militant union rhetoric at the party's 2008 conference, Rachel Sylvester wrote, made it "a quaint but rather pointless vision of the past: Jurassic Park with an Abba soundtrack, a T-rex dressed in flares." Five years later, at the first Margaret Thatcher Annual Lecture given after her death, Boris Johnson lamented that British youth were getting an overwhelmingly negative impression of the late prime minister from "Russell Brand and the BBC" that those old enough to remember what came before her election did not. "[In 1979] Red Robbo [i.e. Derek Robinson] paralyzed what was left of our car industry and the country went into an ecstasy of uselessness called the winter of discontent: women were forced to give birth by candle-light, Prime Minister's Questions was lit by paraffin lamp and Blue Peter was all about how to put newspaper in blankets for extra insulation." Two years later, with another election looming, Johnson again claimed that Ed Miliband, Labour's then-leader, would take Britain back to the 1970s if he became prime minister.
In 2008, another Times piece raised the spectre of the Winter of Discontent in warning Labour, then in government with Gordon Brown as prime minister, not to allow the TUC to set the party's agenda again. Militant union rhetoric at the party's 2008 conference, Rachel Sylvester wrote, made it "a quaint but rather pointless vision of the past: Jurassic Park with an Abba soundtrack, a T-rex dressed in flares." Five years later, at the first Margaret Thatcher Annual Lecture given after her death, Boris Johnson lamented that British youth were getting an overwhelmingly negative impression of the late prime minister from "Russell Brand and the BBC" that those old enough to remember what came before her election did not. "[In 1979] Red Robbo [i.e. Derek Robinson] paralyzed what was left of our car industry and the country went into an ecstasy of uselessness called the winter of discontent: women were forced to give birth by candle-light, Prime Minister's Questions was lit by paraffin lamp and Blue Peter was all about how to put newspaper in blankets for extra insulation." Two years later, with another election looming, Johnson again claimed that Ed Miliband, Labour's then-leader, would take Britain back to the 1970s if he became prime minister.