Every Monday we feature a favourite Alex cartoon selected by our readers.

This week’s cartoon from 2022 was nominated by Brian Saunders, who emailed to say “with our new PM waxing lyrical over the 1970s, Rupert and Tim’s lunch might help bring some perspective to the reality of this decade.“ It’s true. Andy Burnham may want to roll back 40 years of neoliberalism, but he was born in 1970 and thus would have been a toddler during the Three-Day Week, and so may not have the best insights into the economics of that decade.

This cartoon ran when the world was emerging from the Covid-19 pandemic. Russia’s unexpected invasion of Ukraine in February had caused the oil price to spike and inflation to run rampant, creating economic conditions reminiscent of fifty years previously. The economic woes of the 1970s were compounded by the fact that no one seemed to want to do their jobs and were constantly on strike (miners, dockers, lorry drivers, train drivers, nurses, dustmen, even gravediggers). In 2022 everyone was demanding to be allowed to work from home - which had similar economic consequences. The 70s ground to a halt with the Winter of Discontent under the ineffectual Jim Callaghan, who was the first British Prime Minister to wear glasses. The other bespectacled PMs to follow were the equally hapless John Major and Keir Starmer. So perhaps Andy Burnham should try contact lenses.

Rupert, Alex’s original boss, has been a marginal character in the strip over recent years (he’d be approaching 80 by now), but seems to remain popular with the readership. Perhaps that’s because he belongs to the now-remote generation of the gentleman banker. He would have started his career in roughly the same year that our new PM was born and was one of those old-school City types who conducted most of his business at lunch or on the golf course. He was of course Alex’s role model.

Alex’s generation were teenagers in the 1970s, but ended up being grateful for the economic disaster zone of that decade, as it propelled Mrs Thatcher to power in 1979. Not only did she usher in a wave of privatisations, providing fat fees for the City, but she also deregulated financial markets, forty years ago in 1986, which made being a banker suddenly a lucrative and sexy career. We suppose we should be equally grateful for this chain of events, as without Yuppies and conspicuous consumption to satirise when we started the strip, we wouldn’t have had our careers either.

If you click on the strip above you can see it in its original 2022 context.

If you’ve got any suggestions for a favourite cartoon for future inclusion please email us. And do tell us if there’s a particular reason why it appealed to you.