We were seven bright, working-class boys, scattered across the UK in local Welfare Assistance offices, where we distributed dollops of state welfare to nominally less fortunate, actually more practical citizens who clustered round warm fires, subsisting contentedly on beer and fish and chips, while we trudged wetly from house to house, room to room, handing out payment books, clothing grants, extra food money to chronic invalids, ruddy with health and good cheer as they commiserated us on our sniffles and shivers and hard luck on having to work for a living.

Then, in the swinging sixties, the new Government decided to change Britain from a mangy lion, living off past glories, to a sleek agile tiger, a sort of America lite, nimble and dynamic, snatching glory from the white-hot crucible of the new technology. That was the theory, at least, and although computerization of the chaotic and unstructured welfare system had been declared an impossible task, we were plucked from our damp and cheerless places of work and assembled in a huge office complex, seven of us, set down and abandoned amongst six thousand non-technical clerical workers who had no knowledge of, or interest in technology or welfare, except for their own.

The theory was, set an impossible task, assemble a completely inadequate team, both in numbers and training, and to throw them into battle, where the great British genius for improvisation and succeeding against overwhelming odds would kick in and carry them triumphantly to victory. To ensure that the odds were sufficiently overwhelming, none of us had ever seen a computer, and indeed were unlikely to do so, since our mainframe was in London, three hundred miles to the south, our keypunch department, in this primitive computer era was a hundred miles away, and the powers that were had forgotten to place a manager in overall charge of the project.

Having thus assured our success against overwhelming odds, the Government sat back and waited for our miracle. Since we were all fairly intelligent and practical souls, we quickly settled down to our new status as citizens of the Welfare State. Crosswords in the morning and the pub in the afternoon provided a pleasant existence as we floated gently down the river of life, an existence that might have lasted into the twilight of our careers, had not the political landscape changed, once more.

Eventually, the new regime, clearing out the stables, swept a path to our cozy little domain. After a while, our new Tory, boss arrived. He was the real thing, an aristocrat of the old school, tall, immaculate, immensely dignified and sure of himself, the archetypal Oxbridge leader of men. He was the sort of man who had sent our grandfathers into the thunder of battle and the hail of foreign bullets, to cover a quarter of the globe with swaths of pink..