Golden Jubilee flops and no posh pop - no Cameron? (ASB?)

Was thinking the other day about the Daily Telegraph's turn-of-the-millennium "mad" period, when it seemed to see the whole of popular mass culture as representing a conspiracy against it and the interests it represented it, before the Golden Jubilee & Will Young & Keane & James Blunt et al convinced it that pop could work in favour of its side just as much as it had already worked for Labour.

So what if the Golden Jubilee is the total damp squib that people even a short time beforehand predicted it would be, and that wave of pop acts don't become dominant in the mainstream (with phenomenal, never-equalled album sales among audiences who had once virtually ignored pop altogether) around the same time? Would this ensure that any subsequent Tory government would have to be more dominated by self-made politicians on the Thatcher-era model (Theresa May has partially gone back to this, of course) and that any election in which they win power would have to be a more serious, bona fide political debate (such as we last saw in 1992 - non-coincidentally the last one before Five Live and when Sky News existed but was in so few homes as to not matter; those factors would of course have made it hard anyway) rather than Cameron basically doing to Brown what Blair had done to Major? In other words, that the Tories would have to get power by debating with Brown on Brown's level?

Of course, this is probably ASB because you'd have to go back further to change it; that wave of pop acts were the byproduct of Thatcherism's attack on Tory wariness of capitalism and mass culture, just delayed 20 years as long-term outcomes of big political changes usually are (c.f. the popular press not really getting started until 25/30 years after the event that allowed it to exist, the expansion of education, and thus literacy among those who saw the existent newspapers as above them, in 1870) so you'd almost certainly have to have a different Toryism in the first years of their lives for their not to take up such careers, to see them - even in such middle-of-the-road forms - as beneath them and their duty. So thinking "how could 2004 have been different - in pop terms - without a different 1984?" arguably defeats the point. But it is worth considering whether a different pop music in the early/mid 2000s would have made different politics subsequently inevitable - and how far you would have to go back, and what you would have to change, for that different pop to have existed.
 
Interesting to re-read this thread - and thanks to whoever it is for all the likes!

It's arguable that we *did* have a serious election this year - certainly the most serious (because the first without Blair or Cameron) since the 1992 one mentioned here.
 
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