No, nothing like that ever seemed to happen. When Margaret Thatcher took over the Conservative Party, she turned it strongly towards the right. It was almost a cult of personality, or that's how it seemed. The left have often been their own worst enemy, with in-fighting and the like, all splitting up into factions rather than combining forces - and we seemed to end up with an increasingly nutjob right, a splintered left, and a centre that couldn't make up its mind which way it was going.

Scooping up a newly liberated section of society implies organisation. The left haven't been organised since the sixties. They probably could have been unified under Michael Foot, but the Press and the right ridiculed him for his age, and Neil Kinnock was similarly turned into a figure of fun. Trying to be Prime Minister when you're both ginger and Welsh was probably a tad too optimistic, I don't know. It looked like warfare via the newspapers, and the newspapers got nasty.

I'm inclined to blame a mixture of Margaret Thatcher and Rupert Murdoch, but that might just be because they're awfully inviting figures of hate.