Forty years ago this week, I became the editor of this paper. That is as long ago from now as was D-Day from then. It must seem as distant to today’s young as did the men on the Normandy beaches to my 27-year-old self. I can now see more clearly how much my generation enjoyed the freedom for which those men had fought. That freedom is trickling away.

Re-reading The Spectator’s Portrait of the Week (which I restored to the front of the paper as soon as I became editor), I find many aspects of the world in March 1984 echoing today. There was near-anarchy in Lebanon; American marines withdrew. Israel/Palestine peace plans were unsuccessfully touted. Sunnis and Shi’ites were killing one another in the Persian Gulf. An Assad ruled Syria. A Trudeau was prime minister of Canada. A Benn (Tony) was in parliament, fresh from victory in the Chesterfield by-election. Protesting French lorry drivers blocked roads. Students threw eggs at the prime minister. As today, everyone groaned about mortgage rates (10.5 per cent, twice current ones).

What was different in March 1984? Mrs Thatcher’s fight about Britain’s contribution to the European Community budget was raging. Now we’re out. The IRA was busy, murdering a deputy governor of the Maze prison. Gerry Adams, too, was shot, by the UDA. Now that’s over, or seems to be. Nelson Mandela refused a prison release which would have confined him to the Bantustan of Transkei. Instead, he waited six more years for freedom. Nigel Lawson’s first Budget began a story of tax simplification and tax reductions, not seen in those of Jeremy Hunt.

The big story in Britain was the miners’ strike. A young 21st-century mind, schooled in greenery, must puzzle why people wanted coal at all, let alone, as the NUM leader Arthur Scargill insisted, wanted every seam to be mined until exhausted, whatever the cost. Yet the striking miners became the great cause of the sort who today follow Greta Thunberg in the opposite direction. In March 1984, the strikes began, first in Yorkshire and Scotland. By the month’s end, three quarters of the miners were out. But the quarter who went on working mattered. They maintained 20 per cent of usual national production at first, eventually rising to 50 per cent as more returned to work. They had a strong moral case for doing so, because Scargill always refused a national strike ballot. Building on his own tactics which had broken the will of Heath’s Conservative government in 1972, he sent often-violent ‘flying pickets’ across the country to stop miners working. This time, however, the government was ready. Coal stocks had been piled high. A new system of ‘mutual aid’ between police forces, coordinated police intelligence and anti-picketing laws already introduced soon meant the pickets could not fly unimpeded. This week 40 years ago, on 19 March, officials informed Mrs Thatcher that whereas only 11 pits had been operating the previous Friday, now 44 were working. Despite many alarums and excursions over the next 11 months, Scargill could never unite the miners or break the new system.

When I became editor, I wanted to continue the tradition of my great predecessor Alexander Chancellor, and ensure that the paper, as its name suggests, was not a combatant in politics, but an interested observer. I was nevertheless aware that freedom in Britain required the defeat of Scargill. He was not the sole loser. Next came the equally lengthy battle of Wapping. Rupert Murdoch’s newspapers endured a union siege which failed to stop them getting rid of hundreds of unnecessary printers and introducing new technology. Journalism could become profitable and fearless once again. All this meant that we at The Spectator and our Fleet Street cousins, who had suffered much worse, did feel free. With the important exception of the libel laws, there was little repression. They would never admit it, but even papers like the Guardian benefited from this. From such battles, it became clear that the government did have a direction and a will which could prevail. On the world stage too, the advocates of freedom were beginning to prove mightier than the totalitarians. I was still editor when the Berlin Wall came down five years later. Its fall had always been desirable: by 1989, it was logical.

In 2024, freedom is sharply diminished, and fear is back. Where once it was shop stewards who dominated the workplace (though never, I hasten to add, The Spectator), now it is the commissars of HR and related characters, such as diversity officers, who act as a third force trying to police speech and advance group rights against the rights of each independent human being. They infest almost every big organisation – corporates, universities, museums, charities, the civil service, churches, local government, the NHS, the law, even the armed forces and the police. Their effect across the world is to demoralise the West, making us, at a time of economic weakness, much more prey to foreign tyrants when they threaten us with arms or court us with money.

Whenever I enter the offices of The Spectator, my heart lifts at a place where free thought flourishes. Only last week, the paper joined the Telegraph in a notable success when the government, faced with cross-party opposition in the Lords, promised an amendment banning foreign state bids for national newspapers and news magazines (thus saving us from the clutches of the Abu Dhabi royal family). But even so, it seems to me that this small, though ever-growing, paper has a tougher fight than it did when I began, and therefore matters more now than then. Its position has become lonelier. The people who direct our nation seem helpless or indifferent, or sometimes even complicit, in the flight from freedom.