Thatcher Stole My Trousers by Alexei Sayle, book review: A class act

This is an unexpected delight. All those lefty stand-up comedians who monopolise the funny stuff now: their style started with Alexei Sayle and his comrades in the 1980s.

They were raucous and passionately opposed to Margaret Thatcher, so the first surprise of the book is how gentle, often wistful, it is. It is not packed with one-liners. It is much funnier than that. It is an observant and wry account of Sayle's young adulthood in which the jokes creep up on the reader, as unexpectedly as the philosophical insights.

"My inclination was to make important life decisions based not on what was sensible or right or appropriate but rather on what I thought might sound impressive to some imaginary people who lived inside my head. These people encouraged me to make a lot of mistakes," he writes.

The second surprise is how ambiguous Sayle's politics were. He was brought up in a Communist household in Liverpool by his atheist Jewish party-member parents. That story is told in Sayle's first memoir, Stalin Ate My Homework: it was an upbringing that produced a young adult who felt profoundly different from everyone else and yet who was fearsomely articulate.

So Sayle was a lefty, and he went out with Linda, who was a Maoist, a member of the Merseyside branch of the Communist Party of Britain (Marxist-Leninist). They were so left-wing that they got married in 1974. It was "almost as an affectation," says Sayle. "All the couples we knew were living together while marriage was considered to be old-fashioned and possibly fascist so we thought we'd be different."

When the miners went on strike in 1984, he supported them. "To take on the miners the right changed the employment laws, co-opted the police and unleashed the reactionary press while the left deployed me and Billy Bragg."

But when the print workers went on strike against Rupert Murdoch's move to Wapping a year later, he couldn't support them. He had taught printers' apprentices at the London College of Printing, and knew too much about the restrictive practices in that industry to think that their jobs had to be defended. One of his chapters is called, "The Workers United Will Frequently Be Defeated".

Similarly, when Live Aid happened in 1985, he remembered the Arab Marxists with whom he had shared digs when he first moved to London. Their friends had seized power in Ethiopia. "I was certain if they were given £150m raised by the concert then they would just use it to pursue their wars and very little of it would go to the starving. Which is what happened."

If there is an arc to this story of Sayle's breakthrough to success, it bends from his first meeting the children of the rich at Chelsea School of Art to an episode of The Young Ones featuring Stephen Fry, Hugh Laurie and Emma Thompson. When Sayle remonstrated with fellow Young Ones writers Rik Mayall, Lise Mayer and Ben Elton that these public-school Oxford and Cambridge types were the enemy, they replied: "No, that was just you. That was all just in your head. Didn't you notice that we never subscribed to your demented class-war ravings?"

Bloomsbury Circus, £16.99. Order at £14.99 inc. p&p from the Independent Bookshop