Writing about anniversaries is deceptively hard to do – as I’ve recently discovered

Anniversary journalism, it might be thought, is what you write when you’ve run out of ideas.

There’s something in that, of course, but the form is much underrated in terms of its value for the present. It is also surprisingly tricky to do.

The past few weeks I’ve had a couple such challenges. Forty years on from Margaret Thatcher’s 1979 general election victory, what do we make of it? Too young to vote then, but having lived through the era, it felt historic and the start of process of radical and painful reform. So it proved.

But 20, or even 30 years on, the Thatcherite economic settlement felt much more secure than today. Now, with sufficient passage of time, people have forgotten or never knew what it was that brought her to power – in her terms, a ruinous attempt to impose socialism on the British people. Markets, profits, deregulation, privatisation, lower taxes, weaker unions and free trade were all parts of the answer to the British disease. Now, for good or ill, they are deeply unfashionable again. So that was a valuable insight to be gained from looking back – that socialist ideas have a certain durability, and that perhaps “big” politics in terms of the centre ground shifting goes in long cycles.

The other anniversary was the decade since the MPs’ expenses scandal broke. That one is still close to a live issue today. It was quantitatively different to other scandals because it revealed an endemically corrupt, complacent parliamentary culture. It fed, plainly, into the coming populist agenda of a Westminster elite that exists whole lives apart from the “left behind”. We could not see in 2009 how it would help propel the UK potentially out if the EU, but it seems obvious now. So it, the scandal, is part of understanding the present.

There are other anniversaries too that rarely get the attention they deserve in our media. The May the Fourth movement in China, for example, a century ago during which students in Beijing protested their nation’s failures to reform and resist western and Japanese imperialism. As it happens, the events of 1919 are being used by the Xi government for its own propaganda purposes, along with the usual jubilee about Mao’s triumph in 1949.

In its way the 10th birthday of WhatsApp, which we recently marked, seemingly unremarkable, can also tell us much about the speed and unforeseen impact of what might have originally been regarded as trivial bits of software.

So I think anniversary journalism is hardly lazy, and can be revealing, even revelatory. If journalism is about telling the reader something they did not know or realise, and entertaining them and stimulating them, then it has value of its own. It will never make the splash, but few things ever do.

Yours,

Sean O’Grady​

Associate editor