Twenty-five years on, the game begins again

In the autumn of 1984, solicitors were allowed to advertise for the first time, but if the public failed to spot their modest announcements it was probably because the newspapers were awash with a much more unusual publicity blitz. The government was selling half of British Telecommunications, as the phone company was then called, and it needed the help of people who had never previously owned a share. The BT flotation was the start of a phenomenon that was as much a part of the decade that followed as Bros, the Pet Shop Boys or Wham! Buoyed by a bull market, the government used the BT model to sell £80 billion of nationalised industries, balancing the government books and creating a new generation of equity holders.

BT was not the first privatisation. That honour went to British Aerospace in February 1981, but the sums were small — just £150 million compared with the £3.9