We're sitting round a real fire burning logs, and a fan heater's whining away in the centre of the room's dark, threadbare carpet. I'm warm at last. Andy sits in an ancient bulging armchair, its fake brown leather rubbed through to the fabric net underneath in places and burnished to a deep black shine on the arms; he nurses his whisky and looks into the fire most of the time. His concession to the warmth of the room has been to take off his topmost cardigan.

"Yeah," he's saying, "we were the blank-cheque generation. I remember thinking in "79 that it was time to really go for something, to finally try something different; to be radical. It seemed like ever since the "sixties there had been just one brand of government in two slightly different packages and nothing much ever changed; there was this feeling that after the burst of energy in the early-mid-'sixties everything had been going downhill; the whole country was constipated, bound up with rules and regulations and restrictive practices and just general, endemic, infectious ennui. I never could decide who was right, socialists — even revolutionaries — or the arch-capitalists, and it seemed we'd never find out in Britain because whatever way the popular vote went it never really brought any real change of direction. Heath wasn't particularly good for business and Callaghan wasn't particularly good for the working class."

"I didn't think you ever thought much of revolution," I tell him, sipping my whisky. "I thought you were always a devout capitalist."

Andy shrugs. "I just wanted change. It seemed like what was needed. It didn't really matter which direction it came from. I never said much because I wanted to keep my options open. I'd already decided I wanted to go into the Army and it wouldn't have been a good idea to have anything on my record about supporting some left-wing group. But it had occurred to me that if there was ever any… well, I don't know; armed revolt, popular uprising…" He laughs lightly. "I can remember when that didn't seem so unlikely, and I thought, well, if anything like that does ever happen, and they're right and the establishment is wrong, then it wouldn't do any harm for there to be people like me in the Army who were basically in sympathy with the… movement, whatever." He shakes his head, still staring at the fire. "Though I guess that sounds pretty dumb now, doesn't it?"

I shrug. "Don't ask me; you're talking to somebody who thought the way to make the world a better place was to become a journalist. Marks me down as a prime strategic thinker, and no mistake."

"Nothing wrong with the idea," Andy says. "But if you're disillusioned now it's partly because of what I'm talking about; the radicalism of Thatcher that seemed so fresh. That promise, that lean, trimmed-down fitness we could all look forward to; here was the chance to follow one dynamic plan, pushed by somebody who wasn't going to chicken out halfway through. Stripping away all the inefficiencies, the cosy deals, the feather-bedding, the smothering worst of the nanny-state; it was a breath of clean new air, it was a crusade; something we could all take part in, all be a part of."

"If you were rich to start with, or determined to be a bigger bastard than your mates."

Andy shakes his head. "You've always hated the Tories too much to see any of that clearly. But the point is it doesn't matter who was right, and even less who would have been right; all that matters is what people felt, because that's what produced the new ethos of the age; consensus had led to impasse, care to sterility, so: deliver a shock to the system, take the sort of radical risk with the country that you have to take with a business at least once in its history if it's to succeed; go for growth, take the monetarist shilling." He sighs, takes out the cigarette case again and holds it out to me. I take a spliff.

"And I was one of those who did," he says, lighting the J with his Zippo. "I was a loyal trooper in the children's crusade to recover the lost citadel of British economic power."

He watches the fire while I smoke the spliff.

"Though of course before that I'd already done my bit: I was one of Our Lads, I was an Expeditionary, part of the Task Force that recaptured Maggie's surrendered popularity."

I don't know what to say, and, in a recently introduced policy initiative that has come with my advancing years, I don't say anything.

"Well, here we are," Andy says, sitting forward and slapping his hands on his knees, then taking the J when I tap him on the elbow. "Thanks." He tokes on the spliff. "Here we are and we've had our experiment; there's been one party, one dominant idea, one fully followed plan, one strong leader — and her grey shadow — and it's all turned to shit and ashes. Industrial base cut so close to the bone the marrow's leaking out, the old vaguely socialist inefficiencies replaced with more rabid capitalist ones, power centralised, corruption institutionalised, and a generation created which'll never have any skills beyond opening a car with a coat hanger and knowing which solvents give you the best buzz with a plastic bag over your head before you throw up or pass out." He sucks hard on the number before holding it out to me.

"Yeah," I say, taking it. "But it's not like it was all your fault. You did your bit but… Islagiatt."

"Yeah, it seemed like a good idea at the time…"

"Christ, man, I didn't think any of you guys should have been out there, but I don't think I could have done what you did, in the Falklands. I mean, even if there had been some war I did believe worth fighting, if I'd been called up or something, I'm a coward, I'm just not physically capable. You were. You did it; fuck the rights and wrongs of the war, once you're in there, under fire, and your mates are getting blown away around you, you have to be able to function. At least you did; I'm not sure I could."

"So what?" he says, looking at me. "So I'm more of a fucking man because I learned how to kill people, and did?"

"No, I just mean —»

"Anyway," he says, looking away again. "A lot of good any of that did when we had a captain who couldn't fucking hack it, didn't have the guts to admit it, and had to send good men into a fucking killing ground to prove how fucking brave he really was." Andy lifts a log from the hearth and puts it on the fire, hitting the other logs with it and making them spark and blaze.

"Yeah," I say. "Well, I can't —»

"And you're wrong," he says, getting out of his seat and going to the corner of the room. There's a half-open hatch there leading into what looks like a deep, oddly cube-shaped cupboard; it's a dumb waiter. He pulls the top part of the metal cover further up, and the lower half sinks at the same time; he reaches in and gathers an armful of logs, bringing them over to the hearth. "We all have responsibility, Cameron. You can't escape it."

"Chayzuz, Gould, you take a hard line, man, so ye dae," I say, trying to lighten things up but sounding pretty pathetic even to myself.

Andy sits, takes the offered spliff and arranges the logs neatly round the edge of the hearth, to dry. He glances at me. "Yeah, and a long memory; I still haven't forgiven you for not trying to rescue me on the ice that time." He takes a long draw on the J, while I sit there thinking, Oh shit, then he hands the number back to me again with a big grin on his face. "Only kidding," he says. "I've been out-machoing men and bedding women with that story for twenty years."

Andy shows me to my room, a floor down, at about four in the morning. It has a fan heater and an electric blanket on the single bed. Before I go to sleep I wonder about whether I should have said anything to him about Mr Archer and his phone calls and Ares. I came up here thinking I would; I assumed I'd need to offload on somebody, but somehow it never seemed to be the right time to introduce the subject.