"During the 1980s the most effective opposition to the principle of privatisation in fact came not from the Labour party, whose defence of the public sector seemed merely a reflex function of its backward-looking dependence on the trade unions, but from her [Margaret Thatcher's] own side. A single phrase in a characteristically nostalgic speech by Harold Macmillan did more damage to the idea of privatisation than all the outraged anathemas of Neil Kinnock and Roy Hattersley. Speaking to the Tory Reform Group at the Carlton Club in November 1985, the former Prime Minister was said to have likened privatisation to a once-wealthy family fallen on hard times "selling the family silver". In fact, as is so often the case with famous phrases, Macmillan never used the words reported. What he actually said was: "First the Georgian silver goes. And then all that nice furniture that used to be in the saloon. Then the Canalettos go..." Despite the remoteness from most voters' experience of the aristocratic world he conjured up, Macmillan's words touched a cord. Quite ordinary families have some inherited "family silver", little used but which they do not like to sell. The image of minsters like a lot of dodgy house-strippers, knocking down the nation's heirlooms at a cost well below their true worth subtly undermined Mrs Thatcher's carefully created reputation for thrifty housekeeping. In vain the Government's supporters retorted that the industries being sold off were not assets at all, but liabilities which the Treasury was well rid of."