Hitchens asserts that the reforms facilitated vast and radical constitutional change under Tony Blair's new government that amounted to a "slow motion coup d'état".

It contrasts the funerals of Winston Churchill (1965) and Diana, Princess of Wales (1997), using these two related but dissimilar events, three decades apart, to illustrate the enormous cultural changes that took place in the intervening period.

Other changes gain Hitchens's attention, from the passivity and conformism resulting from the watching of television to the Church of England's rejection of its traditional liturgy and scripture.

One chapter analyses the use of TV and radio soap operas to spread liberal cultural and moral propaganda, and refers to several instances where this intention has been openly expressed by the editors and authors of such programmes.

In particular, Hitchens criticises the easy capture of the Conservative Party by lobbyists for commercial TV, which removed the BBC's monopoly power to defend cultural standards.

He argues that the introduction of colour television, which made even the bad programmes look good, greatly increased the influence of TV over the public mind.

Hitchens's view is sustained, in the case of capital punishment, by the historian Dominic Sandbrook, in his history of what he calls the White Heat of the 1960s,[5] using contemporaneous opinion poll data.

He wrote that British society's unwillingness to criticize sexual promiscuity among gay, bisexual, and straight men alike despite the ill after-effects stands in direct hypocritical contrast to government action against drug use.

[9] John Colvin, writing in the New Statesman thought the "barren times" in which we live "have found their ideal chronicler" who "in this clear and uninhibited work, reminds us of the tyranny of the new" and that "it is difficult to contradict his belief that a great nation seems almost to have vanished, its traditions mocked and enfeebled".

Alan Cowell, in a mostly critical review in The New York Times, stated "in the 1950s and 60s, Britain was a gentler, more deferential place; the churches were better attended; children did give up their bus seats to adults; and a generation was nurtured on a history of wartime victory and imperial grandeur that had yet to be derided as myth or oppression".

[13] In The Weekly Standard, another US publication, Jonathan Foreman wrote that "at its best this book combines superb reporting (especially about the hijacking of education by frustrated leftists) with a heartbreaking analysis of one of the strangest revolutions in history.

However, Foreman added that the book suffered from "cranky fogeyism", and he was particularly critical of both the chapter analysing the Chatterley trial and the premise that satirical television and radio programmes of the late 1950s and early 1960s contributed towards destroying British national unity.