DIG out your drainpipes, locate your leg-warmers and dust down your ra-ra skirt, our politicians are taking us on a trip through the 1980s.

The 21st Century was forgotten when Michael Howard's debut at Prime Minister's Questions was dominated by less-than-fond memories of that dark, dark decade.

We learned that Mr Howard was responsible for the hated Poll Tax, for sky-high interest rates and one million house repossessions as the 1990s dawned.

Mr Blair, meanwhile, had hated the European Community, loved the Wapping pickets and condemned the US for its "state-sponsored terrorism".

All these sins, it turned out, were wrapped up in a new Tory dossier, which Mr Howard said: "I have not even had to sex up."

The sense of a Tardis travelling through time was heightened by the sight, in the front row of the public gallery, of Howard's mates from the 1980s, those twin Normans - Lamont and Fowler.

Any further back into history and Mr Blair would have been accused of opposing Hadrian's Wall which, quite clearly, was a sensible measure to curb asylum seekers.

Quite what all this means to voters worried about schools, hospitals, trains and thugs in 2003, was not immediately clear.

When a backbencher attacked "highly-paid barristers, talking in a language and using procedures that ordinary people don't understand", he could have been talking about the two lawyers at the despatch box.

But what was clear was that Mr Howard immediately commanded the Commons in a way that bald bloke with the frog trapped in his throat was never able to do.

The leader arrived to huge cheers from the Tory benches and rose to speak in a respectable silence that Labour's badly-behaved backbenchers had never allowed his predecessor to enjoy.

Mr Howard even had the best lines, chiding the Prime Minister that, with his first two questions failing to elicit an answer, it was "not a very good start, I'm afraid".

Suddenly Mr Blair, who could thrash Iain Duncan Smith on these occasions with one hand tied behind his back, was stumbling over his words. There was even the odd embarrassing pause.

For the record, Mr Howard challenged the Prime Minister over soaring NHS administration costs and the poisonous relationship with his Chancellor next door. But that hardly mattered.

What had changed was that the vacuum had been filled by a leader able to stand toe-to-toe with Blair - a man, at last, with something of the fight about him.