Mini's major comeback

The Mini symbolised 60s Britain - liberating, classless, an icon of swinging modernity. MATTHEW SWEET asks if its new German reincarnation can ever hope to revive such careless rapture.

At the website for the new, revamped Mini Cooper, an animation window shows a tightly focused image of the car's smooth, sleek surfaces, but denies you a view of the top or the wheels. You could be forgiven for thinking that the view from an unusual angle was something impossibly high-tech and German, and you'd be right.

The relaunched, redesigned Mini - a car which was once such a powerful symbol of British economic optimism that it was produced with the Union Jack stencilled on the roof - will be overseen from Munich by BMW.

Hang about, though. The Mini was designed by a Greek of German extraction, driven to success on the Monte Carlo racing circuit by an Irishman, and its presence in Britain is ultimately attributable to the actions of former President Gamal Abdal Nasser of Egypt.

In 1956, Nasser nationalised the Suez Canal, British oil supplies dried up, queues at British petrol stations grew and PM Anthony Eden instituted petrol rationing. Britons discovered the joys of German-made bubble cars and Lord Leonard, chairman of the British Motor Corporation, raged, "God damn those bloody awful bubble cars - we must drive them out of the streets by designing a proper miniature car".

He then called for his best designer, Greek-born Alec Issigonis (not knowing, presumably, that his mother was Bavarian) and asked him to apply himself to the problem. Issigonis whipped out his packet of Park Drive and scribbled down a rough sketch.

Three years later, in August 1959, the Mini was unveiled to the British press as an advertising campaign enthused, "It's Wizardry on Wheels!" and motoring correspondents gushed, "BMC have produced something that is new, exciting and practical - a cheap-to-run car that will accommodate a small family, hold its own in a main-road traffic stream, and park on a postage stamp!"

And when Paddy Hopkirk drove John Cooper's souped-up, high-powered variant to the finishing line at the 1964 Monte Carlo rally, the Irish driver assured the Mini's status as an icon of Britishness.

Issigonis and his mother emigrated to Britain, where he studied at Battersea Polytechnic, and made a virtue of his unwillingness to work out specifications on paper. When an assistant asked him how big he wanted the wheels of the Mini, he indicated the distance with his hands, which, on being measured, proved to be exactly 10 inches.

He took a virtuoso attitude to his work. "Market research is bunk" and "a camel is a horse designed by a committee" were two of his favourite maxims.

When the car was launched in 1959, it became a favourite celebrity accessory, a symbol of liberation - although the more enthusiastic members of the permissive society must have found it tricky to exercise their principal freedoms within its confines.

Twiggy, Princess Margaret, the Beatles and Lulu were all early adopters. They were no doubt intoxicated by the car's ability to stick to the road like glue, its natty flick switches, its winking indicator lights and its hydrolastic suspension - and frustrated by the boot's inability to accommodate anything larger than a lunch box.

"One of the greatest achievements of the Mini," writes designer Sir Terence Conran, "is that it anticipated the changing social values that would come to the fore in the 1960s, when the postwar baby boomers were looking to express their independence from previous generations through the fashions of Mary Quant and the music of the Beatles, the Stones and the Who. Along with the miniskirt, the Mini Cooper became an icon of British modernity. But unlike fashion and music, the Mini's appeal transcended not only class and sex, but age."

As the car became more fashionable, customising firms provided oak add-ons and Mercedes headlamps, and even installed a pair of wicker side panels for a Mini owned by Peter Sellers, whose habit of changing cars once the ashtray was filled made him a reliable customer.

Variants were developed. A canopied cousin, the Mini Moke, a gadabout whose name derived from Gypsy slang for an uncooperative pony, supplied a set of wheels for Linda Thorson in The Avengers, and pursued Patrick McGoohan in The Prisoner.

And when its racier incarnation, the Mini Cooper, whined over the line at Monte Carlo, the car gained a reputation for speed and tenacity which, in 1969, inspired the cast of The Italian Job to bomb through the streets and sewers of Torino with scads of gold pilfered from the coffers of Fiat.

There was, however, something hubristic in the strong connections between the little car and a certain strain of 1960s glamour. The Mini became linked with glamourpusses in comparably abbreviated skirts and flesh-coloured lipstick of the sort that Raquel Welch wore in One Million Years BC.

But as the years moved on, the car retained its associations with the women these people became - women like Wendy Craig in Butterflies, who scooted her Union flag-topped number around some nameless London suburb, monologuing her middle-class, post-permissive disappointments, and waiting for a suited Bruce Montague to roll up in his monster BMW and show her around the rather less economical pleasures of the early 80s.

The Mini couldn't accommodate the aspirations of the Thatcher decade - a period informed by desires that were utterly at odds with the thinking behind the nifty, thrifty vehicle - and sales took a fatal slump.

Maybe the stabilisation of oil prices hastened the process by which the Mini's desirability powered down, and the hulking, gas-glugging saloon models became more attractive. Or perhaps BMC's inability to make a decent profit on the car was more significant.

Or maybe, as the 70s ticked away, the mass of Mini drivers began to regard the freedoms promised by the Mini to be ephemeral or illusory. Ten years later, the independent types who found their liberation behind its wheel were puzzling over what to do with their purchases.

How could they take the kids away for the weekend in such a car - unless they were willing to relieve the entire family of underwear-changing duties and leave the tea-flasks at home?

But I suspect that the model's eventual disappearance was just as much to do with the feminisation of the Mini brand: it became a car for women and, as the world of auto-appreciation is endemically misogynist, this was an irremediable blow to its status.

By the time Mr Bean got behind the wheel of his model, its fate was sealed. These were cars for social misfits. Enthusiasts. People with websites.

The last one, number 5,287,862, rolled off the production line last year. The new version went on sale in Britain this month and many patriotic Mini aficionados - such as unreconstructed Star Trek fans who refuse to acknowledge the canonicity of new episodes without William Shatner - have already begun their boycott.

However, even during its wilderness years, when the word "mega" had become the preferred epithet of approval, the car retained at least a measure of respect.

Mini jokes, for instance, don't have the snide contempt of Skoda jokes: How many elephants can you fit into a Mini? (Two in the front, two in the back.) How many giraffes can you fit into a Mini? (None, it's full of elephants.) How many dead people can you fit into a Mini? (Two in the front, two in the back, one in the ash tray.)

Bad jokes, but sweet jokes. It's not a privilege that was ever extended to the Trabant. But then, what do you expect? The Trabant was built by Germans.