Our Cars: Austin Maestro 1.6 Vanden Plas

You paid for this. Or your parents or grandparents did. I’m not talking about my own car which appears in these pictures, but the entire Maestro project codenamed LC10, later LM10. The Austin Maestro – born 1983, died 1994, risen again in 1997 – was the product of the state-owned British Leyland, whose irritatingly persistent losses, mostly but not all its fault, meant that the UK government had to bankroll the birth of the Maestro, the Mini Metro that preceded it, and the Austin Montego that followed.

Without such tax-payer funding, the vast British Leyland empire would have gone under. So thanks for that: without you or your relatives, I’d not be getting paid to write this now.

Keeping the Maestro alive was a game of brinkmanship that would toy with the livelihoods of 150,000 employees, and tens of thousands more from support industries across the country. Those sparring on the brink were Sir Michael Edwardes and his board, the clear-thinking, assertive South African parachuted in to try and save BL. On the other side were union leaders who sometimes struggled to control the 250 shop stewards that so often wrought havoc on the factory floor.