Harold Macmillan improving standard of living; the slogan "Life's Better Under the Conservatives" was matched by Macmillan's own remark, "indeed let us be frank about it—most of our people have never had it so good," usually paraphrased as "You've never had it so good." Such rhetoric reflected a new reality of working-class affluence; it has been argued that "the key factor in the Conservative victory was that average real pay for industrial workers had risen since Churchill's 1951 victory by over 20 per cent". The scale of the victory meant that not only had the Conservatives won three successive general elections, but
Hurts So Good by Mellencamp and George Green, Mellencamp's childhood friend and occasional writing partner. The song was first conceived, Mellencamp claims, in his baby's crib. John claims to have had an epiphany with a girl named Tiffany the day before who had uttered the phrase "Hurt so good" referring to an acupuncture treatment she was receiving from John's grandmother on his father's side. He then repeated the lines to Green and they finished the song very quickly. In 2004, Mellencamp expounded on the writing of "Hurts So Good" in an interview with American Songwriter magazine: "George Green and I wrote that together.