When I was in the middle of reading Francis Beckett's book, a member of my family asked what it was about. Since they all have notoriously short attention spans, unless it is for hours of sport on television, I came up with the quickest possible answer: "It's about all those politicians who grew up in the 1960s and the impact they had."

That is a gross generalisation, of course. Between vignettes about the formative years of our only baby boomer prime ministers  Tony Blair buying tight white flares in Biba, Gordon Brown hijacking the rectorship of Edinburgh University surrounded by mini-skirted girls called Brown's Sugars wearing "Gordon for me" T-shirts  the book canters through a social and political history of the postwar years. And it is an entertaining read. I particularly enjoyed being reminded of Peter Hitchens's transition from International Socialist to rightwing commentator.

Beckett is adamant that someone like me, born in the late 50s, is not a real baby boomer, though David Willetts's recent book The Pinch proposed two baby booms between the late 40s and early 60s. Hitchens and I nevertheless epitomise his core argument; that the baby boomers of the liberal 60s/early 70s split into various tribes from the 80s on, and our legacy leaves a lot to be desired. Put crudely those tribes included the economic liberals and individualists who fell behind Thatcher, and who reduced the generous 60s concept of "freedom" to mean merely economic freedom. They then ruthlessly promoted this philosophy through the rightwing media or made a lot of money in the City.

Then there were the woolly liberal boomers on the idealistic left, who triangulated into New Labour, making decisions over coffee in the PM's den. Beckett maintains that this lot were in thrall to management gurus and meaningless feelgood words such as "modernisation", "innovation" and "stakeholder" that were the inferior but direct descendents of the loose hippy language of the 60s.

Both groups also provided a comfortable berth for extremist boomers, who found it as easy to police Thatcherite or Blairite ideological purity as they had previously policed the certainties of the hard left. The general cynicism about politics today suggests that many less hardline, but equally idealistic, boomers feel disenchanted with the way it all turned out.

Unlike the Willetts book, which was crammed with facts and figures about the social and economic costs of the boomers, in particular pensions and debt, this book never quite answers the question of what the baby boomers did or didn't do for us, apart from delivering up Thatcherism and New Labour. And while Willetts makes some complex but not altogether convincing arguments for a new social contract between the generations, Beckett ends with a vague note about what should happen next. But at the end of a tumultuous two years which have seen the world economy turned on its head, the bankers, economic liberals and Conservatives firmly back in charge, I have a modest suggestion. Back in 1963 the outgoing prime minister Harold McMacmillan told the Queen: "It is thinking about themselves that really is the curse of the younger generation." The baby boomers have been thinking about themselves for a long time; maybe it is time to move on and start thinking about the next generation  the Camerons, Milibands, Osbornes and Cleggs. What was going on in their formative years, what makes them tick and what are they going to do for us?

Fiona Millar's The Secret World of the Working Mother is published by Vermilion.