From a dusty shelf in a TV station in Nigeria, nine lost episodes of Doctor Who have been recovered. Also attempting to move through time and space are our politicians. A large, state-owned utility is floated on the stock exchange by the government. The frenzied stampede for the shares, which show an instant and hefty profit, is hailed by the government as a resounding success for privatisation while Labour accuses ministers of flogging off a national jewel that belonged to all of us at a knockdown price. In the same week, the prime minister launches a state-sponsored scheme to help people into homeownership, another one that sounds like it is from the back catalogue of Margaret Thatcher. Help to Buy is a conscious, though phoney, imitation of her right to buy that enabled council tenants to purchase their homes. Welcome back to the 80s or, rather, a bad impersonation of it.

Why did the government make such a fetish of selling off the Royal Mail? Partly because they are strapped for cash and there is not a whole lot left in the cupboard. By the time she had finished, Mrs T had sold off more than 40 state industries, a revolution that was emulated around the world. Under John Major, the railways and what was left of the coal industry followed. Tony Blair and Gordon Brown auctioned air traffic control and defence research.

None of them managed to sell off the Royal Mail. Even Mrs T balked at that. She had a complicated psychological relationship with monarchy and thought it an act of lèse majesté to privatise the Queen's head. Going boldly where even the Iron Lady feared to tread was an element of the appeal of this privatisation to the Thatcherite business minister, Michael Fallon. He books himself a place in the Tory hall of fame by doing something from which even their heroine recoiled. The enthusiasm of Vince Cable and the Lib Dems is harder to fathom. This will seem counterintuitive to anyone who is not a Lib Dem minister, but for them this was also a political virility test. They believe that they burnish their credentials as a party of government by doing things that most of the public say they hate. It's not been unpopular with everyone, of course. There will not be much moaning from those who bought the shares at 330p and saw them rise to 455p by the close of trading on Friday. A 38% paper profit is a great return for a few clicks of the keyboard.

Accused of grossly mispricing the offer, Dr Cable protests that it won't be fair to judge until we see where the shares settle in six months' time. The Royal Mail faces some very stiff challenges: rotten relations with its workforce, a need for investment and increasing competition. Those who drove up the price of the shares are making a bet on the chief executive, Moya Greene. As one of the ministers involved in the flotation points out: "She hasn't done anything yet."

All the same, people in government are frank, at least in private, that the issue was "priced to go". The Royal Mail's debts were written off and its pension liabilities taken on by the Treasury. The worst of all worlds, from the government's point of view, was that investors, especially the small ones, would end up nursing a loss. Ministers wanted to be absolutely sure that buyers would see a return, especially when they will be wanting to offload the government stakes in the banks in the future. The allocation to small investors was seven times oversubscribed. For shares valued at £1.7bn there were £30bn worth of bids, which does suggest that the shares were priced too cheap. In the balance of risks to their own reputations, ministers decided that they would rather suffer what they hope is a passing embarrassment about the pricing than the career-terminating disaster of presiding over a humiliating flop.

Enthusiasts hailed the demand for shares as evidence of a continuing public appetite for the Thatcherite idea of "popular capitalism". Ministers are especially pleased that nearly all of the Royal Mail's staff took their helping. To me, this is unsurprising proof that people will always gladly take free money.

Not as many as you might have thought, though. The float of British Telecom in 1984 attracted more than 2.4 million people, the subsequent sale of British Gas something like 4 million. The Royal Mail attracted a much more modest 690,000. That is not compelling evidence of a massive unquenched appetite for "popular capitalism", a concept that has been rather unpopular since the Great Crash. There is another important difference from Mrs Thatcher's privatisations. Her sell-offs were popular not just because the "Sids" made a fast buck on them. State industries had been widely discredited by their association with losses, strikes, inefficiency, poor management and lousy consumer service and choice. Privatisation could be sold as the cure and has been broadly successful in those areas where the companies were released into markets in which there was genuine competition.

Not many would today contend that British Airways, British Aerospace, Jaguar or Rolls-Royce ought to be taken back under state control. You certainly won't find anyone on the Labour frontbench arguing for renationalisation. Labour is not even saying that it would take back the Royal Mail on the not unreasonable grounds that a Labour government simply will not be able to find the money.

The legacy from privatisation that has always been the problem was the second, later wave of sell-offs that put monopoly suppliers of water, gas and electricity into private hands. The structure and regulation of the utilities has never been got right by governments of either stripe. Rather than create proper competition, they have the smell about them of a cosy cartel dedicated to maximising the returns to their shareholders and swelling the bank accounts of their boards rather than innovating on behalf of the consumer. The privatisation of the railways was a botch that has never been corrected. They have become more modern, safer and they carry more passengers, but they have also become more costly to the taxpayer than they were in state hands. The operators of the rail franchises now receive about four times as much in public subsidy as did British Rail.

Mrs Thatcher created a popular enthusiasm for privatisation because the flaws of state industries were so painfully plain. Three decades on, we now have long experience of the private companies that took their place and damn them for having many of the same faults along with flaws all of their own. So even as David Cameron uses the word "nuts" to describe Labour's plans to impose a price freeze on the energy companies, the prime minister admits that Ed Miliband has "struck a chord" with the public. The government feels compelled to say it is ordering a cap on rail fares, though such is the confusion about pricing it is not clear that it will really be a cap at all.

Mrs Thatcher's sale of council housing was another revolution that turned a million tenants into home-owners. Not many people know this: Labour had the idea first. The party lived to regret that they let her steal it from them along with many of their voters. The tragedy was that the social housing stock that was sold off was not replaced. What Britain now needs – has long needed – is to build more homes. That would surely be the mission of a true Tory radical, a genuine heir to Thatcher. What the party's current leadership has come up with is the Help to Buy scheme that will use government-sponsored loans to help some people get mortgages. The likeliest result is that house prices will be driven further upwards, making it even more difficult for others to get a foot on the property ladder.

The kindest thing to say is that this betrays a philosophical confusion among the political descendants of Mrs T. The state should get out of the business of delivering parcels, they say, but it should get into owning the risk on the purchase of private property. Go figure. Debt is wicked when it is owed by the government, but is to be encouraged among the public. Work that one out. A different explanation is that they are simply being cynical. George Osborne has reportedly quipped to cabinet colleagues that "a little housing boom" will be great for their re-election prospects because "everyone will be happy as property values go up".

Mrs Thatcher didn't realise at the time that she was presiding over a housing bubble that would burst with very painful consequences for many voters. Her successors are knowingly trying to recreate that aspect of her period in the hope that it will make some voters feel warmer towards the government. They are gambling that the consequences won't be felt until after the election is behind them.

They are playing some of the tunes of Thatcherism, but doing it like a poor tribute band that resorts to trying to replicate her greatest hits because they can't write any of their own. I understand why Conservatives want to create an ersatz version of the 80s, their last decade of hegemony over British politics. Here's their problem. We've already lived it. We know what happens next.