The Mini: 'a car for people who want to be different but aren't'

The car is populist modern art – I am sorry, reader, meet your plug-in Raphael – and a mirror of the driver’s soul. I am small and raging, and I love the Mini, because it is like me. I wonder if people used to feel this way about horses. Probably.

The Mini is like a lot of British people apparently: we are over-represented in the small and raging. It’s the best-selling British car of all time and if it wasn’t in Bond – I mean around Bond – it was in The Italian Job, which is both sexier – anyone can have Bond, Caine is slightly more detached – and more relatable. Looking at the Mini, here a convertible Cooper S exclusive, named for John Cooper of the Cooper Car Company of Surbiton, evokes the time when cars had identities. They couldn’t help it: their makers hadn’t learnt to disguise their souls in a medium black SUV with a trim called kill-me-now-I’m-done-with-you. You could be interesting in Surbiton, or anywhere. It’s still the most stylish small car ever made – we cannot say best without casting our eyes to heaven in thanks for the Ford Fiesta – but I hate the VW Beetle for obvious reasons. Whimsy from Germany? Are you kidding me? Even their waltzes sound like punch-ups.

It’s funny that Minis are from Oxford, home planet of British contempt. Not that students made it out to Plant Oxford in Cowley, which is a pilgrimage destination: Mini fans are the Trekkies of car world. It’s also funny how much larger they are than Alec Issigonis’s original Mini: the Morris Mini-Minor of 1959. It really did look like a surprised box that was up for anything. You could talk a Mini into anything. It was like a gormless lover. If an early Mini had four passengers, it doubled in weight and went from 0-60 mph in 27.1 seconds, which I think is roughly the same rate of acceleration as a squirrel fleeing from a bear. The past is another country. BMW bought the brand in 1994, and the cars looked more German and less weird: shout-out to the mesmerising Austin Mini pick-up of 1962, which looked like it was headed to Camberwick Green and was never coming back.