At first glimpse of the new Austin Mini Metro, franchisees unashamedly wept - no more would they prefer to tell neighbours they were contract assassins rather than face exposure as someone who sold Morris Itals.  Motoring journalists were equally impressed - if, possibly, less emotional - when the Metro was officially launched that October, but flash forward 15 years and you'll find Alan Partridge repeatedly raving that he's "not driving a Mini Metro", an opinion shared by many classic car enthusiasts.  Precisely why its reputation has sunk so low is unclear. It cannot entirely be blamed on a generation of thirtysomething Britons watching the weekly Metro panda car chases in Juliet Bravo.  There really was a brief period - 1980-1982, to be precise - when the Metro was seen as a desirable, even groundbreaking supermini with the additional cachet of royal ownership.  MPB 900W might have looked like an innocuous Austin Mini Metro L, but from autumn 1980 until July 1981 it was the property of one Lady Diana Spencer.  The Metro also featured an interior that was incredibly airy and spacious compared with those of its rivals, many of which were by then quite elderly; the Ford Fiesta and VW Polo had their roots in the mid-Seventies, while the Fiat 127, Renault 5 and Peugeot 104 were all approaching their 10th birthdays. Given the Metro's promise, what could possibly go wrong?  The answer was a high level of warranty claims due to quality control problems that should never have occurred in a car whose running gear dated, essentially, to the Fifties.  In addition, for all the positive reviews, the Austin's sales rarely exceeded those of the Fiesta.  As with all British Leyland products, its reputation was tarnished by prevailing images of angry strikers standing around a burning brazier somewhere in the Midlands.  By the middle of the decade the Metro faced severe competition from second-generation versions of its main competitors, plus the new Peugeot 205 and Fiat Uno.  In 1987, British Leyland was forced to cancel a Metro replacement for reasons of cost. When an uprated Metro appeared in 1990, with the more modern K-series engine, it was well engineered but looked utterly dated.  The car had morphed into the Rover 100 by the time production ceased in 1997, but it still looked the same - every bit as contemporary as the average stegosaurus.  The depth of British Leyland's Eighties desperation can be gauged by the Metro's infamous launch commercial.  As extras waved the Union Flag to maritime music, flotillas of foreign cars were forced back into the Channel by a phalanx of Metros - "A British Car To Beat The World".  If you didn't rush out immediately to buy one, you were quite clearly a Communist, but the ad was made when the marque faced removal of all state funding.  The Metro's biggest problem was perhaps the Mini prefix worn by early models. Few cars could have coped with such a burden of expectation.  1980 Austin Metro launched, designed to be a slightly bigger alternative to the Mini  1982 Metro range expanded with “sporty” MG and “luxury” Vanden Plas  1983 MG Metro Turbo hits the streets with a 115mph top speed  1985 Facelift sees the introduction of a five-door version  1987 With Austin no more, the car becomes simply the “Metro”  1990 Sales reach 1.37 million. The Metro is given a makeover and re-badged again, this time as a Rover  1991 Rover Metro named as What Car? car of the year  1994 Metro name is dropped but the car lives on as the facelifted Rover 100 supermini  1997 With nearly 1.5 million Metros and Rover 100s sold in Britain, production finally ends
An object of desire - and derision - the Mini Metro is 30 this year. Andrew    Roberts looks back at a British favourite.