Back from the Brink: The Inside Story of the Tory Resurrection. Peter Snowdon
rise of John Major was meteoric. His father, Tom, had a burgeoning career as a variety performer, including a brief spell as a trapeze artist, before settling down with his second wife, Gwen (Major’s mother), in Worcester Park, south-west London. Born in 1943, during the Second World War, Major rose from humble origins in Brixton to scale the heights of the Conservative Party. He left school at sixteen, with few qualifications, because his family needed the money he could earn, but continued to study at home first thing in the morning and late at night. After periods of temporary unemployment he eventually found his feet as a banker with Standard Chartered Bank. He also became an active member of Brixton Young Conservatives. Inspired to enter political life, he was elected as a local councillor in Lambeth and eventually as MP for Huntingdon 1979, after a long search for a safe seat. Mrs Thatcher thought highly of Major as an able and loyal minister, promoting him to Chief Secretary to the Treasury in 1987. To his surprise he replaced Geoffrey Howe as Foreign Secretary in July 1989, and succeeded Lawson as Chancellor three months later. On 28 November 1990 the forty-seven-year-old from Brixton entered 10 Downing Street as Prime Minister.
Major Tonic
‘I want to see us build a country that is at ease with itself,’ Major declared on the steps of Number 10. It was a sentiment that resonated throughout the country, after over a decade of Thatcherite medicine. Major’s disarming smile and emollient manner were the antidote to troubled times. He had made few enemies in the party; a huge political asset that others like Heseltine could not claim. He appointed a ‘Cabinet of friends’, welcoming back Heseltine from the cold to become Environment Secretary, as well as promoting his campaign manager, Norman Lamont, to the Chancellorship and appointing Chris Patten as Party Chairman. Major’s consensual approach to decision-making endeared him to Cabinet colleagues, who felt bruised and battered by Mrs Thatcher’s handbag. A party that had been reduced to despair in the dying days before her downfall, and guilt-ridden shock in the immediate aftermath, soon recovered its poise. Major reassured her supporters by being the anointed heir, and enthused her detractors by offering an inclusive style of leadership.
Most importantly for the party, John Major’s incredible rise led to a dramatic reversal in public opinion. A fortnight before Mrs Thatcher resigned, Labour enjoyed a 16 per cent lead in the opinion polls. Within days of her leaving Downing Street, the Conservatives had leapt to a 12 per cent lead.27 Focusing the minds of Tory MPs was the reality that they would have to go to the country within eighteen months. They believed that Major represented their best hope of uniting the party after the trauma of deposing the Iron Lady. Even after more than eleven years in office, and despite the ever-widening differences of opinion on Europe, the hunger for power was still there.
The new Prime Minister’s in-tray was distinctly uninviting. He had to deal with the unpopular Community Charge, complex European negotiations and a conflict in the Middle East. But by far the hardest situation facing the country was the deteriorating state of the economy. Major inherited a dire political and economic situation. ‘Interest rates were at 14 per cent, inflation was going up to double figures, growth had fallen through the floor and the recession had started with a vengeance and was going to take unemployment up very high indeed.’28 Within twelve months the Community Charge had been replaced, British troops had played a key role in expelling Iraqi forces from Kuwait, and public spending was increased to assuage concerns that the party would desert the public services during the downturn.
The future shape of the EC was one of the most immediate concerns for Major. European leaders were about to negotiate a treaty that would strengthen the institutional bonds of the European project, forging closer cooperation in a wide range of policy areas that had hitherto been the domain of individual nation states. The Single European Act, which Mrs Thatcher had signed (and then regretted) in 1986, paved the way for further integration, particularly on the creation of a single European currency and social policy (known as the Social Chapter) which the former Prime Minister had railed against since her Bruges Speech. Major headed for the Dutch town of Maastricht in December 1991 with the intention of securing ‘opt-outs’ from both the single currency and the Social Chapter. Unlike his predecessor, he consulted the parliamentary party and the Cabinet widely before and during the negotiations. Yet his hand was weakened when his European counterparts reminded him that Mrs Thatcher had signed up to an ‘ever closer union’ in Europe.
The fact that the majority of the 376-strong parliamentary party were largely pragmatic towards Europe, if not pro-European, should have been in Major’s favour. Many were from a generation that came of age after the war and believed strongly that peace and prosperity would endure through closer cooperation (which involved pooling sovereignty) with Britain’s Continental neighbours. However, a significant minority of Tory MPs had become deeply suspicious of what they saw as a perpetual loss of British sovereignty as unelected European institutions accrued more powers. Major feared that a growing rift at the heart of the party could very easily turn into something more dangerous. ‘I was very conscious of the two historic precedents – the Corn Laws and Tariff Reform,’ he recalls. ‘The danger of the party splitting in November 1990 seemed to me to be very real. The proximity of an election eighteen months later actually quite helped us in the short term, because people tend to pull together, but I felt the party was near to splitting – even then.’29
Following some deft negotiations at Maastricht, Major returned to Westminster having secured the opt-outs from the European Social Chapter and the single currency. In the Commons, Tory MPs waved their order papers in appreciation of his achievement. He had considered ratifying the new treaty by taking it through the Commons as soon as he returned to London, but the impending general election, which was planned for the following spring, curtailed the parliamentary timetable. It was a decision he would soon come to regret.
Despite his renewed confidence after Maastricht, Major was acutely aware that his predecessor was watching his every move. His appointment of Heseltine and scrapping of the poll tax, and the government’s position on Europe, particularly alarmed Mrs Thatcher, who remained in the Commons on the backbenches until the election. Soon after leaving office she had promised to be a ‘good back-seat driver’, words which infuriated Major. He had scrupulously consulted his predecessor in the months after her departure, but that was now becoming increasingly difficult. ‘The Labour Party were very keen to play on the fact, “Oh well, she’s still running the government, yet she wouldn’t have won the election,”’ said one senior figure within the government. ‘It wasn’t a credible position. Had she not said that, we could have consulted her and brought her in much more than we did.’
The former Prime Minister struggled to come to terms with the loss of power after being in office so long, particularly during the conclusion of the Gulf War, that began just before she left Number 10. Her court of former aides and advisers let it be known to a number of Tory MPs and sympathisers in the press that she was disappointed with Major’s performance and questioned his judgement. She gave him her support in public, particularly as the general election approached, but as one of his aides remarked, ‘The evil was in the drip feed, the constant gnawing away at him.’30 One of the senior figures in the party still sympathetic to her admits, ‘She had become her own worst enemy by blocking off anyone who could replace her – Major was the only person in Cabinet who could claim to be her heir.’
Major himself was exasperated by the influence she still commanded in the party. A low point in their relationship came in June 1991 when the press reported comments allegedly from her that he was a ‘grey man’ who had ‘no ideas’. She had also delivered a speech in New York in which she made an implicit attack on the government’s ERM policy. According to one of his closest advisers in Number 10, Judith Chaplin, the Prime Minister was exasperated, labelling Mrs Thatcher’s behaviour ‘emotional’ and her views ‘loopy’. Chaplin, who later became a Tory MP before her untimely death in 1993, recorded Major’s frustration in her diaries. ‘I want her isolated,’ Chaplin recorded Major saying. ‘I want her destroyed.’31