Back from the Brink: The Inside Story of the Tory Resurrection. Peter Snowdon
had betrayed her in November 1990 by telling her that she had no hope of winning in the second ballot. The resentment would flow both ways.
The Eurosceptics opposing the Maastricht Bill were emboldened by the result of a referendum in Denmark in June 1992, when a narrow majority voted against ratifying the Treaty. Rebellion had become respectable, and as the Bill made its way through the Commons the rebels grew in number and confidence, encouraged by the tacit support of senior figures from the heyday of the Thatcher revolution. Iain Duncan Smith, one of the leading Eurosceptics elected in 1992, recalls: ‘I think the Whips got used to thundering things through because they could beat rebellions with large majorities. They believed they could ram Maastricht through, but they couldn’t. It was the key to the whole thing unravelling.’46 Major could not escape the fact that the ‘fundamental unreconstructed anti-Europeans’ outnumbered the government’s diminishing majority. ‘We were a minority government from the start,’ he asserts. He was incensed by the behaviour of the Maastricht rebels. ‘They wanted me to renege on a treaty I had negotiated on behalf of the British people. Worse, they wanted me to renege on a deal on which I had absolutely cast-iron parliamentary approval before I negotiated. If I had done that, no one would ever have trusted a British Prime Minister in negotiating in Europe today. The same people who talk about honour and sanction were the people that were asking me to break our word. That was why I was prepared, if necessary, to take it to the country.’47 On 22 July 1993 the Bill failed to pass one of its last parliamentary hurdles (three Cabinet meetings having been held in one day in an attempt to carry the government), and the next day the government held a vote of confidence, which it won by thirty-eight votes.
Hours after the government survived, an exhausted Prime Minister sat down to be interviewed by Michael Brunson, ITN’s political editor. Believing he was having a private conversation while the cameras were not rolling, he vented his frustration. ‘The real problem is one of a tiny majority. Don’t overlook that. I could have done all these clever, decisive things which people wanted me to do but I would have split the Conservative Party into smithereens. And you would have said I had acted like a ham-fisted leader … Just think it through from my perspective. You are the Prime Minister, with a majority of eighteen, a party that is still harking back to a golden age that never was, and is now invented. You have three right-wing members of the Cabinet who actually resign. What happens in the parliamentary party?’ Brunson suggested he could easily find replacements. Major replied: ‘I could bring in other people. But where do you think most of this poison is coming from? From the dispossessed and the never-possessed. You can think of ex-ministers who are going around causing all sorts of trouble. We don’t want another three more of the bastards out there.’ The tape of the conversation was leaked to the Observer.
Major’s remark about ‘bastards’ was taken to refer to Michael Portillo, the Defence Secretary, Peter Lilley, the Social Security Secretary, and John Redwood, the Welsh Secretary, all prominent Eurosceptics, although he insists he did not have anyone in particular in mind. But his words brought into full public view the animosity that was absorbing the highest reaches of government. The fact that commentators swiftly identified the three Cabinet members in question revealed how much briefing was occurring. ‘Tory MPs asked themselves what they were in power for during the Maastricht debates, while John Major struggled to keep discipline,’ says one former aide. ‘It reinforced an impression of division in the public’s eyes. Here was a party that had become dogmatically obsessed, like a bickering, neurotic couple on a train – everyone just wanted them to shut up.’
There was a genuine ideological rift occurring within the Conservative Party in the early 1990s. Closer European integration created a powerful tension between a belief in the nation and the desire to spread commerce and trade. The struggle to reconcile these forces was tearing the party apart, from the Cabinet table to the grassroots in the country. The party’s presence in local government had shrunk since 1979, when it had over twelve thousand councillors, to a point where it controlled just thirteen councils in 1995. Party membership had also been in decline since the 1970s, and that decline became even sharper in the 1990s.48 ‘Our associations on the ground were left with the more politically interested members, and they attracted too many zealots,’ one Cabinet minister observed. The increasingly polarised views of activists and members reinforced the divisions in Westminster.
What turned the crisis into a deeper malaise was the fact that the bitterness associated with Mrs Thatcher’s departure had become entangled with the disputes about Maastricht. Eurosceptics disappointed with Major’s premiership after Black Wednesday despaired that, as they saw it, a great leader had been unceremoniously dumped and her inheritance was being betrayed. By the end of 1993, the trauma of the events of November 1990 had come to haunt the party. To the most ardent Thatcherite MPs, turning the tide of European integration was far more important than loyalty to the Prime Minister, who they believed was weak and indecisive, while Thatcherism had never suffered an electoral failure. Every day the Whips’ Office battled to keep the government afloat, as the party’s overall majority dwindled after successive by-election defeats. The malcontents had to be kept on board. ‘It always irritated me, because people said Mrs Thatcher was much stronger than John Major, but he had a majority of twenty-one, which was reduced by two every time we lost a by-election, all the way down to zero at the end,’ says one former whip, Andrew MacKay. ‘It’s easy to be strong with a big majority, but it’s very difficult to be strong when you’re held to ransom by the venal, the cranky or the issue-obsessive.’49
What made matters worse was that the pro-European members of Major’s government – Ken Clarke, Douglas Hurd and Michael Heseltine – underestimated the depth and breadth of feeling in the parliamentary party about Maastricht. Indeed the ‘bastards’ in Cabinet were just as vexed about Europe as the backbench rebels. Hurd contends that it was not so much complacency among the senior ranks as a ‘mixture of exhaustion and fatalism’ within the government. ‘It was more a case of a rabbit stuck in the headlights; so much energy was taken up by the Maastricht votes.’50 Major removed the whip from eight of the rebels in November 1994: it was a move that did him more harm than good. As the government’s majority almost completely disappeared, a sense of paralysis in office pervaded. Its room for manoeuvre was now extremely limited. Senior ministers were exasperated. ‘The rebels thought all you had to do was take an anti-European position, be beastly to foreigners and the world would flock to your side,’ said one. ‘It was never true. It was a fantasy.’
‘Put Up or Shut Up’
‘I am not prepared to see the party I care for laid out on the rack like this any longer … It is time to put up or shut up.’ With those words, Major stunned his party on 22 June 1995. His last throw of the dice was to resign as party leader, prompting a leadership election to resolve differences, restore discipline and reassert his authority after three years of infighting. It was an extraordinary move for a sitting Prime Minister. When the Whip had been restored to the eight rebels in April on the promise of loyalty, they had circulated the television studios boasting of their success. Major felt he could never trust their word again, and realised that a leadership challenge in the autumn was highly likely. He feared that the party conference would descend into farce, undermining everything the government was trying to accomplish. ‘The only way to exorcise that was to resign and determine where parliamentary opinion really rested,’ he recalls.51
Once it was clear that Michael Portillo was not going to stand for the leadership, only one Eurosceptic member of the Cabinet challenged Major: John Redwood. The Welsh Secretary believed that if there was ‘no change’ in leadership there was ‘no chance’ at the next general election. Redwood launched his campaign surrounded by the leading rebels, many of whom were held in contempt by Major and loyal members of the Cabinet. The effect was unfortunate: ‘You can practically hear the flapping of white coats,’ one of Major’s campaign team remarked. But Redwood attracted the support of