John Major: The Autobiography. John Major
I sat in my garden in the September sun composing a speech. Never had I found one so hard to write. I had little experience of big rallies, and social security does not readily lend itself to conference oratory. Soon the ground at my feet was littered with discarded texts. The speech passed off well enough on the day, however, and I earned a crouching ovation from the audience, many of whom were wondering who was on next, and whether the subject to follow would be more politically exciting. No conference speech ever gave me so much trouble as my debut, and I was mightily relieved when it was over without disaster.
When Parliament reassembled in November I began to get to know the many disabled lobby groups who worked with such dedication for their special interests. In most cases they were not the left-wing warriors I had expected to find, and although not many were obvious Tories, I enjoyed the relationships that were soon built up. I would have liked to have become closer to them, but their institutional role of lobbying the government made that more difficult than I had imagined.
Soon after I had been appointed the McColl Report landed on my desk. Ian McColl, a distinguished professor of surgery, had chaired a Committee of Inquiry into the service provided by the artificial limb and appliance centres. It was a high-powered committee including Brian Griffiths, soon to be appointed head of the Prime Minister’s Policy Unit at Number 10, and Marmaduke (‘Duke’) Hussey, who had lost a leg at the Anzio beach-head in 1943 but had gone on to a distinguished career and was a former Chief Executive and Managing Director of Times Newspapers.
The report was fiercely critical of the services available to disabled people: wheelchair design was out of date; artificial limbs were poorly fitted; and the contract arrangements between the department and the near-monopoly suppliers were inadequate. As I had nearly lost a leg myself in Nigeria I was instinctively sympathetic to the disabled. I knew I was fortunate not to be in need of an artificial limb myself.
The department was disenchanted with the McColl Report, but I decided to implement it in full, and called in Professor McColl to discuss the way forward. I had not previously met the author of this rip-roaring critique of current policy, but he turned out to be a slender, sandy-haired individual of gentle disposition who was courteously but firmly determined to ensure his report was not shelved – as, he told me, he had been threatened it would be by an angry civil servant. His good nature soon overcame any residual resentment among the department’s officials, and a Special Health Authority was set up with a wide-ranging brief to improve services for disabled people. I invited Lord Holderness – formerly Richard Wood, a Conservative MP and government minister who had lost both his legs to a bomb in Libya in 1943 – to chair the new authority, and he and his colleagues worked to such effect that services greatly improved.
Ian McColl, however, was not to drift out of my life. In 1989 Margaret Thatcher sent him to the House of Lords, and in the 1990s he became my Parliamentary Private Secretary in the Lords. He spent his early mornings operating at Guy’s or St Thomas’s Hospitals and then came on to Number 10, where he had become the doctor-in-residence as well as a political adviser, and one of the most popular figures in Downing Street.
My higher profile as a minister of state made me a bigger target for criticism, and on one issue, although for a few days only, I became Public Enemy Number One. January 1987 was bitterly cold. Heavy falls of snow covered the whole country, and there was genuine concern about how vulnerable people would keep warm. The previous summer the department had prepared a new scheme of cold weather payments to help the vulnerable when the temperature fell below a certain level, but with Arctic blizzards sweeping Britain, the system looked hopelessly bureaucratic. I was even accused of having personally devised a scheme that would never be triggered (although why anyone would have done that the critics never explained).
As I drove from Huntingdon to the Commons on icy roads and in grim weather, the radio news made it clear that the cold weather payments were the issue of the moment, and that the opposition’s attack on what it called our ‘heartless system’ would be fierce. I had not realised, until I listened to Labour spokesmen, that by introducing a new scheme to help the old pay for their heating in cold weather we had been deliberately trying to freeze them to death. Labour, however, assured everyone that that was our intention. And they pinned the blame on me.
I had no authority to change the scheme and make early payments under it without both Treasury approval and extra funding – neither of which was forthcoming. The Treasury refused to yield, and an alarmed Margaret Thatcher – no doubt with an eye to Prime Minister’s Questions, where uproar was guaranteed – summoned John MacGregor, the Chief Secretary to the Treasury, and myself to see her at Number 10 and thrash out our solution to this winter crisis. I pleaded for money, and John resisted. We were in the first-floor study, in which Margaret liked to work, and I looked through the window at the deep snow covering Horse Guards Parade. ‘It must be very cold in a two-up, two-down semi with no heating,’ I said. Mrs Thatcher turned to me sharply, then looked out, and I knew I had won.
The Treasury approved the expenditure, and I announced that one and a half million vulnerable people would receive a £5 payment towards their heating bills. The vulnerable were reassured, the Labour fox was shot, the Tories were delighted, and I ended my brief stint as a hate figure.
It was a timely introduction to the sort of political flash-fire that can so often cause trouble. The Treasury was not always all-powerful, and Margaret Thatcher was a good deal more alert to popular concerns than her detractors liked to suggest. I moved from villain to hero in a matter of hours, and within a short time revised the system of cold weather payments to make it a good deal more effective. That done, the weather improved, and the new system remained untested.
I enjoyed my two years at Social Security, and did not anticipate that they would soon come to an end. In early 1987, however, the Conservatives returned to the lead in the opinion polls, and all parties began to prepare themselves for a general election. After two successive election defeats Labour still looked unelectable, and we were generally confident of another win. As the election approached speculation grew, and I was tipped for all manner of jobs in the new Parliament.
I had a modest role in the preparations for the June election by helping the Treasury to ‘cost’ Labour’s social security policies. The bulk of this work was done by Andrew Tyrie, then Nigel Lawson’s special adviser, and after 1997 the Tory Member for Chichester. It was a brilliant success in undermining Labour’s claim to be able to afford their programme without massive tax increases.
When the election was called, Peter Brown, my constituency agent in Huntingdon, had prepared yet again for me to fight the seat as though it was a marginal. I was committed to a busy programme, including three speeches each evening at different villages, as well as a string of question-and-answer sessions with special-interest groups. This was our normal practice. We expected to win the election in Huntingdon, but we never took it for granted and left nothing to chance, working hard for the biggest possible majority.
Our plans were complicated when I was invited to join a number of Central Office press conferences during the campaign. As these took place early in the morning, I would drive to London after my evening speeches and return to the constituency mid-morning. It was exhausting, and sleep was at a premium. But it was exhilarating to see the campaign from the centre. I was at the morning conference a week before polling day on 4 June, ‘wobbly Thursday’, when Margaret – tired and in pain from a tooth infection – was snappy and irritable, and everyone walked on eggshells to avoid provoking an explosion.
It was evident from the underlying atmosphere at Central Office that morning that the relationship between Norman Tebbit, as Party Chairman, and David Young, the Secretary of State for Employment and a leading figure in planning the campaign, was one of mutual distrust. But our private rolling daily opinion poll never blinked, and the election was won comfortably. Division of the anti-Conservative forces gave Mrs Thatcher a reduced, but still substantial majority of 102, although she received only 42 per cent of the poll. It was a stunning third election victory for her.
At Huntingdon I won with a record majority of over twenty-seven thousand, and more than two-thirds of the vote. It was now one of the safest Tory seats in the country. Norma and I returned to Finings to celebrate and ponder the next five years. Neither of