John Major

The 'boy from Brixton'.

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“”It is time to return to core values, time to get back to basics, to self-discipline and respect for the law, to consideration for the others, to accepting responsibility for yourself and your family - and not shuffling it off on other people and the state. .

—John Major, October 1993.

John 'Back to Basics' Major (1943–) was a British Conservative Prime Minister (1990-1997); a man who, if remembered by anyone these days, it’s for being a deathly dull, uncharismatic man whose only concession to a personality was his love of cricket – a view not helped by the fact Private Eye portrayed him as a naive, bumbling fool (in the vein as an adult Adrian Mole.) and Spitting Image always showing him as an all-grey character who only ate peas (not helped by the fact he’d gone grey in his 40s and favoured grey suits which made him look much older than he was). Perhaps one of his crimes was to have been sandwiched between two leaders who clearly did have charisma and an ‘inner fire’ – Margaret Thatcher and then Tony Blair.

Public perception pegs him as a fairly useless Prime Minister, though modern historians have been more favourable – particularly when they take into account of the ‘hand he’d been dealt’ in 1990 and when his calibre is compared to later Conservative Prime Ministers. He generally fell off the political radar after leading his party into the disastrous 1997 General Election though he continues to occasionally resurface - such as to oppose Scottish Independence and soon after, to fight against Brexit.

Early Life

Major was described as ‘the man who ran away from the circus to become an accountant’ – his father was a rather risqué philandering music-hall entertainer, whose later garden ornament business floundered enough to reduce the family to a point they were (in Major’s words) ‘close to the edge, clinging on’ in 1950s London. He drifted through school, failed most of his exams and left at sixteen, then drifted into a series of jobs (and bouts of unemployment). By his early 20s, he was the lover of a divorcee thirteen years his senior who appeared to have helped him ‘straighten out’, smarten up and nurture his ambitions. A rather interesting backstory for such a 'dull' man, no?

Said straightening out included getting involved in Conservative Party politics (becoming a local councillor in the 1960s) and getting into banking via a correspondence course. By the 1970s, he was hunting about for a Parliamentary seat which he’d actually have a decent chance of winning; his hard work and networking within the party finally paying off in being offered Huntingdon – a safe rural ‘shire’ seat – in time for the 1979 General Election, which was a solid Conservative victory.

Parliament

While he was later considered ‘rapidly over-promoted’ by Thatcher in her final year in power the truth was that Major was much more a ‘sleeper hit’ of the 1980s; continuing in his combination of hard work and back-room networking to get a series of boring-but-responsible posts of ever-increasing importance through the decade. In this respect, he was ‘in the right place at the right time’; that when the imperious Thatcher was finally defenestrated over her failure of the 'Poll Tax', he was senior enough to be considered a credible candidate but hadn’t been there long enough to have made any real political enemies yet. Thus he became the ‘compromise candidate’ which both pro and anti Thatcher factions could agree on. Some duplicity on Major’s part seems to have been played – that he’d inferred to both groups that he was ‘their man’ but then once in power, make his own path (which caused a deepening and sour rift with Thatcher as he denied her attempts to 'backseat drive').

Prime Minister

For a ‘useless Prime Minister’, Major sure did achieve some things.

• Gave full support to H.W. Bush over the Gulf War (inc 50,000 British forces in Desert Storm).
• Did much of the ‘heavy lifting’ which led to the 1998 ‘Good Friday Agreement’ in Northern Ireland (putting 'The Troubles' on ice) and the final normalisation of relations with the Republic of Ireland - though not without some 'hiccups' on the way.
• Managed to turn around a 20-point Labour lead in the polls to a 6-point Tory lead in about a year, leading to an unprecedented fourth victory in the 1992 General Election (also winning the record of ‘most votes’ at just over 14 million).
• Got the British Parliament to ratify the Maastricht Treaty (leading to the formation of the modern European Union) despite the Eurosceptic wing of his party vowing to resist to the death.
• Managed to stabilise the economy after the debacle of the early 1990s recession and the British ejection from the ‘Exchange Rate Mechanism’ – though in this case it was more ‘fixing the crap you caused’ than anything else (they'd deliberately stoked a boom in the late 1980s to help win the 1987 election).

Most critical and perhaps impressive was the simple fact that Major managed to actually get the Conservative Party to 1997 without it actually dying on route. Thatcher and the 'bastards' in the rear trying to knife him, the Eurosceptic 'Referendum Party' rising on his right while in front of him (and the nation) the various colleagues who were increasingly unable to keep their trousers up, to say no to mysterious envelopes filled with cash or realise when they're being tone-deaf - all causing his Parliamentary majority to slowly grind down under his feet to zero by 1996 due to much of the population increasingly convinced the Party were either corrupt, malign, deluded or simply stupid (though most still believed Major himself was honest and well-meaning).

All of this, however is outweighed in the popular consciousness by the spectre of ‘Back to Basics’ A show-piece speech in 1993 to the ‘party faithful’, in which Major laid out his political stall (much more an old-school ‘One Nation Conservatism’ in the mould of Edward Heath than an unabashed Thatcherite). It wasn’t as bad as it was later portrayed (personal sexuality was barely mentioned) but it was a clear ‘hymn to the good old days’ which not only ignored the fact their own party had destroyed much of the infrastructure which made said days possible but also cut a moralistic, hectoring tone which felt out of sync with mainstream British society at the time (and personally hypocritical, reaching for the ‘family values’ line while the woman you’d had an affair with was in the audience...).

Ultimately, this speech was the millstone which more than anything else sunk the Tories. Not only did it apparently give the social reactionaries carte blanche to try to attack anything they didn’t like (single mothers, unmarried parents, sex education etc) which made the party feel even more retrograde but it provided the perfect backdrop of seemingly blatant hypocrisy which came to be summed up as simply ‘Tory Sleaze’.

Other items of note in his tenure was the piles of burning cattle due to BSE, his timidity (or caution) over intervening in the Yugoslav Wars and ill-considered policies such as the 'Cones Hotline' which made the Government look stupid.

Legacy

One of the reasons he’s forgotten is that he doesn’t really have a legacy. If ‘One Nation Conservatism’ is alive in Britain today, it’s not within the Conservative Party – the ‘bastards’ and ‘swivel-eyed loons’ have won. He is persona non grata, like his old Cabinet colleagues Michael Heseltine and Ken Clarke. His vision of a classless, meritocratic and fair Britain which ‘was at ease with itself’ is as unfashionable in the world of culture wars, conspiracy theories, alternative facts and vulgar libertarianism as much as shell suits and curtain haircuts are.

His bleating about governmental competence, of respect for civil servants., for ‘sound policies’, public service and for personal rectitude are unwelcome to modern Conservative ears. Better instead to proclaim him a failure, to blame him single-handedly for the ‘97 defeat, that ‘he wasn’t a real conservative’ and should basically ‘sit down and shut up’. Lastly, his steadfast refusal to prostrate himself at the shrine of the Blessed St Margaret is a heresy which can never be forgiven by those who tend the flames of the cult.

John Major is a reminder of what ‘Conservative’ used to mean, and much of the current crop hate him for that.

References

British Prime Ministers

Chamberlain (Con.) - Churchill (Con.) - Attlee (Lab.) - Churchill (Con.) - Eden (Con.) - Macmillan (Con.) - Douglas-Home (Con.) - Wilson (Lab.) - Heath (Con.) - Wilson (Lab.) - Callaghan (Lab.) - Thatcher (Con.) - Major (Con.) - Blair (Lab.) - Brown (Lab.) - Cameron (Con.) - May (Con.) - Johnson (Con.) - Truss (Con.) - Sunak (Con.) - Starmer (Lab.) (incumbent)