John Major’s rise to foreign secretary, chancellor and then prime minister in no time at all should not really have caused the surprise it did among MPs and the press.
The Lobby always regarded him as one of most astute of Tory politicians, one you would go to if you wanted to know the latest on who was up and who was down in Conservative-land. I first met him within days of joining the Lobby in 1981 and always found him one of the most friendly and helpful MPs, first as a junior whip and then as he moved swiftly through the ranks of government.
He was ambitious and clever, good at collecting allies and being different things to different people. As we know, Margaret Thatcher was convinced initially that he was a worthy successor to her. It was not an opinion she held for long.
Journalists like myself and Elinor Goodman, of the FT and then Channel 4, rather selfishly regretted it when he rose to the Foreign Office, knowing that he would be much harder to reach for an opinion in that hallowed building. Major got where he was through being able, popular, supremely tactical and consensual. But he always seemed to be one step ahead of his colleagues and was certainly in the right place at the right time when Margaret Thatcher had to make key appointments during the crisis that ended her leadership.
Those skills were immediately on view after his shock elevation to Number 10 when he brought back Michael Heseltine to see off the poll tax. I wrote in December 1990 that an MP had called the poll tax ‘the flagship that sank the admiral [Thatcher]’ and Major was determined not to be a second victim. He also introduced a new style of running the Cabinet, allowing ministers to pitch in on other’s territory. He was, according to the polls, the most popular PM for thirty years.
In Europe he was trying to avoid the perpetual conflict that fellow leaders associated with Thatcher’s premiership. His negotiating skills were hailed the following year as he emerged from the Maastricht summit. The Maastricht Treaty, signed in February 1992, represented the biggest step since the founding Treaty of Rome towards European integration. It created the European Union and paved the way for the single currency (or euro).
But Major emerged from the intense negotiations with his aides claiming ‘game, set and match’ as he secured opt-outs for Britain on the single currency and the social chapter. It was a deal that held the Tory party together and helped it to go on and defeat Neil Kinnock, seemingly against the odds, in 1992. A late surge to the Tories from voters who were flirting with the Liberal Democrats saw Major, who had used an upturned soapbox as he travelled the country, achieve an outright majority. To say that was a high point would be an understatement because Maastricht and associated European issues were to dog Major throughout his 1992–7 term, leading eventually to a Blair landslide in 1997.
After the 1992 victory, it was the shortest of honeymoons and by late September I was writing about the prospect of a leadership challenge to Major. I had covered one of the most dramatic days in post-war political history when Britain was forced out of the exchange rate mechanism – the device that was supposed to keep national exchange rates close to a European norm – on Black Wednesday, as 16 September 1992 came to be known. The decision came after a tumultuous day in which interest rates were raised in two stages by five per cent as Major and Norman Lamont, his chancellor, tried and failed to save the pound’s parity with the mark.
So soon after the election, it was a moment from which Major and his government never recovered because it called into question its economic competence. Major tried to defend membership of the ERM but I reported the views of senior Tories that if he even tried to go back, half his Cabinet would walk out on him and precipitate an inevitable challenge. He had indeed contemplated resignation himself. Lamont rode out the storm for a time but, seven months later, Major dropped him shortly after a disastrous defeat in the Newbury by-election and replaced him with Kenneth Clarke. Lamont, in a resignation speech reminiscent of Sir Geoffrey Howe’s three years earlier, said the Government gave the impression of ‘being in office but not in power’.
But Maastricht and the treaty ratification was the issue that was to sap Major’s will and strength. He had implacable rebels up against him, including Iain Duncan Smith, a future leader. After a series of scrapes, he was defeated by a combination of Labour and Tory rebels on a social chapter vote and had to call a confidence vote the next day, 23 July 1993, in order to restore what was left of his battered authority.
There then came one of those moments that befall prime ministers when it’s all going wrong. He did an interview with the estimable Michael Brunson of ITV. That was fine but once it had been completed, Brunson carried on his chat with Major, asking him questions that were supposed to be off the record. However, the live feed was still running, which neither party knew. When Brunson asked Major why he did not sack the conspiring ministers, he gave an explosive reply that was later picked up by other broadcasters. He replied: ‘Just think it through from my perspective. You are the prime minister, with a majority of eighteen … where do you think most of the poison is coming from? From the dispossessed and the never-possessed. Do we want three more of the bastards out there?’
From then on the ‘bastards’, fairly or not, were identified as Peter Lilley, Michael Howard and Michael Portillo, three of the leading sceptics in his Cabinet. For me the next highlight in this seemingly never-ending saga came on the lovely Greek island of Corfu in June 1994. There Major, no longer the agreeable figure they had welcomed after the years of Thatcher lectures, told European leaders he could not accept the federalist Jean-Luc Dehaene as the next president of the commission.
The Belgian Prime Minister was the choice of France and Germany to replace Jacques Delors at the end of the year. But British officials said that Dehaene did not fit the bill, and would not command the consensus and wide support across the Community that was needed for somebody who was going to be president for the next five years.
Major had wielded the veto late on the Friday evening. Christopher Meyer, his press secretary with whom I often played squash (and who later became UK ambassador in Washington), had rung me and told me to round up the press party for a late-night briefing. Sometimes they were a waste of time; this one was not.
For us globetrotters there was no let-up and by September we were in South Africa. Major had encouraged a group of sporting icons – Bobby Charlton, Rob Andrew, Colin Cowdrey and heptathlete Judy Simpson – to come along to promote sport in the townships. Margaret Thatcher, by no means for the first time, caused trouble during the trip on which Major was trying to encourage international companies to come to South Africa. Speaking in India, she had doubted the willingness of international investors to come to South Africa because of fears of violence in words that seemed certain to undermine Major’s trip.
The problems were smoothed over and the cricket-loving Major, a devout supporter of Surrey, appropriately went to the Alexandra Township Oval. He opened the nets, and then proceeded to show off some polished strokes and clean-bowled the South African sports minister. It was a happy relief during times of trouble.
There really was no easing up and by November Major turned a vote on increasing Britain’s contribution to the EU into a confidence issue to bring his Cabinet on side. The Cabinet right-wingers, including Portillo, Lilley and John Redwood, were forced to go along with a so-called ‘suicide pact’ in which they all said they would go down with Major if he lost the vote, which of course he did not.
Then came the bravest moment of Major’s premiership. Fed up by the constant sniping, he called the Lobby to the Downing Street rose garden on 24 June 1995 and announced that he was resigning as Conservative leader, telling his critics to ‘put up or shut up’. Major – who had not lost his strategic nous – knew that a leadership challenge to him in the autumn was all but inevitable, so he tried to take his critics by surprise, believing he would attract a back-bench challenger at worst.
He was wrong. By Monday, John Redwood, the Welsh secretary and former policy adviser to Thatcher, was ready to throw his hat into the ring, resign from the Cabinet and take on Major as the right-wing champion. Major was confident of winning, and did, but it added to the sense of disarray surrounding the Government and exploded the pretence of Cabinet unity. Other Cabinet ministers tried to dissuade Redwood but he would not be moved.
On 26 June he launched his campaign. As I wrote, he came close to receiving the endorsement of Baroness Thatcher. Asked in Washington whom she supported, Lady Thatcher said the result of the leadership contest had to be that ‘we must have the true Conservative policies that I pursued; policies of lower taxes, keeping our national parliamentary sovereignty and the independence of the pound sterling’. She had referred to the revival of right-wing Reaganite Republicanism in America and added: ‘I suspect something similar is about to happen in my own country.’ Not much doubt what she meant, and whom she supported.
Redwood accused Major of jeopardizing the party’s position by quitting, leaving it in limbo when it needed firm leadership. His resignation letter said that he had put forward ideas on how Major could avoid a challenge in the autumn and that he had been devastated the next day to learn from another minister that the Prime Minister had decided to stand down.
When the result came, it was far from what the Major campaign wanted. But it was enough. I wrote that he looked certain to lead the Conservatives into the next general election after pulling off the riskiest gamble of his political life. He won a decisive, although not overwhelming, victory. The Prime Minister was backed by 218 of the 329 Conservative MPs entitled to vote, with his challenger, Redwood, receiving a highly respectable 89 votes.
I also speculated that Michael Heseltine might be made deputy prime minister, which he was. It was interesting because some MPs had been pushing Heseltine to let it be known that he would be a candidate if Major was forced out after the first round. He declined. A few weeks later Peter Riddell and I interviewed Heseltine, and he surprised us by revealing that Major had informally offered him the job of deputy prime minister three weeks before he called the leadership election.
Heseltine told us of a private, late-night Commons meeting in which he first learnt Major wanted him as his number two, another at which Major confided he would take on all comers in a leadership fight, and a third on the day of the election when the PM confirmed Heseltine would get the job of deputy if he won. It restored our faith in Major, the fixer. Long before the election, Major had spoken of a significant promotion with the man who at the time was considered the favourite to succeed him if he was ousted.
We asked if Major might have made the move to get him on side in advance and Heseltine, with only the hint of a smile, said he had not thought of such a ‘Machiavellian interpretation’. It was clever. I had been told by several Heseltine allies that they were dismayed when he told them to vote for Major in the first round. Heseltine had given up his last chance of becoming leader, but his consolation was the number-two job.
Major had bought time, but that was all. Tony Blair was by now looking a certainty to take Labour back to power in an election that had to be held in the spring of 1997, and the Tories, also dogged by sleaze allegations, were still banging on about Europe.
In November 1996 there was yet another big revolt as pro-Europeans united with Eurosceptics to protest against Major’s refusal to allow a Commons debate on the single currency. A private meeting of the 1922 Committee of Tory back-benchers delivered what MPs called a ‘unanimous and uncompromising’ message to Major that he must change his mind. Sir Marcus Fox, chairman of the committee, and two other officers were asked by the executive of the committee to seek an urgent meeting with the Prime Minister to convey the full weight of back-bench anger.
The Prime Minister was reported to be in no mood to back down. In the febrile atmosphere at Westminster, one or two Tory MPs hinted that they could be forced into resigning the whip and there was even gossip that the rift could spiral into a confidence issue which might bring the Government down. Such talk was regarded as fanciful but one senior Tory loyalist told me that a ‘dangerous gulf’ was opening up between the party and the Government: ‘I really do not know what is going on. Who is advising the Prime Minister?’
Kenneth Clarke, the pro-European chancellor, then agreed to face his party’s Eurosceptics in a gamble designed to quell the renewed Tory turmoil over the single currency and turn attention back to his Budget the day afterwards. Then Major and Heseltine joined forces to crush the hopes of the Tory Right that the Conservatives could go into the general election on a pledge to keep Britain out of the European single currency. The Prime Minister dismayed Eurosceptics by ruling out a change in the wait-and-see policy in the present Parliament and, for the first time, in the election campaign itself.
The hardening of Major’s opposition to a U-turn came after two days of intense speculation that he might be about to shift and launch a backstairs campaign to persuade Clarke to go along with him. The opposite had happened. A fierce response by the chancellor to any idea of a retreat strengthened Westminster opinion that he would resign if the policy changed. The policy of keeping open options on the single currency appeared to have become set in stone.
I wrote that in the behind-the-scenes ministerial power struggle over Europe, the sceptics had been vanquished. The Right were furious with Major, alleging that he had given in to the Clarke–Heseltine axis and prevented the party adopting an electoral policy that would have set the Tories apart from Labour.
In a final victory for the pro-Europeans, Clarke won Cabinet agreement that the wait-and-see policy on the single currency could not be changed before the general election. But a group of senior ministers, led by Home Secretary Michael Howard, argued that the Government should, while leaving options open, declare before the election that the chances of Britain joining the single currency during the next Parliament were highly unlikely. It was a forerunner of the Labour row over whether Britain should join the single currency, which was to dominate the early months and years of the incoming Blair government.
The Europe argument was settled for the time being. The election was months away and Blair was on a straight course to victory. Major had fought a courageous battle against heavy odds. Europe had cost Margaret Thatcher her job. Major had survived a turbulent parliament, often by his own cunning. But the rows over Europe presented to the electorate a party that was divided from top to bottom. Such forces do not win elections, and there was never a chance that Major would repeat 1992.