An exasperated scholar, Charles Dellheim, in an excellent book about the Thatcher years, wrote, ‘Few Americans know, or care, what Ronald Reagan’s father did for a living. But who in Britain does not know, and care one way or the other, that Margaret Thatcher is the daughter of a Grantham grocer?’1
If Thatcher’s family background ‘placed’ her very firmly, what could the public expect of her pleasant-looking bespectacled successor, John Major, the youngest Prime Minister to date in the twentieth century? Here was no stereotype. Indeed, the Dickensian family background was something no one would have guessed from the grey suit, and the demeanour, which was that of a friendly bank manager. (He had worked for the Standard Chartered Bank, in the tricky section of development banking, chiefly in the area of facilitating investment in African countries, before moving over to the Corporate Affairs side of the business.2) Behind the grey suits and the smiles was the tragi-comic pathos of his father’s life. In the bathroom of his parents’ bungalow in Worcester Park, the young John Major could have opened a trunk–as his brother recalled–‘a large black one, with reinforced edges, containing such exotic items as a ginger wig, an evening cane and an opera hat, which as a child, I played with, popping it out and collapsing it over and over again. There were also greasepaints, band parts, false whiskers and a black jacket edged with silk. My sister Pat recalls a trapeze costume with a stars-and-stripes design, strongly suggesting that it dates from his time in America, and a photograph of Father wearing this costume.’3
John Major’s father, born Tom Ball in the West Midlands in 1879, had emigrated to America when his father Abraham, a master bricklayer, went to seek work at the blast furnaces of Andrew Carnegie’s steel works in Pittsburgh. Tom did not follow his father into bricklaying but, having taught himself acrobatics in the cellar (they by then had an independent builders’ business), he left home to work as a trapeze artist in the circus. He subsequently pursued a career in vaudeville, performing in America, and in every town in England which possessed a theatre. His first wife, Kate Edith Grant, began her relationship with Tom as the other half of a music-hall double act, celebrated in its day as Drum and Major. It seems as if it were she who took ‘Major’ as a stage name: Kitty Major. They trod the boards with Dan Leno Junior, Marie Lloyd, Randolph Sutton and many other household names. The Drum and Major act continued until well into the 1920s, with comedy routines and songs, some of them written by Kitty herself:
And can you ever remember a Tommy,
A Swaddie, a Tifly, or Jack,
Hear a word said against Mother England,
And not biff the foreigner back?
Towards the end of the marriage, Tom had formed an attachment to a young dancer named Gwen Coates, twenty-six years younger than himself. She was a brilliant dancer, who continued to be able to do the splits as an old lady. Terry Major-Ball, John’s brother, tells us that ‘Kitty died in June 1928, after a long illness as a result of an accident with a stage prop’. Unfortunately he did not expand. A year later, Tom Ball married Gwen Coates and in 1930, by the age of fifty-one, he had decided to give up his stage career. The pair began to have children–Aston, who died at birth in June 1929; Pat, described on the birth certificate as the child of an actor; and, in 1932, Terry, on whose certificate Tom has become a ‘fuel agent’, selling coke and coal. It was at about this time that Tom began to make garden ornaments, starting small in a spare bedroom of the bungalow, and eventually expanding into Major’s Garden Ornaments–making gnomes out of plaster moulds. The business throve. ‘Father had flourishing outlets all over southern England.’4 The coming of war finished all that. ‘Garden ornaments were the last thing people needed during the war. So he closed down the firm and went into Civil Defence, and Mother took a job in a library.’5
The last child, John Roy Major, was born on 29 March 1943. He had no memory of his parents having been interested in politics, though he assumed that they voted Conservative, ‘if only out of admiration for Winston Churchill’.6 When the future Prime Minister came into the world, his father was already sixty-four. The days of the flying trapeze and of music-hall routines were long over, shut away in the bathroom trunk. John Major grew up with elderly, loving parents who struggled with debt but proudly saw their clever son through Rutlish Grammar School in Wimbledon, where he did not work very hard but he enjoyed playing cricket. He left school at sixteen, and did a variety of jobs, including helping his brother Terry in a business very similar to Major’s Garden Ornaments–Davids’ Rural Industries. ‘We didn’t just turn out these other people’s moulds, we made our own models. Terry was even better at it than I was, and my sister even more than him. Even today if you hand me a lump of clay, I will make you something rather good and make a mould out of it.’7 Eventually, having been a clerk at the District Bank, he sat the exams for the Institute of Banking, and his career, such as it ever was, began.
Major’s Jewish mistress, Edwina Currie, a sometime Junior Minister at the Department of Health, felt qualified to advise him about his wife, Norma–‘being half Jewish–he used to ask me about Jewish things, just at the end of the evening, as if he had been saving it up, something he wanted to know. And the most extraordinary moment was in the bath, when he asked if I believed in God. “Yes”, I said, “but not in all the ritual. I had that stuffed down my throat as a child.” He nodded and patted my back, as if satisfied, as if he’s been asking himself the question a long time, and had now found a satisfactory formula.’8 Currie’s career came unstuck, not through her indiscretions about Major–these were published later as an exhibitionistic attempt to make some money–but because she had mishandled her Department’s response to an outbreak of salmonella. By bossily, and quite needlessly, telling television viewers not to eat eggs, she managed to do such damage to the chicken farmers that kamikaze was required. (In all the rituals of resignation, she kept her humiliated cool, leaving her office at the Department, drafting her letter, and so on, until the moment when the Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, hugged her–‘gave me a cuddle’, a phrase which, given the two participants, is slightly chilling–and ‘it creased me for a minute’. She was soon back to her normal, brassy form. ‘My trivial objective’, she told her diary at the end of the same day, 21 December 1988, ‘is to get to the end of this Parliament with a fur coat and some decent jewellery.’9 She did this by a relentless campaign of self-publicity, writing various salacious novels which were supposedly autobiographical, and finishing up by publishing details of her relationship with Major. These did her no good, and him no harm at all. If anything, it increased his image among the British public that he was a normal, modern person. If, in the course of marriage to a much nicer woman than Edwina, he had been tempted to step aside, the public attitude was one of sympathy for the Majors, knowledge that such things sometimes happen in a marriage, and recognition that John and Norma Major were both behaving with dignity, whereas Edwina was not. John and Edwina had finished their affair before Major became Prime Minister, but her revelations must have prompted the historically minded to ask when was the last time that a Prime Minister found himself in a comparable position. Thatcher had married a man who had been previously married–a technical adultery in the eyes of some Churches; but though she had loved to flirt with her favoured spivs, she was no Catherine the Great, her interest in power for its own sake surely driving out other passions. Callaghan, though he fathered a well-known adulteress, the Baroness Jay, was not known for his extra-marital adventures, if he had any. There was gossip about Harold Wilson’s baffling relationship with Marcia Falkender, but Wilson was not a conspicuously sexy person. Heath was Heath. Alec Home was obviously a loyal husband. Harold Macmillan was an undersexed cuckold. Eden, like Thatcher, broke the Church’s marriage laws by remarriage after divorce, but was not obviously unfaithful to his second wife, Clarissa. Churchill was undersexed. Attlee’s sexual nature, if existent, was unimaginable. Chamberlain, Baldwin and Ramsay MacDonald were hardly figures whose names are linked ineradicably with bawdry. For a figure comparable to John Major you have to go back in history to Lloyd George. John Major did not conduct himself with the exuberance of Lloyd George, but the knowledge that he had a sexual nature–that he was an attractive person–was a refreshing novelty in political life.
His new style of leadership, after Thatcher’s combative approach, was perceived to be not merely nicer but (at first) more effectual. Most noticeably was this case in December 1991, when Major returned from the European Council at Maastricht, having personally negotiated three crucial opt-outs for Britain from the treaty which sought to bind the nations of Europe in an ever-closer political, legal and social union. First, he would not sign up to the Social Charter governing working conditions. Secondly, he would not sign up for a single currency, and the abolition of sterling. Thirdly, he would not commit Britain to federalism. The Foreign Office were amazed at Major’s skill as a negotiator, and when he returned to tell the Commons there were cheers from the back benches. The election in the following year, which so many pundits predicted would be a disaster for the Conservatives, was a political triumph for Major. Fourteen and a half million people had voted Conservative, compared with the thirteen million who had voted for Thatcher in 1983. In his own constituency of Huntingdon, he had increased his personal majority from 27,500 to 36,000, one of the largest majorities in parliamentary history.10 It was clear that this victory was not simply an answer to the question, ‘Do you want Neil Kinnock to be Prime Minister?’ Clearly, the profound electoral unattractiveness of the Labour dream ticket–Kinnock and Hattersley–made their contribution to the historic Conservative victory. But Major’s personal rating was very high, and voters liked what he promised:
‘I want a Britain where there is a helping hand for those who need it; where people can get a hand up, not just a hand out. A country that is fair and free from prejudice–a classless society, at ease with itself.’ Yet, within months, Major was spoken of as the most disastrous Prime Minister in history; what went wrong?
First, there was a world recession, exacerbated in Europe by the reunification of Germany in November 1989. The German Budget moved from a surplus of $48 billion in 1990 to a deficit of $21 billion in 1991. Britain had been locked into the ERM, joining at a perilous moment when the pound sterling exchanged for 2.95DM, a rate which was never going to be easy for British business, and which in the gathering storm became ruinous for thousands of savers, importers and exporters. Understandably anxious to curb German inflation, Chancellor Kohl would not reduce the high interest rates in Germany. By September, the European markets were in turmoil, and on 16 September Britain was forced out of the ERM. Sterling had in effect been devalued by 10 percent. In panic, the government–effectively, Major, his Chancellor Norman Lamont and the Governor of the Bank of England, reduced interest rates, bringing them down to 9 percent (from a proposed 15 percent) in one week. Savers, pensioners and businesses lost heavily, in many cases ruinously during the so-called Black Wednesday, while currency speculators such as the Hungarian-born George Soros made $1 billion in forty-eight hours. Major had chosen badly by appointing Norman Lamont as Chancellor of the Exchequer, and he also made a mistake in not sacking Lamont immediately after the fateful day. Black Wednesday not only created a country, overnight, which was very much the reverse of ‘at ease with itself’. It opened up an unbridgeable fissure in the Conservative ranks. Thatcher, who had been against joining the ERM in the first place, and who had only been bullied into doing so by Lawson and Howe, could not restrain her harpie-squawks of triumph. She spent Black Wednesday on the telephone to her friends in Washington saying that she had been proved right.11 A collective madness now descended upon the parliamentary party. There was no prospect at this juncture of Britain actually leaving the European Union, and it would have been hard to see how such a course could have improved the by-now-calamitous state of the British economy. Yet, to leave the Union was what the more impassioned of the Eurosceptics desired. In fact, the collapse of the ERM was a felix culpa for the British, proving Thatcher right in economic terms. Sterling could now find its natural level against other currencies, British businesses were now much more free and potentially more profitable. But Black Wednesday made many Conservatives wonder. The ERM calamity had happened because of Britain’s involvement with the EU. The dread of losing British independence within the stultifying bureaucracy of a superstate led many people to think that the Prime Minister’s skilful negotiations at Maastricht were not skilful enough. They wanted out. On the other wing of the party, the social democratically minded figures such as Kenneth Clarke, who became the new Chancellor, after the useless Lamont was eventually sacked in May 1993, or the genial Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd, were understandably alarmed by the disloyalty of the sceptics, and by the silliness of some of their arguments. Their loftiness offended the majority of the public, whose doubts about the European experiment were legitimate and very far from the ‘loony’ figures such as John Redwood, the strange-looking Secretary of State for Wales.
The Conservative Party had, in the previous fifteen or twenty years, been through a series of exhausting transmogrifications. The doctrine-free alliance of the landed classes and the suburbs, which had kept the party in power for much of the twentieth century, had been violently disturbed by the Thatcher Revolution. Whether or not individual voters, or parliamentarians, embraced the sacred doctrines of monetarism, the Conservatives had become the party representing monetarist liberalism. It was not sure any longer who or what it was. It had sucked at the teats of its new wet nurse and drunk deep of the heady but potentially toxic draughts which she gave them. The enchantress seemed to lead them to victory and triumph, but when she no longer appeared able to do so, ritual sacrifice seemed the only way out. The massacre of the Money-Mother had been an act of gratuitous violence, but it had momentarily appeased the Fates. Now she returned from the dead, having lost what vestiges of political nous or personal niceness she might once have possessed. Like the witch at a christening, she wanted to curse the baby whom she had at first suckled as her natural heir. And she who had forced through British membership of the European Union now became the High Priestess of the Eurosceptic Cult, screeching her strange imprecations against each and every manifestation of ‘compromise’ from the government, and finding her words echoed by those of Major’s Cabinet colleagues who sensed an electoral advantage in exploiting public concerns. It might have been supposed that this would have encouraged the true believers to embrace Europe, as the old right of the Conservative Party had done in the 1960s. Heath, after all, had been the candidate of the right in those days, and Thatcher had campaigned for a Yes vote in the referendum on British membership of the EEC, wearing a shirt embla-zoned with the flags of the six member states. Black Wednesday, however, had been a demonstration of what happens if a free currency and a free country find themselves locked into currency agreements fixed by others. The enormous opportunities offered British businesses by membership of the largest free trade area in the world were balanced by the political and sometimes economic costs of ‘Brussels’.
If the argument were being conducted on a purely intellectually level, it would have to be conceded that the existence of both sides was itself self-explanatory. There are indeed two sides to the question–is membership of the EU to Britain’s advantage? For certain manufacturers, and certain financiers, the answer is very much yes; for others, who trade in other parts of the world or deal in non-European currencies, the economic consequences of membership are indifferent, and the political restraints could well seem tiresome. For the farmers and the fishermen, as General de Gaulle had long before warned, the Common Agricultural Policy favoured the French against the British farmer, the European against the British fishermen in countless ways.
Hence the divide. But the Conservative Party was suffering a collective identity crisis or nervous breakdown. Like a seventeenth-century Protestant sect breaking up into ever more fissiparous and esoteric groups, here Brownists, there Muggletonians, there Shakers, here Anabaptists, the parliamentary party splintered into ever more rancorous groupings: Tory Reform, Lollards, No Turning Backers, Bruge Groupists, Conservative Way Forwarders, 92 Groupers, Fresh Starters and European Foundationists.12 Sensing that they wanted his blood, Major called the Eurosceptic rebels the Bastards. The most personable of the bastards, Michael Portillo, a blubber-lipped bisexual with rigorously combed-back hair, hid his intelligence in order to rouse the rabble, a low point being reached when he told the European Union, ‘Don’t mess with Britain’, and claimed–his father had been a professor at the University of Salamanca–that European examination boards were less reliable than the good old British GCSE. But Portillo was too much of a coward to stand openly against his leader. Major smoked out the bastards in June 1995 by standing down as leader and inviting one of them to challenge him for the leadership. The gauntlet was picked up by John Redwood, christened by the press Vulcan because of a perceived resemblance to Star Trek’s Mr Spock. Major naturally won the contest. It was the most extreme case of ‘No one will kill me, Jamie, to make you King.’13 There was not much doubt, however, about the likely outcome of the next General Election. By the time that happened, Major was well into his eighth year as Prime Minister, a much longer run than many of his predecessors. The country was ready for a change. The nice decent man who negotiated Maastricht had evolved into a largely ineffectual Prime Minister who was blamed for Black Wednesday. He made catastrophic mistakes, such as allowing Michael Heseltine–whom he had appointed as President of the Board of Trade–to close thirty-one coal mines in one fell swoop with a loss of 30,000 jobs. (‘A monumental cock-up’–said the Confederation of British Industry.14) The effects of the recession led to many natural Conservative supporters losing their houses through repossession. Even those who survived felt bruised by the experience. The newspapers, bored by more than eighteen years of government by the same party, began to play up the more absurd antics of Cabinet members, such as David Mellor, who had a three-month affair with a thirty-year-old actress, Antonia de Sancha (in a bugged telephone call he admitted to being ‘seriously knackered’ after a night with hers15). The sleaze was not a journalistic invention. The career of Jeffrey Archer, liar, paymaster of a prostitute and convicted perjurer, should make that clear enough.
Jeffrey Archer was born in 1940, his mother a journalist, the first woman ever to work on the Weston Mercury. His father, whom Archer gave out was a First World War hero, decorated for valour, had in fact been a convicted fraudster and bigamist, who had travelled to New York at the beginning of the First War on his dead employer’s passport and duped ‘many well-known New York people’. The son would be a chip off the old block. His Who’s Who entry was a better work of fiction than any of his novels which he so successfully persuaded the public to buy. He was down as educated at Wellington College–a Berkshire public school–whereas in fact he had merely been to school in the village of Wellington, Somerset. He studied as a gym teacher at the Department of Education in Oxford, but Who’s Who readers were led to believe that Brasenose College was his alma mater. In 1966 he had married Mary Weeden, an ice-cold scientist. This was one of the best bits of luck he ever pulled off, for, as his career came unstuck, he discovered that this beautiful, mysterious person was far more prepared to share the financial rewards than she was to discard the moral disgrace of being Mrs, then Lady Archer. At twenty-nine, he became MP for Loughborough–Britain’s fourth youngest MP. (He of course claimed to be the youngest.) Five years later, he came close to bankruptcy, having invested in a fraudulent Canadian cleaning firm called Aquablast. He decided, like Sir Walter Scott in comparable circumstances, to write his way out of penury. He had a genius, not for writing, but for self-promotion. Initially, the sales of the books were sluggish, but they were always written up and presented as if they were bestsellers on a level with Gone With the Wind. Little by little, people believed this, and the books sold. He re-entered public life, and Conservative political life, as a rich, popular author, much in demand on the circuit of speakers to Conservative luncheons, fetes and fund-raising evenings. By 1985, he had risen to become the deputy chairman of the party, even though Willie Whitelaw warned the Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, that Archer was ‘an accident waiting to happen’.
In October 1986, sure enough, Archer resigned. ‘I have been silly, very foolish. What else can I say?’ He admitted arranging for a friend to pay Miss Monica Coughlan £2,000 in £50 notes, at a rendezvous arranged on Platform 3 of Victoria Station. The News of the World printed the story. The Star, however, had the temerity to suggest that Archer was not merely paying Miss Coughlan money out of the kindness of his heart but because he had had sex with her, and wished to offer hush money. He sued, and in July 1987 he was awarded £500,000 in damages. The judge, Mr Justice Caulfield, was so overwhelmed by the ‘fragrant’ beauty of Mary Archer that he could not conceive of a man married to her being tempted by ‘kinky’ sex, as had been alleged, with Miss Coughlan. The evidence given by Miss Coughlan, which included vivid descriptions of the spots on Archer’s naked back, seemed convincing enough to many, but Caulfield effectively ordered the jury to find Archer not guilty. Mary Archer was worth more than her weight in gold. By January 1994, she was a member of the board of Anglia TV. Mysteriously Jeffrey Archer, who, it was claimed, knew nothing of an impending takeover of the company, cleared up a tidy £78,000 profit on buying and selling Anglia shares in a hurry–acting, naturally, on behalf of a friend. By 1997, Archer was speaking of himself as a plausible Conservative candidate for Mayor of London, but in November 1999, the News of the World was able to establish that Archer, in the libel trial of 1987, had persuaded a friend, Ted Francis, to lie about his whereabouts on the night in question. In some ways the interesting thing about the ensuing trial for perjury, in September 2000, was not the demeanour of the defendant, but that of the defendant’s wife, who seemed to be on the edge of losing her cool, and who once actually called out and corrected evidence being given by another witness. Some of the evidence for Archer’s defence consisted of a comparison between two desk diaries. One was a scuffed, well-used diary which appeared to have been the one in actual use in 1986. Another, much newer-looking diary for the same year, with only a few entries was, in Mary Archer’s clear recollection, the one which had in fact been in constant use in the Archers’ London flat. When her accountant came to be examined, he had difficulty in accounting for the half a million pounds in damages, which Mary Archer had said to a local newspaper had been donated to charity. Yet, it was not Mary Archer who was on trial, but Jeffrey, who, while the trial was in progress, had opened at the Theatre Royal, Windsor, with a play called The Accused. It transferred to the Haymarket in the latter days of Archer’s own trial. He took the part of the Accused, his wooden acting in the theatre being neither more nor less convincing than his behaviour on political platforms over the previous twenty years. He liked to suggest that the play had transferred to the enormous West End theatre because of popular demand. The Haymarket was pathetically empty, whereas the court room at the Old Bailey full, to see him be sent down for four years on two counts of perjury and two of perverting the course of justice.16 The question was not why he had been condemned, but why–given his obviously fraudulent character–he had been promoted within the political party by Margaret Thatcher, and, much more disgracefully, ennobled by the Queen at the recommendation of John Major. Poor Miss Coughlan’s wad of money was very different from Miss Prism’s handbag, in that other mishap on Victoria Station described by Oscar Wilde. Nevertheless, the words of Lady Bracknell hovered in the air as Major’s government came unstuck. Losing one Minister through scandal was a misfortune, but having a whole pack of crooks as his colleagues and supporters began to look like carelessness.
When John Major became Prime Minister, Britain was involved in the Gulf War, but this was not a conflict of Major’s making. Compared with his predecessors and his immediate successor, he was responsible for remarkably few deaths. His economic policy, following the debacle when Britain tumbled out of the ERM, was unexciting, which meant there were smaller dole queues, fewer strikes, and a higher level of personal prosperity than at any time in the nation’s history. He came very close to helping the warring factions in Ireland find a peaceful way out of their ancient feud, and, indeed, handed an Irish situation on to his successor which was bound to end in peaceful negotiations. All in all, then, a successful term in office, and a good number of years at it, too–nearly eight. But by the end of the Major years, most journalists were writing John Major off as an embarrassing failure.
John Major was an apt Prime Minister for the times. In spite of the snobbish jibes directed at him by privately educated journalists, jibes which he understandably found vexing, he was more or less classless and, apart from a reassuring amiability when appearing on television, he was, in a good sense, characterless. The British had surely had enough of the cult of personality?
The country was no longer a great world power, but it had a sort of ex-great power status which meant it was necessary to have a Prime Minister who was courteous and good-humoured when meeting other world leaders. Major fulfilled this role admirably, as Thatcher most definitely had not. He was a patient negotiator–witness his winning the opt-out at Maastricht. But he was not pushing or needlessly aggressive. He seemed to be the perfect Prime Minister to express Britain’s new status in the world–that of a prosperous ex–world power with an ambivalent attitude to the European Union of which it was a semi-detached member; a country with many of its old problems–corporatism, public inefficiency, too high taxes–but which was coming to terms with radical changes in its economic life and in its ethnic, social and demographic composition with resilience and inventiveness. Major presided rather appropriately over a period when the country wanted to cast aside the old divisive politics of unions versus new money. Something potentially rather interesting was happening to Britain, particularly to London. It was changing–into what, it was not quite clear. It had for a long time been clear that it would never revert to being a North European socialist state such as had been envisaged in 1945. It was therefore for the Labour Party to devise an alternative to state socialism. The trouble with being a Conservative at this date was that, intellectually, Conservatism had won, if not all, then a substantial number of the arguments. The former Eastern European communist states all yearned to become bourgeois liberal democracies such as Mrs Thatcher had championed. Britain, which combined a generous welfare system with burgeoning financial and services industries, was an attractive place not only to the majority of its own citizens but to many throughout the globe who wanted to come and work or live there. Yet, although Britain was more peaceful, more prosperous than it had ever been, there was a sense in many quarters that all was not well.
Major’s government fell because it was inefficient, and because the Labour Party had eventually chosen a leader who did not frighten the electorate. But for those who had a responsibility to produce newspapers each morning, and for those who had an appetite to read them, the dullness of the Major years provided a challenge. Major’s virtues, namely his unflappability and his understatedness, made him insufferably dull, especially to the cartoonists. Steve Bell of the Guardian envisaged him as always wearing Y-front underpants outside his trousers, while Patrick Wright and Peter Richardson devised 101 Uses for a John Major. Major’s expressionless face and his grey off-the-peg suits adorn each cruelly accurate drawing of their little book. The best of them show him standing dispassionately and dutifully being used as: an ironing board–Mr Major bends down while a woman places the board on his back; a toast rack–he kneels at a table, with the pieces of toast balanced on his fingers while a peppery old Tory rustles a copy of that morning’s Times; a draught excluder–a trussed Major is wedged against the bottom of a door, and a lavatory paper holder–a polite, patient Major stands by holding the roll while another peppery Tory-looking character sits enthroned on the lo.17 Something was necessary to fill the mythological gap after the demise of Mrs Thatcher. She had appropriated to herself the roles traditionally played not by ministers but by monarchs. And in Mr Major’s gentle occupancy of Number 10 Downing Street it was inevitable that those who saw the world through the lenses of the newspapers and the television should have turned away from the dullness of politicians to the traditional stuff of story books and mythologies, princes and princesses. The newspaper proprietors and their readership were lucky, for this phase of political doldrums coincided with a period when, although the monarch was, as ever, leading a tastefully discreet existence, signing her state papers, exercising her corgis, following the horses and enjoying the companionship of a few carefully chosen, chiefly aristocratic ladies-in-waiting and courtiers, her heir was champing to be taken seriously, and to command the public stage.
21 January 1993
For the past 15 years I have been entirely motivated by a desperate desire to put the ‘Great’ back into Great Britain. Everything I have tried to do–all the projects, speeches, schemes etc.–have been with this end in mind. And none of this has worked, as you can see too obviously!18