‘The devil you know’
NORMAN ORMAL: I spotted the potential of John Major way before we realised he didn’t have any.
Craig Brown, Norman Ormal (1998)
ALAN PARTRIDGE: People forget that on the Titanic’s maiden voyage, there were over a thousand miles of uneventful, very pleasurable cruising, before it hit the iceberg.
Patrick Marber, Steve Coogan & Armando Iannucci, Knowing Me, Knowing You with Alan Partridge (1994)
‘I’ve always voted Labour,’ I said. ‘But . . .’ I hesitated. Suddenly the stakes had become very high. ‘But what?’ ‘But I felt secretly relieved when the Tories won.’
David Lodge, Therapy (1995)
John Major was a very young prime minister. In this, as in so little else, he was part of a trend, for the fashion, as the twentieth century progressed, was very definitely away from the older premier. In the decades either side of the Second World War, the average age of a prime minister was sixty-seven; in the years after 1960, it fell to fifty-eight before, in the 1990s, a further ten years were shaved off the figure. Much of that latter reduction was due to Tony Blair, who was often cited as the youngest prime minister of the century, being just shy of his forty-third birthday when elected in 1997. Less well remembered is the fact that the record he broke was that of his predecessor.
And perhaps it isn’t surprising that Major’s youth is so easily forgotten. He made far less play of that dubious merit than did Blair, giving the appearance of someone who had been middle-aged for some considerable time. There was too, when he became prime minister in November 1990, a higher cultural premium placed on experience than was to become the norm, and it was more important for him to emphasise his record in government, in contrast to that of the two opposition leaders – Neil Kinnock and Paddy Ashdown – though both were older than he was.
That record, however, was so compressed that it resembled a crash course in statesmanship. Major had never been in opposition, having entered Parliament in the 1979 general election that brought Margaret Thatcher to power. He had served as foreign secretary and then as chancellor of the exchequer, but these had been only brief appointments. Most of his three and a half years in the cabinet had been spent in the backroom job of chief secretary to the Treasury. Little known outside Westminster, he was far from an obvious choice to become leader of the Conservative Party.
His standing was illustrated by the media coverage that followed the political demise of Margaret Thatcher in 1990. Having been challenged in an election for the leadership of the party by her former defence secretary, Michael Heseltine, Thatcher had failed to secure sufficient votes to win on the first ballot. She was then informed by her cabinet colleagues that she stood little chance of prevailing in the next round, and announced her resignation on the morning of Thursday 22 November, thereby freeing cabinet ministers to enter the race – an opportunity immediately picked up by the chancellor, John Major, and foreign secretary Douglas Hurd. That evening, the BBC and ITV news bulletins produced graphics to illustrate how the electoral process worked; both followed the conventional wisdom of the day and showed Major coming last and being knocked out, leading to a final third-ballot showdown between the flamboyant self-made millionaire Heseltine and the patrician Old Etonian Hurd.
In the real world, to the surprise of the media, it took just four days for Major to move into Number 10, having seen off both rivals with no need for that final ballot. His opening words to his first cabinet as prime minister summed up the mood of a perplexed public: ‘Well, who’d have thought it?’
The implausibility of his rise helped create an image of accidental premiership that he never quite threw off. As prime minister, he served for longer than, say, Clement Attlee, David Lloyd George or Edward Heath, longer than James Callaghan and Neville Chamberlain put together, and just a few months shy of Harold Macmillan, yet he made less impression than any of those figures even at the time. In retrospect his premiership is remembered by many as being little more than a brief interregnum. Indeed that was the view of the Independent’s editor, Andrew Marr, even as Major was leaving office: ‘he was what happened after Margaret Thatcher and before Tony Blair.’ Others were less certain of his role. ‘I simply find myself asking: Does he really exist?’ commented the veteran MP Enoch Powell in 1991, and if that was unnecessarily cruel, it reflected a widespread perception. Satirists, used to the raw red meat of anti-Thatcher savagery, were at a loss to know how to caricature this mild, affable but seemingly bland embodiment of suburban man. Guy Jenkin, the co-creator of Channel 4’s topical sitcom Drop the Dead Donkey, recalled that ‘Trying to write jokes about John Major was like trying to write jokes about grass growing,’ and his writing partner, Andy Hamilton, agreed: ‘They were dull days for comedy writers.’ Their best joke in those early days came with the concept of a John Major-o-gram: ‘They send round a bloke in a suit. He stands here for ten minutes, no one notices him and he goes away again.’
The satirical puppet series Spitting Image reached much the same conclusion. On air at the time of the change in leadership, the programme’s first attempt to depict Major showed him with a radio antenna on his head, so that Thatcher could operate him by remote control, but when the show returned for its next series in 1991, it had devised a more enduring incarnation: a puppet sprayed all over with grey paint who had an unhealthy obsession with peas and starred in a new feature, ‘The Life of John Major – the most boring story ever told’. The greyness became the defining public image of the man so that when, in 1992, someone drew a Hitler moustache on a portrait of Thatcher in the House of Commons, Neil Kinnock could joke on Have I Got News for You: ‘Next week they’re going to colour in John Major.’ He was by common consensus dull, boring and lacking in glamour; in 1996 readers of the BBC’s Clothes Show Magazine voted him ‘the person they would least like to see in his underpants’.
Major’s voice, too, with its slightly strangled, expressionless tone and its tendency to pronounce the word ‘want’ as ‘wunt’, came in for mockery. ‘He doesn’t speak English,’ raged the irascible newsreader Henry Davenport in Drop the Dead Donkey, ‘he speaks Croydonian, an incomprehensible suburban dialect,’ while the comedian Jo Brand concluded that he ‘talks like a minor Dickens character on acid’. The view from abroad was no more encouraging. The French newspaper Le Figaro nicknamed him ‘Monsieur Ordinaire’, while even the Belgians – not universally renowned as the most vibrant and colourful people in Europe – were unimpressed: ‘In his grey Marks and Spencer suit, he is hardly a charismatic figure,’ sniffed the Brussels-based daily Le Soir.
Yet this allegedly grey man had risen to become prime minister, leader of the most successful political party in the history of democracy. Not for nothing was one of his early biographies titled The Major Enigma; there had to be more here than met the casual eye. And behind the demure demeanour, it transpired, there lurked a shrewd and effective political operator. His closest friend in the Commons, Chris Patten, was later to describe him as ‘very, very competent – the best of our political generation’, while the BBC’s political editor John Cole wrote: ‘he was more politically astute than his critics, and had run rings around them.’ Nor was his appeal confined to Westminster: in the 1992 general election Major secured for the Conservatives the largest popular vote ever recorded by a British political party, despite the supposedly widespread opinion that he was deeply uninspiring. Even with all the derision directed at him, he was, for a while, genuinely popular. ‘The public liked him,’ wrote Michael Heseltine with a truthful simplicity.
And in person he was clearly very likeable, displaying a generosity of spirit that is not always evident in politics. In January 1991 the veteran socialist Eric Heffer, now riddled with cancer, made what was clearly going to be his last ever appearance in the House of Commons to vote against Britain’s involvement in the war against Saddam Hussein. Before the debate began, Major crossed the floor of the chamber, knelt beside the dying man and had a private conversation, an emotionally charged gesture that provoked an outbreak of applause from MPs of both sides. Tony Benn, in tears at the condition of the man who was probably his closest friend at Westminster, noted in his diary: ‘I have never, in forty years, heard anyone clapping in the House of Commons. Eric was overwhelmed.’
Major was also very tactile, offering men a two-handed handshake and flirting with women to great effect, so that even political opponents were disarmed. John Prescott’s wife, Pauline, was said to have been ‘bowled over by how witty and charming he was’, while the hardened Eurosceptic Teresa Gorman was almost persuaded to abandon her rebellious inclinations and vote with her own government, as Major sat holding her hand and talking gently to her: ‘It was very seductive; I could feel myself tingling all over.’ At a dinner thrown by the Speaker of the House of Commons, Paddy Ashdown saw the prime minister chatting up Labour’s former deputy leader Margaret Beckett with a line worthy of a Carry On script: ‘Would you like a nibble of my mace?’ As Ashdown remarked, ‘He is a terrible flirt!’
Major had too a gift for personal communication when meeting the electorate that hadn’t been noted in his predecessor, though his empathy was less evident in the heated environment of the House of Commons or when delivering platform speeches. In an age that was, we were repeatedly told, dominated by television, he was adjudged by many to be a poor performer on the small screen, though some of his charm evidently came through. The journalist John Diamond attended a dinner party in 1991 at which a woman ‘listed for the amazed assembly the things she would gladly do with John Major between a pair of satin sheets’. It was, noted Diamond, the men, not the women, who were puzzled by this declaration and who demanded clarification of the prime minister’s inexplicable sex appeal.
Perhaps the issue did ultimately come down to gender. The commentators, critics and comedians of the time were predominantly male, while Major’s air of quiet self-assurance and mild coquettishness played best with female voters, many of whom had deserted the Conservative Party during Thatcher’s incumbency. ‘His polling figures, especially among women, are amazing,’ marvelled Chris Patten in 1991. The very ordinariness of the man, his decency and honesty, however mocked, was an appealing attribute and was deliberately played up. Major himself was clear that he wanted ‘to be prime minister without changing, without losing the interests that every other Briton had, without having no time for holidays, no time for sport, no time for anything but the higher things of life’. The restoration of normality was, to use a phrase often associated with him, most agreeable.
Much of this was only to emerge as Major’s premiership wore on. Certainly it was of less significance over those few days in November 1990, as Tory MPs considered who was to succeed Thatcher as their leader. Then there was just one overriding question: which of the candidates was most Thatcherite and could best protect the legacy? Loyalists, outraged at her defenestration, wished to keep the flame alive, while even some of the regicides were troubled by feelings of guilt over what they had done and sought to make amends. Their verdict rapidly became clear. ‘Most Tory backbenchers regard Mr Major as the most Thatcherite of the three contenders,’ reported The Times, ‘although it is something of a mystery why he should have acquired this reputation.’
Major’s privately expressed position was clear – ‘I’m not a Thatcherite, never have been’ – but in public that mystery remained unsolved and, for the moment at least, largely unaddressed. His campaign team for the leadership election included most of the leading right-wingers, the likes of Norman Lamont, Michael Howard, Peter Lilley and Norman Tebbit, while his victory was greeted rapturously by Thatcher herself. ‘It’s everything I’ve dreamt of for such a long time,’ she said, as she embraced Major’s wife, Norma, on the night of his triumph; ‘the future is assured.’ Within a year, Thatcher was telling her friend, the journalist Woodrow Wyatt, that ‘I think he has deceived me,’ and although the truth was rather that she had deceived herself, her sense of betrayal was shared by many on the right of the party, contributing heavily to the disloyalty that became increasingly prevalent amongst Conservative MPs in the 1990s.
As chancellor, Major had taken Britain into the European Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM), tying the value of sterling to that of the deutschmark. Given that record, how could the Eurosceptic supporters of Thatcher have persuaded themselves that he was on their side? Part of the answer was his demonstrable dryness in economic matters. His espousal of the ERM was based on counter-inflationary concerns, rather than any great enthusiasm for the European project, and his one well-known quote as chancellor, as the country slid into recession, was to urge resolution in the fight against inflation: ‘If it isn’t hurting, it isn’t working.’ Beyond that, there was a studied refusal to reveal anything much about his own political beliefs. He was associated with no particular faction in the party, had written no influential papers for think tanks, delivered no speeches that anyone had noticed, appeared at not a single press conference during the 1987 election campaign.
Many years later, when he was in opposition, Major was asked by a colleague, Michael Spicer, where he had really stood on the great European questions that had dominated his premiership. ‘He smiles and makes no audible response,’ wrote Spicer in his diary. ‘I suppose that is how he became prime minister in the first place.’ Others had spotted this characteristic earlier. ‘His whole life,’ noted the Tory MP Edwina Currie, his former lover who knew him better than most, ‘has the waft of an opportunistic silence reflecting tremendous self-discipline.’
Equally important to his image as a Thatcherite, however, was a simple cultural perception of his humble origins. His father was a trapeze artist in the music halls, who had moved with some success into the garden ornaments business, before the bottom dropped out of the gnome market on the outbreak of the Second World War. By the time John Major was born in 1943, the family had suffered a severe fall in living standards, and he grew up in straitened circumstances in South London, leaving school with just three O-levels. The fact that he subsequently rose so high was entirely due to his involvement in the Conservative Party, and was seen as a fine illustration of a new meritocracy. ‘What does the Conservative Party offer a working class kid from Brixton?’ asked a Tory election poster in 1992. ‘They made him prime minister.’ In all the tribulations that were to come, he clung on to this. ‘I love my party,’ he explained in later years, contrasting himself with his predecessor. ‘She never loved the party. That was the difference.’
Major was clearly not cast in the same mould as, say, Douglas Hurd – the former Eton head boy turned diplomat, whose father and grandfather had both been MPs – rather his story seemed the living embodiment of Thatcher’s promises to those who aspired to better themselves. It was widely assumed therefore that he bought into her ideology. Certainly that was her feeling. ‘I don’t want old style, old Etonian Tories of the old school to succeed me,’ she observed. ‘John Major is someone who has fought his way up from the bottom and is far more in tune with the skilled and ambitious and worthwhile working classes than Douglas Hurd is.’
There was at least some truth in this perception. As prime minister, Major’s evocation of a classless society echoed Thatcher’s mindset, even as it pointed the way forward to Tony Blair and New Labour. ‘I want to bring into being a different kind of country,’ he said in 1991, ‘to bury forever old divisions in Britain between North and South, blue-collar and white-collar, polytechnic and university. They’re old style, old hat.’ The one-nation theme and the emphasis on newness was to become very familiar with Blair, but that specific proposal – of removing divisions in further education – was reminiscent of Thatcher’s assault on the pillars of the establishment.
It also, of course, came from a man who had left school at the age of sixteen, and it revealed an insecurity that he mostly kept hidden. Sitting at a cabinet table still dominated by ex-public schoolboys, he was in a small minority of those who had been state educated, and he was entirely alone as a non-graduate. The subject of his restricted education was eagerly seized upon by a press desperately trying to find an angle on the man. ‘Never has so much been written about so little,’ he commented, in one of his best lines, but it was clearly an important part of his make-up. ‘He is terribly lacking in confidence in himself, especially all the social things,’ observed Chris Patten. That awkwardness was to play an important role in Major’s premiership, amplified by the sheer bloody-mindedness that had been required to take him from Brixton to Downing Street. For the immediate future, however, the momentum of the leadership election was sufficient to give him a chance to establish a new style.
Even so, his first cabinet demonstrated a strong continuity with Thatcher. Many of her ministers remained in place, while those who were introduced or promoted were mostly acceptable to the right wing; Norman Lamont became chancellor and places were found for Michael Howard and for a returning Kenneth Baker. The one controversial decision was to bring Michael Heseltine back into the fold after five years on the back benches.
As the man who had ended Thatcher’s premiership, Heseltine was loathed by many of her supporters, but it would have been perverse if his talents had not been utilised. Regardless of ideology, he was one of the few genuine stars that the party had at its disposal, as he demonstrated on his return to the conference platform in 1991. Reviving his celebrated line in knockabout humour, he mocked the Labour Party’s attempts to rebrand itself by launching into songs from Oliver! – ‘Who will buy my sweet red roses?’ and ‘You’ve got to pick a pocket or two’ – while suggesting that the opposition leader, Neil Kinnock, was a dead ringer for the Artful Dodger. It was rare for a report of a Heseltine speech not to use the word ‘bravura’, and there were few senior Tories of whom that could be said. ‘He is very like an ancient matinée idol in an MGM movie,’ noted the television personality Gyles Brandreth; ‘the performance is stagey and the colour isn’t quite true, but there’s still something rather compelling about it.’
Displaying a shrewd sense of politics, Major appointed his former rival to be environment secretary, charged in the first instance with finding a replacement for what was now known almost universally as ‘the hated poll tax’, the abolition of which had been the cornerstone of Heseltine’s challenge for the leadership. The result was the creation of a new charge on property to fund local authorities, the council tax, and, as an interim measure, while that was being introduced, a reduction in the level of the poll tax by £140 per person, funded by a rise in VAT from 15 to 17.5 per cent. (To no one’s great surprise, the temporary VAT increase was never rescinded.) Further popular moves by the government came with a rise in child benefit – which had been frozen for three years – and a long-overdue award of compensation to haemophiliacs infected with HIV as a result of their treatment by the NHS, though of course this came too late for the many who had already died. Clear signals were being sent that this was a new, more compassionate Conservatism, and the Tories enjoyed an immediate boost in their opinion poll ratings.
There were other items outstanding on Major’s desk as he took office. Chief amongst them was the imminent war against Iraq, a nation then ruled by Saddam Hussein, whose troops had invaded the neighbouring country of Kuwait in August 1990. Margaret Thatcher had led the international response to the invasion, pushing the American president, George Bush, into committing his country to military action, and already some 14,000 British troops were in position in the region as part of a United Nations-approved coalition.
Although the change in prime minister on the very brink of hostilities was far from ideal (‘It distracted us from the business of facing up to Saddam Hussein and created a damaging sense of uncertainty,’ noted General Peter de la Billière, commander of the British forces), there was never any doubt that Major would follow through on his predecessor’s resolve. What was at question was how effective a war leader he would be, and for some the answer came as a surprise. Displaying neither bellicosity during the conflict nor triumphalism afterwards, Major proved to be popular amongst the troops, while his homely style – he ended his television broadcast on the eve of war with the words ‘God bless’ – helped distance him from the confrontational legacy of Thatcher. Similarly the shots of him, in casual trousers and a jumper, addressing the soldiers, making no pretence at being anything other than a civilian, played very well back home.
Overshadowed in popular memory by the invasion of Iraq twelve years later, the 1991 Kuwaiti War was, in military terms, an unqualified success. Five weeks of bombing was followed by a ground war that was shorter than anyone had dared hope. Within four days of the tanks rolling into Kuwait, the Iraqi army had been routed and the operation completed, despite Saddam’s dire warnings that the coalition would face ‘the mother of all battles’. (That was one of the phrases from the hostilities that entered the language, alongside ‘friendly fire’ and ‘collateral damage’.) British and American casualties were remarkably few in number, and if Saddam remained in power, that was what had always been intended; the UN resolution authorising military action had talked of the removal of the occupying force from the sovereign territory of Kuwait, but said nothing of regime change in Iraq. Nonetheless, some were later to regret the decision not to press onwards to Baghdad, believing that it merely stored up future problems.
There was some opposition at home to Britain’s involvement in the war, though nowhere near the level that was to be seen in subsequent conflicts. A couple of peripheral figures, Clare Short and Tony Banks, resigned from the Labour front bench in protest, but few noticed or cared; in any event, both had already resigned on previous occasions and a law of diminishing returns operates in such circumstances. There was, however, some disquiet about the media treatment of the hostilities. On the one hand, the new cable news station CNN showed what amounted to a nightly firework display as bombs rained down on Baghdad, and on the other, the American propaganda footage purported to show ‘smart missiles’ pinpointing their targets with unerring accuracy. In the midst of this, huge numbers of civilians were being killed and wounded in Iraq, though one would have been hard pushed to detect that fact from the coverage. Instead the most memorable images came from BBC Two’s Newsnight programme where, in the words of comedian Mark Steel: ‘each night Peter Snow clambered around in a sandpit, surrounded by toy helicopters like a spoilt child, adding to the impression that the whole episode was an elaborate computer game.’
Elsewhere the BBC exercised a degree of self-censorship bordering on parody. The comedies ’Allo ’Allo and M*A*S*H, together with a planned screening of Carry On Up the Khyber, all set during previous conflicts, were withdrawn from the television schedules, while the BBC banned a bewildering variety of records, lest they give offence: not only obvious suspects like John Lennon’s ‘Give Peace a Chance’, Edwin Starr’s ‘War’ and Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s ‘Two Tribes’, but also, in an impressive display of lateral thinking, Roberta Flack’s ‘Killing Me Softly with His Song’, the Bangles’ ‘Walk Like an Egyptian’ and Lulu’s ‘Boom Bang a Bang’. A BBC spokesperson explained that ‘Radio 1 realises it’s got a lot of servicemen’s families among its listeners and it’s very sensitive to what it plays because of that,’ but it was hard to believe that army wives, after two decades of seeing their loved ones depart for tours of Northern Ireland, were so fragile that they would be notably upset by an old Eurovision hit.
There was little to choose between the real Radio 1 and the version parodied in the radio comedy On the Hour, which included a disc jockey named Wayne Kerr explaining that he couldn’t play ‘Puff the Magic Dragon’ in a time of war ‘because it reminds everyone of flame throwers’. Meanwhile the Bristol trip-hop band Massive Attack were prevailed upon to change their name, so that their best-known single, ‘Unfinished Sympathy’, was released under the name Massive and, more reasonably, the new Rolling Stones single, ‘Highwire’, which explicitly addressed the West’s sale of weaponry to Iraq and the experience of soldiers involved in the conflict, was deemed unsuitable for broadcast.
John Major came out of the Kuwaiti War with his reputation and his poll ratings much enhanced, the most popular war leader since Winston Churchill. The other outstanding issue from the Thatcher years, however – the state of the British economy – was less easily resolved. The country was suffering a severe slowdown in economic activity that turned officially into a recession in the second half of 1990; GDP fell for seven consecutive quarters, and then simply refused to recover. We were, said Major, ‘languishing in the no-man’s land of negligible growth’, though the more common expression at the time was ‘bumping along the bottom’. Unemployment and business bankruptcies rose steadily, interest rates remained stubbornly high, and retail sales fell.
It was the second serious recession since the Conservatives had taken office in 1979 and, unlike that of the early 1980s, its impact was felt nationally, with London and the South-East hit as badly as the North. This time it was not just manufacturing that took the brunt of the slump, but commercial construction and the financial services industry, as the boom of the late 1980s juddered to a halt. Some forty million square feet of office space were said to be lying unoccupied in London, and even estate agents – those great symbols of the Thatcherite high noon – were suffering. The huge rises in house prices in affluent parts of the South went into reverse, provoking a wave of repossessions by mortgage companies and leaving many mired in a hitherto unknown state called negative equity, whereby the amount they owed exceeded their homes’ market valuations.
‘The politics of the property-owning democracy had come temporarily unstuck,’ admitted Michael Heseltine in later years, and for many who had bought into the dream, the comedown was especially bitter. Disillusion was everywhere apparent, as Major, a longstanding fan of Chelsea Football Club, discovered in late 1991 when he met Vinnie Jones, the club’s hard-man midfielder who also happened to be a Tory supporter. ‘Sort out the fucking interest rates, will you?’ said Jones, and Major could only reply: ‘I’m trying, I’m trying.’
Little of this, though, attached itself personally to Major. He had been chancellor of the exchequer when the recession started, but his tenure had been so fleeting, so much in the shadow of his predecessors in the job, Geoffrey Howe and Nigel Lawson, that he escaped much of the blame. When asked in a 1992 Gallup opinion poll who was responsible for the recession, the answers split fairly evenly between ‘the worldwide economic recession’ and ‘the Thatcher government’; just 4 per cent answered ‘the Major government’.
Instead the flak was aimed at the new chancellor, Norman Lamont, largely because he projected none of Major’s essential niceness (‘unpleasant and untalented’, thought Edwina Currie) and because he seemed such a lightweight figure to be in so senior a position. It was a perception shared by his colleagues: ‘I never believed that he was the right choice for chancellor of the exchequer,’ revealed Douglas Hurd in his memoirs. The image was all wrong too; with his badger-streaked hair and his cherubic face, Lamont looked, said Labour MP Giles Radice, ‘like a discontented squirrel’, though the most disarming comment was that of comedian Linda Smith: ‘It is nice to see that little boy from the Addams Family doing so well.’
The public were deeply unimpressed by Lamont, both personally and as a steward of the economy. He never quite recovered from an ill-advised speech in 1991, responding to the biggest April rise in unemployment ever recorded. ‘Rising unemployment and the recession have been the price that we have had to pay to get inflation down,’ he said, before handing the opposition a phrase that they didn’t let him forget: ‘That price is well worth paying.’ In retrospect, he was quick to lay the blame on others. ‘This recession has its origins in the boom of 1988 and 1989,’ he was to insist. ‘That boom made the recession inevitable.’ He was perfectly correct, but the observation did him little good, and he was widely seen as an unconvincing, if over-promoted, politician.
It was an impression confirmed when, in April 1991, the News of the World revealed that Lamont was making £15,000 a year from renting out his furnished house to a woman who called herself a ‘sex therapist’. The tenant in question specialised in sadomasochist services (a Miss Whiplash, in tabloid shorthand), though it was clear that Lamont knew nothing about her profession and had never even met her. Much fun was had at his expense, some of which ceased on the revelation that the cost of evicting the woman was partially to be borne by the taxpayer. Though it was not yet apparent, this was merely a foretaste of tabloid scandals to come.
That moment of gaiety aside, the news in the first eighteen months of Major’s premiership was relentlessly downbeat, dominated by economic gloom. As 1991 drew to a close, with a general election due the following year, it appeared that little progress had been made in the twelve years of Conservative government, whether judged by unemployment, interest rates or inflation. By any normal standards the opposition should have been in an unassailable position. But although opinion polls frequently gave the Labour Party a small lead, it was far from consistent, and while Major’s personal ratings were far in advance of those of his party, Labour’s leader, Neil Kinnock, continued to underperform his. There was a danger that the public mood for change, inevitable after Thatcher’s long period in office, might have been satisfied merely by the arrival of Major, with no requirement for a completely new government.
There were plenty of people within the Labour Party who shared that fear, and who identified Kinnock as the key problem. The party’s environment spokesperson, Bryan Gould, noted that ‘some of his colleagues could barely conceal their contempt for him’, and Paddy Ashdown, leader of the Liberal Democrats, recorded in his diary conversations with senior figures like Michael Meacher (‘Kinnock was considered useless’) and Austin Mitchell (‘Kinnock wouldn’t pull it off and it was time the Labour Party realized that’), who had come to the same conclusion.
Much of the criticism was unfair but unavoidable. Kinnock had been Labour leader since 1983 and, although he had fought only one general election, he had already spent longer in the post in opposition than any previous incumbent. Under his leadership, the party had slowly and painfully pulled back from the left-wing policies associated with the heyday of Tony Benn in the early 1980s, but there was a feeling that perhaps Labour required someone new at the helm if it was to make a final break with the past.
Kinnock himself, however much he argued for the abandonment of the old shibboleths, was perceived as being essentially an opportunist, with no real belief in the message he was articulating. Memories of him as a passionate left-wing rebel were kept alive by the Tories and by the media, and the image persisted. As Heseltine pointed out, he may have begun the process of rehabilitating Labour, but he ‘personally looked and sounded the old familiar brand: truly a Welsh Valleys boyo, with plenty of form stretching deep into his past’. The racist abuse of Kinnock as ‘Valleys boyo’ or a ‘Welsh windbag’ came particularly ill from the Swansea-born Heseltine, but the tactic worked, and by the start of the new decade opinion polls were showing that Kinnock himself was now perceived as a bigger handicap to his party than was the hard left he had spent so much time fighting.
When, for example, the Labour conference in 1990, following the collapse of Soviet communism, voted for a reduction in defence spending to the average of other west European countries, in order to fund the welfare state, Kinnock – fearful of Tory claims that Labour was always soft on defence – immediately disowned the decision, announcing that it would not be in the next manifesto: ‘We live in the world of realities not resolutions.’ And, of course, he got the worst of both worlds; undecided voters, remembering his former passion for the cause of nuclear disarmament, still didn’t trust him, while many of the party activists felt betrayed.
Indeed that was the terminology he used himself, according to his colleague Peter Mandelson, the party’s sometime director of communications: ‘I would rather get my betrayal in before the election than after.’ Mandelson’s explanation of that comment was perfectly sound. ‘What he meant was this: too often Labour leaders in the past have not faced up to the difficult arguments. Well, Neil Kinnock would rather face up to the practicalities with honesty and conviction before we go into government.’ There was reason and history behind that account, but it convinced few, because the transformation from firebrand to mainstream statesman, untouched by office, stretched credulity too far. ‘Not one of the major policy positions that Kinnock enthusiastically embraced at the time of his election as leader in 1982,’ wrote the former cabinet minister Peter Shore, ‘survived to the end of his leadership. Moreover, he made no public attempt to explain why he had changed his mind.’
It was that last remark that pinned down Kinnock’s problem. Changing direction as a result of a political conversion might be acceptable; to do so in response to opinion polls looked like weakness.
There was a sense too that Kinnock’s moment had passed. His greatest strength had been as a platform orator, by far the best of the 1980s, capable equally of warm humour and of impassioned rhetoric. Though he had become more restrained since he took over the leadership, and though he seldom shone in the Commons, he was still capable of assimilating and articulating the mood of a crowd, particularly when expressing the fury and hatred that had come to be felt for the Conservative Party in large parts of the country. That talent, however, was of dwindling value now that John Major had replaced Margaret Thatcher; virulent anti-Tory sentiments were much less in evidence in 1991, and apocalyptic warnings about the collapse of society needed a more convincing bogeyman than Major could ever be. And so the idea that Labour might fare better under a different leader began to gain ground.
There was, as it happened, a potential alternative waiting in the wings. John Smith, the shadow chancellor, was generally considered to be the heir apparent, whether the succession came before or after an election. A balding, rotund lawyer from Edinburgh, Smith personified respectability and was seen as a reassuring presence for voters, someone who wouldn’t frighten the horses in southern England. ‘If John Smith could visit every home in Britain,’ remarked his parliamentary colleague, Tony Banks, ‘every home would have stone cladding, double glazing and a full set of encyclopaedias.’ Or, as another colleague, Tony Wright, was to put it, he had ‘the great gift of making ideological declarations sound like a request to call and read the gas meter’.
Smith was also one of the few survivors of the last Labour cabinet, having spent six months as trade secretary in the dying days of James Callaghan’s government, and – which was more important – he had some of the bearing of an experienced politician. Like John Major, he had come through his political career with little sign of ideological positioning. He was always seen as being on the right of the Labour Party, but during the internecine warfare of the early 1980s, he had avoided taking a lead in the fight against the left, while never looking as if he might be tempted to defect to the SDP. As the Sunday Times pointed out in 1992: ‘All the resources of Tory Central Office have failed to find any evidence of his ever having deviated from the most orthodox politics.’
Perhaps for this reason, as well as because he was known to be convivial company, he was popular throughout the party. From the left, Tony Benn observed in November 1991: ‘if there was an election for the leadership on a secret ballot tomorrow, Smith would win, with only about five votes going to Kinnock, and our standing would rise in the polls instantly.’ Meanwhile, amongst those murmuring in Smith’s ear that he should challenge Kinnock for the leadership sooner rather than later was the young right-wing employment spokesperson, Tony Blair, promising his support and that of his friend Gordon Brown if the gauntlet were to be thrown down. In his memoirs, Blair noted: ‘Had John moved to replace Neil, it would have been bloody, but in my view he would have succeeded and history would have been very different.’ Smith did consider the possibility of a challenge but rejected it. Characteristically, he gave no public indication of disloyalty or even dissatisfaction, though neither he nor anyone else could do anything to silence the backstage whispering that continued to undermine Kinnock’s authority.
Throwing himself into his job, Smith set off on what was to become known as the prawn cocktail offensive, a series of meetings with people in the banking and financial sectors aimed at convincing the City that its interests would be safe in Labour’s hands. ‘Never have so many prawns been sacrificed in vain,’ joked Michael Heseltine, and he had a point. In the search for the centre ground of politics, Labour’s broad economic policy had become almost indistinguishable from that of the Conservatives. The party had come round to an essentially monetarist position, and had jettisoned its old anti-Europeanism to such an extent that it too believed the future lay in the protective embrace of the ERM. Even Norman Lamont’s cheerful endorsement of rising unemployment had been pre-empted by Smith, who had praised the ‘counter inflationary discipline’ of the ERM, accepting that if the private sector pursued an inflationary course then ‘there would be unemployment’.
The only question facing voters was who they believed would best implement the policy. And here, despite the recession, the Tories still had a healthy opinion poll lead. Smith was a far better performer than Lamont, but with the shadow of Thatcher still shaping public perceptions of politics, party leaders were what counted, and Major looked so much more reliable than Kinnock. Back in the early days of Major’s leadership, a Tory MP had urged: ‘No more ideology, please! Let’s just wrap our manifesto around John Major’s personality, and ask the people to trust him.’ And in essence that was the sum total of the Conservative campaign for the April 1992 election.
By any conventional measure, the omens were not good. In an opinion poll published on the day the election was called, Labour was shown to have a three-point lead over the Tories. No government had ever started a campaign behind in the polls and gone on to win and there was no reason to suppose that the trend would be bucked now. ‘It is difficult to imagine circumstances more favourable to the Labour opposition,’ noted Peter Shore. A decade earlier there had been a real fear that the SDP/Liberal Alliance might overtake Labour, certainly that its existence would split the anti-Tory vote, but that threat had now receded, and the most charismatic third-party figure, David Owen, was stepping down in defeat from Westminster politics. Above all, the government had failed to engineer an economic recovery in time for the election, and the recession was now officially the longest since the Second World War. House repossessions continued (75,000 of them in the previous year), unemployment was still rising, the amount owed in consumer credit was twice the level of a decade earlier, and 1,200 businesses were going bust every week. All that Kinnock and Labour had to do, it appeared, was to hold their nerve and avoid any serious gaffes.
Nonetheless, Major still put the economy upfront in the campaign, with the promise: ‘Vote Conservative on Thursday and the recovery will continue on Friday.’ No evidence was offered in support of this claim, but it expressed Major’s gut instinct that when it really came down to it, the electorate simply wouldn’t trust Kinnock on the economy. (Nor indeed did John Smith, who was of the opinion that ‘Kinnock didn’t understand economics’.) In the words of Gyles Brandreth, now standing as Conservative candidate for Chester, the hope was that wavering Tory voters would ‘come back to us at the last minute, clinging on to nurse for fear of something worse’.
The ammunition that would be needed for that last-ditch stand was supplied right at the beginning of the campaign, when John Smith and the shadow trade secretary Gordon Brown posed on the steps of the Treasury building to launch a ‘shadow budget’, effectively a pre-announcement of Labour’s economic plans should they win the election. At a time when average male earnings were £18,000 a year, Smith promised that everyone on less than £21,000 – 80 per cent of taxpayers – would gain from his proposed rises in thresholds for tax and national insurance: ‘we are starting to take back something for the average taxpayer and the average family.’ In order to fund these changes, a new top tax rate was to be introduced of 50 per cent on those earning over £40,000. It sounded like a reasonable pitch for the votes of middle England, and was presented with the kind of authority that Norman Lamont was unable to muster, but perhaps warning bells should have sounded when it was greeted with enthusiasm by Tony Benn. ‘Very clever,’ he noted in his diary, ‘attacking the rich and with plans to help the poor. Excellent, good socialist budget.’
Approval by the likes of Benn was not what Kinnock, Smith and Brown had been aiming for, and the impression that they might be working to a socialist agenda was precisely what they were seeking to put behind them; the party manifesto studiously avoided any use at all of the word ‘socialism’. But they had got their pitch wrong. The proposed level at which tax rises would kick in was high by the standards of the North-East or Scotland, but well within the dreams of much of the south-eastern middle class, and – as Labour’s then health spokesperson Robin Cook was later to point out – was not unknown in the media: ‘every sub-editor in Fleet Street or Wapping thought someone on £20,000 a year was poor.’ The proposals were seized on by the Tories and portrayed as an attack on success. Furthermore, it was suggested, this was only the first stage of a tax-raising programme. ‘Labour’s Tax Bombshell,’ read one Conservative poster: ‘You’d pay £1,250 more tax a year under Labour.’ (The message was accompanied by an image of a decidedly retro-looking shell, particularly in the wake of the Kuwaiti War’s smart missiles; this was less Baghdad in 1991 than Walmington-on-Sea fifty years earlier.)
Generating even more column inches was a poster showing two red boxing gloves with the slogan ‘Labour’s Double Whammy’ and a claim that both inflation and tax would go up under a Kinnock government. It wasn’t an entire success: ‘Most of the comment has been “What’s a whammy?” and the reaction is bemused or bewildered,’ noted Edwina Currie. But while the word may have been new – at least to those who weren’t aficionados of the work of blues singer Screamin’ Jay Hawkins or novelist Carl Hiaasen – it was instantly memorable, and the discussion it provoked helped push the Tories’ core message that you couldn’t trust Labour. Less impressive was the fact that, after thirteen years in power, the government had so little to boast about that it was still indulging in such negative tactics.
What positive campaigning there was resolved around Major himself. Determined to appeal directly to the people, he had initially wanted to stage open-access public meetings where he would take questions from all-comers, but this was deemed to be too risky in both political and security terms. Instead, during a walkabout in Bolton, where he was surrounded by a hostile crowd of protestors, he stumbled upon the idea of standing on a box to deliver his message. And thus was born Major’s soapbox, without which no subsequent appearance was complete, the single most memorable image of the election. The sight of the prime minister, standing up alone for his beliefs against a shouting mob, many of them bearing Socialist Workers Party placards, made for fantastic television, even if his words were entirely inaudible.
‘You can see them saying: How can we make him look charismatic?’ reflected comedian Paul Merton, on Have I Got News for You. ‘Let’s stand him next to a wooden box!’ But perhaps Merton was failing to recognise a kindred spirit lurking beneath the grey suit. ‘It’s pure theatre,’ Major said of his campaigning style. He had never been involved in planning an election before, but he took to it with considerable energy and effectiveness. This was a man who had show business in his blood, and he seemed to relish the rough and tumble in a way that should have been understood by a stand-up comic: ‘I liked the unpredictability and the dialogue with the crowds. I was invigorated when things went well, and shrugged off the few unpleasant moments.’
He was also prepared to borrow from others. In 1987 the Labour Party had engaged the film director Hugh Hudson to make a party political broadcast known as ‘Kinnock – The Movie’, which sought to raise the leader’s profile. Now the Tories turned to John Schlesinger, director of Billy Liar, Midnight Cowboy and Marathon Man amongst many others, to make ‘The Journey’, a broadcast that saw John Major revisiting his childhood home in Brixton. ‘Is it still there?’ Major wondered aloud as the car approached his old house, and then excitedly exclaimed: ‘It is, it is, it’s still there!’ Like his soapbox, it was much mocked by smart young men in the media, but it too helped emphasise the sheer ordinariness of Major.
Against this effective combination of knocking copy and normality, Labour’s message was slightly confused. Its campaign theme song was the Farm’s ‘All Together Now’, intended presumably as an anthem of unity and solidarity, though there was also perhaps a pro-European subtext, since the lyrics were about British and German soldiers celebrating together the Christmas of 1914 in the trenches of Flanders. Its uplifting message was hardly matched by the downbeat poem by Adrian Henri, quoting T.S. Eliot’s ‘The Journey of the Magi’, that opened the manifesto:
‘A cold coming we had of it’
huddled together in cardboard cities,
crouched over shared books in leaking classrooms,
crammed into peeling waiting-rooms.
There appeared some doubt about the balance to be struck between denouncing the distressed state of the nation’s fabric under the Tories and the promise of better times to come under Labour. And then there was the notorious Sheffield rally, a whooping American-style extravaganza staged a week before polling day and attended by the entire shadow cabinet. The Sheffield Arena had opened in 1991 as part of an urban redevelopment of land that had previously been the site of a steelworks, the complex also including the Meadowhall shopping centre and the Don Valley stadium. It was thus a symbol of the way that leisure and retail had taken over from industry in the British economy, though whether or why this was a useful association for Labour was not entirely clear.
Nor was the backdrop to the stage quite right on the night. It featured the Union Jack and the flags of the constituent nations of the United Kingdom, but the appeal to patriotism and localism was somewhat spoiled by the fact that the Welsh flag was hung the wrong way round, with its dragon facing to the right. The music was similarly intended to evoke a coalition of cultures: a video of Simply Red’s hit ‘Something Got Me Started’ was followed by performances from violinist Nigel Kennedy, opera singer Elizabeth Brice, the Frickley Colliery Brass Band, a pipe band and a school choir.
All of which was a way of working the 10,000-strong audience up into a frenzy ready for the arrival on stage of Neil Kinnock, just in time for the BBC television news at nine o’clock. And frenzy did indeed seem to be the keynote. Jack Straw, the shadow education spokesperson, thought the atmosphere was ‘surreal, unlike any that I’ve experienced before or since’. Overwhelmed by the enthusiasm of the crowd, Kinnock opened his comments with a repeated shout of ‘Well, all right!’, though it sounded rather like ‘We’re all right!’ He was, he later explained, simply responding as a rock and roll singer would have done: ‘It’s what Johnny Cash does. It’s what the Everly Brothers used to do.’ As seen by television viewers, however, it gave the impression that he and the party were already celebrating a Labour victory at the polls combined with the winning of the Oscar for best actor and the taking of the world heavyweight title. It seemed to confirm all the negative elements of his public image.
When Kinnock finally delivered his speech, it turned out to be a good one. ‘The British people want a country with a sense of community,’ he urged. ‘They want a Britain that is whole and fair and free.’ And he promised: ‘In nine days’ time Britain is going to have a Labour government.’ Perhaps unwisely, however, he also drew attention to Major’s campaigning: ‘What’s at issue in this election is not the soapboxes that people stand on. It’s the cardboard boxes that people live in.’ It was a typically neat oratorical opposition, but not entirely helpful. The contrast between, on the one hand, the man in the marketplace facing down what looked like an SWP mob and, on the other, the man counting his chickens in front of the shrieking faithful at an event that cost £150,000 to stage, was not one that reflected well on Labour.
In retrospect, many blamed the Sheffield rally, in its display of premature triumphalism, for alienating voters. The real problem, however, was not one of tone but of logistics. A coach laid on to transport journalists to East Midlands Airport, where they were booked on a flight to London, became stuck in mud and never made it out of the car park. A replacement bus eventually arrived, but then broke down, and the journalists didn’t get back to the capital till 5 a.m. the next day, leaving the media thoroughly grumpy and disinclined to give any favourable coverage. With a week still to go, there was plenty of time for the image of Sheffield to become a story in its own right, particularly since it fed into an established narrative of Kinnock as a boastful braggart. ‘There is a fine line between confidence and cockiness,’ noted the outgoing home secretary, Kenneth Baker, in a campaign speech, ‘and on Wednesday night in Sheffield, Mr Kinnock stepped over it.’ Twelve months later, Kinnock reflected on the rally and, recalling the dictum of American politician Adlai Stevenson that adulation is all right as long as you don’t inhale, he admitted: ‘for just a few seconds, I inhaled.’
Kinnock, as ever, received criticism from both sides. From the left, the French newspaper Libération headlined its coverage of the rally RED KINNOCK WATERS DOWN HIS WINE, and Bryan Gould identified the key issue in Labour’s position as being its surrender to the economic wisdom of the Tories: ‘We were trying to achieve through pzazz what we dared not try to achieve in substance. If we had been braver on policy and on breaking from the monetarist consensus, we would not have needed the Sheffield rally.’ Similarly Kim Howells, a former union official and now MP, was later to denounce ‘the clique of spin doctors and party managers who foisted on us the anodyne policy statements and gut churning embarrassment of the Sheffield rally’. From another direction entirely came the comments of Sir John Banham, director general of the CBI, who warned a meeting of business executives held in Sheffield the very next day that Labour’s tax plans ran the risk of turning the recession into a slump.
With the polls mostly predicting that no party would win an outright majority, much of the talk in that last week concerned the possibility of a hung parliament and of the coalition government that would necessarily result. This caused great excitement amongst the Liberal Democrats, who had been born in 1989 of the merger of the SDP and the Liberal Party and were now emerging as a more targeted and disciplined force under the leadership of Paddy Ashdown. He let it be known that his price for participating in government would be four cabinet seats and a commitment to proportional representation in future elections. The Tories refused to engage in such talk, publicly insisting that they would make no deal, but Labour was less rigid and some leading figures allowed themselves to be drawn into talk about coalitions, while Neil Kinnock floated the idea of inviting other parties into a discussion of electoral reform. The effect was that Labour suddenly looked as if they lacked self-confidence, the precise opposite of the message sent out by the Sheffield rally, but equally damaging.
Nonetheless, the assumption was that Labour were the favourites to win the election. Few shared the eternal optimism of Tony Benn (‘it looks to me as if this is going to be a 1945-type breakthrough’), but most were convinced that the government would fall, including most of the members of that government. Social services minister Ann Widdecombe was sufficiently doubtful that she took her pot plants home from the office, not expecting to return, while the Conservative Party chairman, Chris Patten, issued instructions on the day before the poll that no senior ministers should appear on television in the early hours of the election broadcasts; the implication was that he believed a loss of the government’s majority was likely and that he didn’t want anything said that might scupper negotiations with other parties. It wasn’t an encouraging message, as Kenneth Baker noted: ‘From the very top of the party the prospect of defeat was being signalled.’ If one were looking for a dissident opinion, however, there was always the stock market, which – like bookmaking – is more often right than not in making such calculations: as trading started on the morning of election day, share prices rose in anticipation of a Conservative victory.
As voting closed at 10 p.m., the BBC and ITN unveiled the results of their exit polls, both showing a hung parliament. The BBC predicted that the Conservatives would emerge as the largest party on 301 seats, still twenty-five seats short of an outright majority, with Labour on 298. On this projection, with the Lib Dems achieving just twenty-four seats, there was no easy or obvious coalition to be constructed that could command a majority of the House of Commons, but one thing was certainly clear, as a smiling Gordon Brown was quick to point out: the Tories had ‘lost their mandate to govern’.
Unfortunately for Labour, the exit polls were misleading. Not quite as misleading as the opinion polls during the campaign, but still suffering from the same basic flaw; it transpired that many of those who voted Conservative were unwilling to admit the fact to strangers bearing clipboards, either before or after the event. It wasn’t a very encouraging message for the Tories. The massive discrepancies between the opinion polls and the actual votes cast suggested that the electors were troubled by feelings of guilt; in the privacy of the polling booths, they opted for a party that promised tax cuts, but they were aware enough of what was expected of them, when asked by pollsters, to protest the opposite, to say they wished to contribute more of their income in order to fund greater investment in public services. They were attracted to the thought that there was such a thing as society, if not necessarily willing to foot the bill.
Those, however, were considerations for the future. At the time, with election night shading into the early hours of the next day, the emerging story was one of Tory success. The key moment came with the declaration in Basildon, a Tory marginal that was considered essential for Labour to win. This was the heartland of ‘Essex man’, the southern working-class voter who had been won over by Margaret Thatcher and Norman Tebbit in the 1980s. Since Major’s appeal was thought to reside in the suburbs rather than in the new towns, hopes were high in Labour circles that Basildon could be taken. It wasn’t, and the Conservative candidate David Amess was returned to represent the seat he had held since 1983. There was a swing from Tory to Labour, but too small to offer any real hope for the rest of the night.
As the election results started to mount up, predictions were revised again and again, each time showing a more substantial move towards the Conservative cause. By the end of the night, it had become apparent that it was all over for Labour and for Neil Kinnock. The Conservatives had recorded 14.1 million votes, the largest endorsement ever achieved in Britain and, though their share of the vote was lower than had been attained in any of the previous three victories under Margaret Thatcher, they were still 7.5 percentage points clear of Labour, greater than the margin of victory in 1979. And much of that margin was the result of the female vote; the lead amongst women was more than twice as great as that amongst men.
Most importantly the Conservatives had a reduced, but still workable, majority of twenty-one seats in the Commons. It was an historic victory, the first time that any party had won four consecutive general victories since the days before the Great Reform Act of 1832 had wiped out the rotten boroughs. And it was all the work of John Major, a man untainted by associations with Thatcherism or with anything else. It was hard to believe that any other Tory leader, even Michael Heseltine, could have achieved such a result.
For the millions who had genuinely believed that this was Labour’s moment, the election night saw a slow, cruel collapse of hope. Yet again the party had failed to win over 40 per cent of the popular vote, as it had similarly failed in every general election since 1970. If the Tories couldn’t be defeated in the depths of a recession caused by their own policies, with all the concessions made by Kinnock, then it was reasonable to ask the question put by Giles Radice: ‘Can Labour ever win?’
Much of the talk in political circles concerned the question of whether Britain might have become a one-party state, along the lines of Japan, where the Liberal Democratic Party had been in power since 1955. By removing Thatcher and replacing her with a very different kind of leader, the Tories had shown that they were capable of reinventing themselves sufficiently to satisfy the public need for a new direction. ‘We live in a dominant party system, where political changes occur through shifts in the dominant party,’ argued Tony Wright, a political lecturer who had just been elected as Labour MP for Cannock and Burntwood. ‘Mr Major is the perfect politician for such a system, without ideological baggage and willing to open and close windows of political opportunity as circumstances demand.’
In the depths of a despair-filled night, there were few enough moments for Labour supporters to celebrate. A couple of rising Conservative stars – Lynda Chalker, the overseas development minister, and Francis Maude, financial secretary to the Treasury – lost their seats, but neither was exactly a household name, and neither was on the Thatcherite wing of the party. Nor was Chris Patten, the one major opposition scalp, who lost his seat in Bath to Don Foster of the Liberal Democrats. Indeed the cheers that rang around Labour clubs when Patten’s result was announced were far exceeded by the whoops of delight heard at a Conservative gathering in London, where the guest list included Thatcher herself; there the wild applause was accompanied by shouts of ‘Tory gain at Bath!’
The absence of Patten from the Commons was a crucial loss, for his was a presence that would have made a considerable difference to Major’s cabinet. Conservative historian Robert Shepherd thought he was ‘the most able Tory strategist and thinker of his generation’, while Major reflected simply: ‘I had lost my next chancellor of the exchequer.’ More than that, he had lost the one senior Conservative who could persuasively argue a pro-European position with passion and conviction, in a language that was readily understood by the public. In 1994 the cabinet minister William Waldegrave explained that, although Major had the right position on Europe, ‘he knows he hasn’t yet got the right language. This is where he misses Chris so much. Terribly. He could put the words on it.’ Patten was instead appointed as the last ever governor of Hong Kong (a job for which Thatcher had once considered Prince Charles, though it was ultimately decided that he wouldn’t be up to negotiating with the Chinese). He was never to return to British politics, much to the relief of the Thatcherite wing, for whom his articulate advocacy of the European cause was always a threat.
For his enemies, Patten’s handling of the election campaign had offered, during its course, another excuse for attacking him. The overwhelming consensus at the time was that it had been ‘run dreadfully badly’, though of course the result retrospectively justified everything. The same could clearly not be said of the Labour Party, though despite the misery of election night, there was some hope for the future. A close analysis of the results showed just how tenuous was Major’s grasp on power: it transpired that if just 1,284 voters in eleven marginal constituencies had voted differently, the Conservatives would have been denied a majority in the Commons. All elections are to a greater or lesser extent decided in a handful of swing constituencies, but this was particularly the case in 1992; the swing to Labour in Tory-held marginals was twice that of the national average, for Labour had learnt to target its campaigning, and was actually very well placed for the next election.
But the vagaries of the British electoral system meant that for the next four or five years there was to be a Conservative government. And the significance of that fact was hard to avoid. When Margaret Thatcher was asked, as the result became clear, what she made of her successor’s remarkable victory, she was exuberant. ‘It is a great night,’ she proclaimed. ‘It is the end of socialism.’ In her memoirs, published the following year, she wrote about James Callaghan’s administration as ‘the last Labour government and perhaps the last ever’, and it seemed all too plausible an analysis.
The Labour leadership’s immediate response was more defensive, finding a scapegoat in the shape of the tabloid newspapers. In the wake of the election defeat, Neil Kinnock announced that he was stepping down as Labour leader, and in his resignation speech he drew attention to an article by the Conservative Party’s former treasurer Alistair McAlpine which had cited as ‘the heroes of this campaign’ David English, Nicholas Lloyd and Kelvin MacKenzie, editors of the Daily Mail, the Daily Express and the Sun respectively. ‘Never has their attack on the Labour Party been so comprehensive,’ wrote McAlpine. ‘This was how the election was won and if the politicians, elated in their hour of victory, are tempted to believe otherwise, they are in very real trouble next time.’ Those comments inspired one of the Sun’s most famous front-page headlines: IT’S THE SUN WOT WON IT, following on from its election-day cover which had shown a crude illustration of a light bulb containing Kinnock’s head, accompanied by the message: ‘If Kinnock wins today will the last person to leave Britain please turn out the lights.’
Whether McAlpine’s analysis, and the Sun’s chest-beating, were accurate or not remained debatable. Chris Patten had been sufficiently interested in the influence of the nation’s biggest-selling daily to commission some research into the question and discovered that, after more than a decade of Thatcherite cheerleading, ‘the majority of its readers throughout the campaign thought it a left-leaning and left-supporting paper’. But truth was less important than perception, and when Tony Blair eventually came to power in the Labour Party, he was clear in his own mind that the Sun had played a crucial role in the 1992 election. Consequently, he took great care to court the paper’s proprietor, Rupert Murdoch, much to the fury of Neil Kinnock, who was still nursing his wounds years later. ‘You imagine what it’s like to have your head stuck inside a fucking light bulb, then you tell me how I’m supposed to feel,’ he raged at Blair’s press secretary, Alastair Campbell.
Kinnock’s departure as Labour leader, along with his deputy Roy Hattersley, marked a final break with the 1980s. Over the course of two elections, he had improved the Labour vote by three million from its low point in 1983, had put on nearly seven percentage points in the share of the vote, and had added sixty-two MPs to the parliamentary party. Most importantly, he had kept the party together and ensured that it survived as the principal opposition to the Conservatives, which at times in the early 1980s had been far from certain. In the 1983 election the SDP/Liberal Alliance had come second in 63 per cent of Tory-held seats, in 1992 the Liberal Democrats came second in just 43 per cent of them. Kinnock had achieved everything except power (he never in his career held office in a British government), destined to be the leader who didn’t take his people to the promised land.
The weight that came with the leadership of Labour was never more apparent than in the few months after the election, as Kinnock shrugged off the burden and could be seen to relax after years of pressure. Appearances on television – notably on Have I Got News for You – and on radio, where he did a stint as a disc jockey on Radio 2, revealed that the humour and the passion that had first made his name had survived. His own verdict on his long period as leader demonstrated a sense of relief that it was all over: ‘What a bloody way to spend my forties!’ But perhaps the last word on Kinnock’s stewardship of the Labour Party should rest with the man who he faced at the despatch box twice a week, and who had no reason to feel any warmth towards him. ‘Neil was a more forceful leader than the Tory Party or the press ever acknowledged,’ wrote John Major in 1999. It was a typically generous tribute that reflected rather well on both men.
There was never much doubt about who was going to succeed Kinnock. Even before nominations for the leadership closed, the leaders of the three biggest trade unions – the AEU, the TGWU and the GMBW – had all endorsed the claim of John Smith, and the result was a foregone conclusion. Even so, Tony Blair tried to persuade his closest colleague Gordon Brown to enter the race, not in the hope of winning but with the intention of putting down a marker on behalf of the impatient young faction who were already becoming known as the ‘modernisers’.
But Smith was far too experienced an operator to allow himself to be outmanoeuvred by the likes of Blair and had already squared Brown before the election, offering him the shadow chancellorship as a consolation prize on condition that he didn’t stand. ‘Gordon had not seized the moment,’ wrote Blair reprovingly in his memoirs, though his comment at the time was more forthright: ‘He chickened out.’ Brown’s own account was somewhat different. ‘I felt I had to be loyal,’ he claimed afterwards. ‘I never thought for a minute of standing against John Smith.’ Blair himself, who Major said was the person he most feared on the Labour front bench, considered running for the deputy leadership, but allowed himself to be talked out of it.
There was one other potential candidate for the top job who didn’t materialise. From the left, Ken Livingstone, the former leader of the Greater London Council, announced his intention of standing. He had the support of the Sun, the paper that had once described him as ‘the most odious man in Britain’ and for whom he now wrote a column, but that was about as deep as his backing went. Under the rules then operating, a candidate needed to secure the nominations of a fifth of the parliamentary party, which in 1992 meant fifty-five MPs; Livingstone managed just thirteen.
The absence of Brown and Livingstone meant that the only challenge Smith faced was from Bryan Gould, and it was touch-and-go whether even he could secure enough nominations. Gould had long carved out an alternative viewpoint to that of Kinnock and Smith, putting forward arguments that were to look much wiser in retrospect than many were prepared to credit at the time. He opposed British membership of the ERM and suggested that, rather than simply pushing up interest rates to deal with the effects of a credit boom, a responsible government would ‘look at restricting the general level of lending by banks and other institutions in conditions where that lending threatened to become excessive’. He further insisted that the British political establishment was mistaken in its ‘belief that monetary measures matter more than the real economy in which ordinary people live and work and that one can take a shortcut, through fiscal policy and the mere assertion that we have a strong currency, to the economic success which we see others enjoying’. Curiously enough, Major in his memoirs seemed partially to come round to this way of thinking, reflecting on his time as chancellor: ‘Like Nigel Lawson before me, I had my eye on the wrong ball: the monetary statistics, and not the real economy.’
But Gould’s position of a modernising, Eurosceptic left enjoyed little support within the party. Labour had become so demoralised by its failure to defeat the Tories over what was now four elections that it had effectively ceded the economic ground and was looking hopefully towards Europe to deliver some sort of alternative on social policy. Furthermore Gould was not a great faction-builder, lacking a power base within either the parliamentary party or – as was still important at the time – the union movement. Indeed his own expertise in economic matters sometimes had the effect of alienating his colleagues, who were aware of their own limitations and felt that he displayed ‘arrogance’. If that were the case, he was far from apologetic. ‘It always amazed me that so few MPs knew anything about economics,’ he later reflected. ‘Almost none found it possible to reach their own independent conclusions.’
Ultimately the leadership election, insofar as there was a debate to be had, came down to something more straightforward than economics and Britain’s relationship with Europe. It was a question of comfort. Smith was the steady-as-she-goes candidate, reassuring the party that there would be no more great upheavals on policy, that it was in prime position to take the next election, and that its traditions would be fully respected, for Smith was nothing if not a man of the Labour movement. Opposing that heartening message was the outsider Gould, the New Zealand-born academic who had gone on to work in broadcast journalism, and who insisted that the party was not yet properly prepared for government. ‘A “safety first” approach and waiting for the Tories to lose won’t produce election victory. We’ll have to reach out to those voters who felt unable to trust us,’ he argued, adding that in the election: ‘Our policies appeared to set a cap on the aspirations of the voters we need to win.’
From another wing of the party, the Europhile social democrat Giles Radice had arrived at the same conclusion. Noting that in the 1992 election Labour had won just three of the 109 seats in the South-East outside London, he called on Labour to recognise and address this regional imbalance. In a series of pamphlets titled ‘Southern Discomfort’, he analysed the problem that the lower-middle class and skilled working class, those in the socio-economic groups C1 and C2, ‘do not trust Labour and think the party is against people “getting on”’. His research discovered ‘that the wavering voters came down in favour of the Tories because they feared that Labour would mismanage the economy, put up taxes and be in hock to the unions’. The regional issue was also expressed in personal terms, as one of Chris Patten’s advisers had observed during the election campaign: ‘We were finding that the reaction against Mr Kinnock was stronger the further south you got.’
But the need to improve the party’s position in the South was not apparent to all. John Smith was born, educated and worked in Scotland, he represented a Scottish constituency and, from his vantage point north of the border, there seemed far less pressure for radical reform of the party. In Scotland Labour had been comfortably the most successful party in the 1992 general election, with a lead over the Conservatives of thirteen percentage points, and it seemed less important to win over Essex man than to avoid being outflanked on the left by the Scottish National Party. There was little sense of urgency in Scotland, just a belief that one last push would be sufficient.
Gould was the obvious answer to Labour’s southern weakness. Sufficiently cosmopolitan and forward looking that he could hardly be painted as an eccentric, extremist Eurosceptic, he was also an adept television performer. Although he was to the left of John Smith, he lacked the taint of union backing, projecting a less obviously aligned image that could have reached out beyond the party’s heartlands. But in the final analysis, none of this counted. Smith took just over 90 per cent of the votes available, winning an overwhelming majority in all three sections of the Labour Party’s electoral college: the MPs, the trade unions and the constituency parties.
A simultaneous election for the deputy leadership, to replace Roy Hattersley, ran much the same course. The would-be left candidate, Bernie Grant, failed to get enough nominations to stand, and the result was a convincing win for Margaret Beckett, who Smith had made clear was his personal choice. She beat both Gould – who was standing in both contests and who trailed in a poor third – and John Prescott, whose pitch was a more traditional left message that the party was in danger of losing its identity. ‘Playing safe hasn’t done us very well, has it?’ he reasoned. ‘All the individuality, the chance, the difference has been taken out of our politics, and the electorate doesn’t trust us.’
Prescott’s opportunity to change that was yet to come. The same was not true of Bryan Gould. In the autumn of 1992 he was voted off the party’s national executive committee and then resigned from the shadow cabinet, acknowledging that he had lost the argument over Labour’s adoption of Tory economic policy. The following year he accepted the offer of a job back in his native New Zealand as the vice-chancellor of Waikato University, and in early 1994 he departed from the House of Commons, another of the best leaders Labour never had. The party he left behind, he believed, had given up on its radical mission and now offered little that was distinctive: ‘More compassionate and competent government, yes, but a new vision, a conscious attempt to change society, to project Britain into a new era – that was definitely off the agenda.’
That perceived lack of a crusading spirit was a verdict not far removed from Thatcher’s announcement of ‘the end of socialism’, and nor was it far from John Major’s own thoughts on the 1992 election. ‘Our victory ensured that our reforms over the previous thirteen years were made permanent,’ he wrote in his memoirs. ‘Above all, our victory in 1992 killed socialism in Britain. It also, I must conclude, made the world safe for Tony Blair.’