3

Events

‘You’re in a bad way’

COLLIN HAYE: What an ageing patient called Mr Major’s government needed today was a shot in the arm. What it actually received was a bullet in the throat.

Chris Morris & Armando Iannucci, The Day Today (1994)

 

Q. What should you look for if you see a pin flying through the air?

A. John Major with a grenade in his mouth.

Denis Healey (1994)

 

ALAN B’STARD: John Smith is one of the few politicians left who has stuck rigidly by the Conservative 1992 manifesto.

Laurence Marks & Maurice Gran, The New Statesman (1992)

At the beginning of January 1993 the Conservative MP Ann Widdecombe bumped into John Major and wished him a happy new year. ‘Well, it can’t be any worse than last year,’ he grumbled, and she felt obliged to remind him that he had actually won a general election in 1992. But he wasn’t to be consoled: ‘Yes, one good day in the whole year.’ A few weeks earlier, Gyles Brandreth – now part of the new Tory intake in the House of Commons – had shared a dinner table with William Whitelaw, the man whose unerring instinct for the soul of the Conservative Party had helped Margaret Thatcher steer through the difficult times of her first decade as leader. Whitelaw, reported Brandreth, ‘spent the whole evening sighing, shaking his head, wobbling his jowls in despair. “I don’t know what’s become of us.”’

All governments are traditionally accorded a honeymoon period when the media tend to give them the benefit of the doubt, and when the opposition is regrouping and rebuilding. Major had been lucky that his honeymoon effectively lasted long enough to see him through a general election; he was considerably less fortunate that it came to an end so swiftly, and so spectacularly, after that victory. Seldom has a newly elected government suffered such a rapid fall from grace. Partly this was because Major had lost his novelty value for the press, and partly because John Smith had taken over the reins of the Labour Party with such apparent assurance. But mostly it was because everything that could go wrong did go wrong.

The first and most devastating blow came in September 1992, while the Commons was still enjoying its summer recess. Britain’s membership of the Exchange Rate Mechanism pinned sterling to the other European currencies (which in practice meant the deutschmark), with only a narrow deviation permitted from its trading value on the international markets. But as the recession dragged wearily onwards, the idea of sticking to exchange rates that had been fixed three years earlier started to look unsustainable. Domestic problems were exacerbated by international instability; Germany had recently taken on the massive task of reunification after the fall of communism in the East, while the American economy was suffering its own problems.

Britain, bedevilled by economic stagnation, and caught as ever between Europe and the USA, the two great powerhouses of the West, was in a dangerous place, ‘trapped in the dollar-deutschmark crossfire’, as Major later put it. There was also the fact that the ERM found no favour with currency speculators, for the obvious reason that it had been designed precisely to reduce the amount of speculation that would be possible; markets seldom approve of being chained by politicians, and Britain was increasingly looking like a weak link.

Towards the end of the summer of 1992 the currency markets, believing that sterling was over-valued, moved to correct the position, and were thoroughly unconvinced by Britain’s attempt to resist such pressures. The issue reached a crisis in a day of high drama on 16 September, nicknamed almost immediately Black Wednesday. That morning, in a two-pronged defence of sterling’s membership of the ERM, the Bank of England began to throw huge sums of money at the market, buying up the currency that no one else wanted, while Norman Lamont implemented an immediate rise in the interest rate, from 10 to 12 per cent. Neither initiative made any difference whatsoever, and nor did Lamont’s announcement that afternoon that interest rates would go up again the following day, this time to 15 per cent. By the early evening, it was clear that the fight had been lost. Told that for every minute they delayed the country was losing £18 million, ministers threw in the towel.

A visibly shell-shocked Lamont was sent out to face the television cameras so that he might stage a humiliating climb-down. Britain withdrew from the ERM, sterling was effectively devalued by around 10 per cent, and the proposed second interest rate rise was abandoned. The estimated £3.3 billion that had been spent by the Bank of England was written off but not easily forgotten. It was all over, and the experiment was abandoned. There was some talk of Britain rejoining the ERM ‘as soon as circumstances allow’, but no one really believed in such a fantasy. It had been, reflected the education secretary John Patten (no relation to Chris), ‘the mother of all mistakes’.

Britain was not the last target of the speculators. In the immediate aftermath of sterling’s collapse, France came under attack as well, though strong intervention by Germany protected the status of the franc, whilst Spain, Portugal and Ireland were obliged to devalue, and Sweden and Norway also withdrew from the mechanism. By that stage it was, or should have been, clear to everyone that the whole enterprise had been doomed to failure from the outset. Though the ERM survived, it was so heavily modified as to become almost meaningless; the margin by which member currencies were allowed to deviate from their central value was increased from 2.25 per cent to 15 per cent. The long-cherished dream of Europe’s ruling class – the construction of a single currency, to which the ERM was but a bridge – was once again looking utopian.

Even if other countries got caught up in the near-collapse of the ERM, however, it was John Major’s bad luck to be the first and most visible fall guy. The mechanism had, in one way or another, played a crucial role in ending the political careers of the three most powerful Tories of the 1980s: Nigel Lawson, Geoffrey Howe and Margaret Thatcher herself. Now it seemed as though Major might also fall victim to its curse. Having suffered such ‘a catastrophic defeat’, he admitted in his memoirs: ‘My own instinct was clear: I should resign.’ But he didn’t, and nor did Norman Lamont.

The fact that Lamont remained in office was particularly surprising. When the Labour government of Harold Wilson had been forced to devalue sterling in 1967, James Callaghan had immediately tendered his resignation and, though he remained in the cabinet, he was moved from the exchequer. Expulsion from the ERM was a still greater reversal of government policy than that had been, and yet the chancellor stayed in place. The next day, the journalist Max Hastings told Lamont that he was amazed he was still in office, given that ‘nobody’s got any confidence in you any more’, and Lamont seemed shocked that anyone would think such a thing: ‘The prime minister has expressed his full confidence in me.’ He was later to make clear that he had been no enthusiast for the project in the first instance, and within days, he was publicly celebrating its collapse. ‘My wife said she’d never heard me singing in the bath until last week,’ he chuckled. For nearly two years, he had been responsible for implementing the policy, but evidently felt little accountability for it.

The fact that no heads rolled merely compounded the political catastrophe of Black Wednesday for the Tories. It would have been unfair for Major to cast Lamont in the role of scapegoat, but it would also have made perfect sense. Instead, the perception was that incompetence had gone unpenalised, and in the absence of official censure, the public were quick to come to their own verdict; if Major had largely escaped blame for the recession, he was to find the recovery much more difficult. At the beginning of September 1992, the Conservative Party had still enjoyed a small lead in the opinion polls; by the end of the month this had disappeared entirely with a startling fall of 14 percentage points. John Major, who at his peak during the Kuwaiti War had enjoyed a personal satisfaction rating of 46 per cent – the highest recorded since Winston Churchill – now stood at minus 27 per cent, and found that his party was less popular than it had been under Thatcher at the time of the poll tax.

For a public who were feeling an economic squeeze, and who were all too aware not only of their mortgage payments but of their level of credit-card indebtedness, the idea that the government would even contemplate putting up interest rates by five percentage points in a single day made the crisis very personal indeed. The memory was to linger and Major was never again to enjoy a lead in the opinion polls.

Parliament was hurriedly recalled for an emergency debate about the events of Black Wednesday, giving John Smith, who had been in office as Labour leader for all of four weeks, an unexpectedly early opportunity to kick a man when he was down. He didn’t resist the temptation. Noting that ERM membership had been Major’s key policy, Smith concluded: ‘With it has gone for ever a claim by the prime minister or the party he leads to economic competence. He is the devalued prime minister of a devalued government.’ In the same debate Gordon Brown, now shadow chancellor, was equally severe in his verdict on the Tories: ‘They may hold office for five years, but after five months they have lost all authority to govern. They have failed the country and they will never be trusted again.’

Those judgements were perfectly accurate, though one might have been forgiven for marvelling at the source of such thunderous denunciations, for Labour had been an enthusiastic advocate of the ERM even before Britain had joined, and Smith and Brown had been the principal cheerleaders. Nor had they previously raised the issue of sterling being pitched at too high an exchange rate (one of the charges now laid at Major’s door). The shadow budget of 1992 had had nothing to say on the subject, while the manifesto had been explicit in its support for the government’s position: ‘Labour will maintain the value of the pound within the European Exchange Rate Mechanism.’ ‘Very little thought was given to the level of sterling’s entry,’ admitted Peter Mandelson, another of Labour’s great Euro-enthusiasts, in his memoirs. ‘It was the politics that mattered, the need for Labour to demonstrate financial discipline.’

The Labour leadership was not alone. The Bank of England, the Confederation of British Industry, the Trades Union Congress, the Liberal Democrats and most of the media – including all the broadsheet newspapers – had also urged Britain’s entry into the ERM, believing it to be essential for the nation’s economic well-being. Amidst such a deafening unison, it had been difficult to hear the voices of those few politicians singing from a different, darker hymn sheet, whether on the left of the Labour Party or the right of the Conservatives. Now the direst warnings of those doom-mongers had been proved right, and it was of some consequence how their respective parties would respond to the setback.

From Labour there came no sign of a rethink after the failure of its economic policy. Gordon Brown continued to operate on a mistaken assumption that the recession would persist, and made no public acknowledgement that he might have been as wrong as Major. When the future Labour cabinet minister David Blunkett wrote in his diary that Black Wednesday was actually ‘White for us’, it revealed only that – as Mandelson’s comments implied – tribalism had become of more significance than, say, the state of the British economy; it certainly said nothing about whether the party’s position and attitudes might need to be reconstructed in the light of such a disastrous outcome.

There were those on the Tory right who likewise used the term White Wednesday (or even, a short-lived phrase, Golden Wednesday). But here the ramifications were far greater, since there was still a debate to be had. ‘I felt intellectually liberated,’ remembered the Eurosceptic MP John Redwood of the expulsion from the ERM. It seemed inevitable that John Major would, sooner or later, come into conflict with this new-found freedom on his right-hand side.

Because the prime minister, of course, had little option but to continue defending – in principle at least – the policy he had himself implemented whilst chancellor. Others might attribute the length and depth of the British recession to membership of the ERM, but he, almost alone, maintained that the experiment had been worthwhile and had brought benefits, primarily the reduction in the inflation rate from 10 per cent in 1990 to 3.5 per cent by the end of 1992. Such arguments cut little ice with the public when set against the monthly unemployment figures, released the day after Black Wednesday, which showed a further 47,000 people had been added to the jobless total. The truth was, as Douglas Hurd later acknowledged, that ‘we had for the moment neither an economic nor a European policy’. Just a couple of months earlier, Major had described the idea of leaving the ERM as ‘fool’s gold’; now that was his only political currency.

It was not simply the public who lost faith with Major’s government on Black Wednesday. Much of the press, which had been broadly, and often narrowly, supportive of the Tories in the past, saw it as a turning point. Many right-wing commentators had been suspicious of Major all along, if for no other reason than he wasn’t Margaret Thatcher, and now others too began to express reservations. The Telegraph titles in particular set up a rival Conservative camp, where ideology could disport itself in pride and purity, unsullied by compromise.

Max Hastings was then the editor of the Daily Telegraph and, although he had personally backed Michael Heseltine in the leadership election, he had been sympathetic to Major up until Black Wednesday. His deputy editor, Simon Heffer, on the other hand, had never been a fan, and the Sunday Telegraph was edited by another Thatcher loyalist, Charles Moore, who had interviewed Major early on in his premiership to the satisfaction of neither. ‘It was clear from the outset that he and I were oil and water,’ remarked Major tartly in his memoirs. ‘I was never to enjoy support from his pen.’ The Sunday Telegraph also housed Christopher Booker, whose journalistic career was seldom noted for his willingness to let go once he had sunk his teeth into an issue; he too took against Major. And its deputy editor was Frank Johnson, one of the wittiest, and therefore most wounding, writers on Fleet Street and another who had no time for the prime minister. As early as December 1990 Alan Clark had reported the dinner conversation of Johnson and Peregrine Worsthorne (former editor of the Sunday Telegraph): ‘Both were plainly getting ready to be “disillusioned” with the unfortunate John.’ When Major was told, during the 1992 election campaign, that the Tories were behind by six percentage points, he is said to have replied: ‘Of those six points, three are the fault of Simon Heffer and the other three are Frank Johnson’s fault.’ He exaggerated, of course, but losing the loyalty of the Telegraph papers was to prove a running sore.

The Times also began to distance itself from Major’s leadership, a situation exacerbated by the fact that the prime minister was clearly no soul-mate of the paper’s proprietor, Rupert Murdoch, who was no longer the frequent visitor to Downing Street that he had been in Margaret Thatcher’s time. One of Murdoch’s other daily titles, Today, was to declare itself for Labour, while the Sun, the most important publication of all, which had once been the theoretical journal of Thatcherism, commenced hostilities in its own unique way. On the evening of Black Wednesday, its editor, Kelvin MacKenzie, cheerfully told Major on the phone: ‘I have a bucket load of shit on my desk and I’m going to pour it all over you.’ Major’s response displayed all the forbearance of a patient uncle, indulging a child with a taste for practical jokes: ‘You are a one.’ The following day the Sun’s front-page headline read: NOW WE’VE ALL BEEN SCREWED BY THE CABINET.

That headline was a typically indelicate allusion to stories then circulating about David Mellor, who had been appointed secretary of state for national heritage after the election. This was a new department rounding up responsibilities that had previously been scattered around various Whitehall offices – sport, the arts, film, broadcasting, tourism – and Mellor was immediately dubbed the ‘minister of fun’. His time in office, however, was fleeting since, in Major’s carefully chosen words, ‘David’s definition of fun ran rather wider than his departmental responsibilities.’

In July 1992 the People newspaper ran a story about an affair between Mellor and a young actress. It appeared that much of the report had been obtained by the covert bugging of the flat where they met. At the time this intrusion was legal – it had been conducted with the knowledge of the landlord, though not of the two lovers – and the exposé was justified by the paper’s editor, Bill Hagerty, on the grounds of public interest; he argued that Mellor had ‘said he was unable to write speeches because he was so tired’, and that therefore his affair must be interfering with his duties as a cabinet minister. But most readers understood that it was just too good a tale for a hungry tabloid to refuse, and the fact that Mellor was not noted as the most physically attractive of MPs (‘I worry about what David Mellor will do when he loses his looks,’ joked the comedian Barry Cryer) only added to the merriment.

It was a story that lingered long in the memory, particularly after the woman involved – having had her personal life splashed across the papers, and facing much personal criticism because she was wrongly believed to have sold her story – decided that she might as well give her own account. The publicist Max Clifford negotiated a deal on her behalf with the Sun, and, at some point along the way, a few suitably salacious details were fabricated to make it all more entertaining still; Mellor was alleged to be partial to having his toes sucked and to enjoy making love while wearing a replica Chelsea strip. (Like his friend and prime minister, he was known as a fan of the West London club.) Mellor hung on to office for several weeks, but he was now seen as fair game and, following further stories, was eventually forced to resign, making a personal statement that was notable for being wittier than most examples of the form. ‘Having grown heartily sick of my private life myself, I cannot expect others to take a more charitable view,’ he shrugged. It was eclipsed only by one of the Sun’s best ever headlines: TOE JOB TO NO JOB.

Ultimately it was all very trivial stuff, seemingly confirming Britain’s reputation for absurdly puritan standards in political life. ‘An affair with an actress?’ puzzled the former French culture minister, Jack Lang. ‘Why else does one become minister of culture?’ But beyond the gossip lurked a serious issue, for Mellor had plenty of enemies in Fleet Street who saw him as a legitimate target, and had done so for some time.

Thanks to a spate of handwringing in the late 1980s about factual errors and invasions of privacy in the press, a Home Office committee had been established under Sir David Calcutt, the Master of Magdalene College, Cambridge, to investigate the newspaper industry. Reporting in 1990 it concluded that self-regulation by the Press Council had failed, and recommended that this largely ineffectual body be replaced by a semi-independent Press Complaints Commission. Calcutt also said that if this attempt to curb the excesses of tabloid reporting didn’t succeed, then legislation would become necessary. Mellor was at the time a Home Office minister and issued a famous warning to the press that they were ‘drinking in the Last Chance Saloon’.

On 9 July 1992, as he settled into his new department, Mellor announced that he was asking Calcutt to conduct a six-month evaluation of how the new system was working, and to look at whether ‘any further measures may be needed to deal with intrusions into personal privacy’. This was reported in The Times under the headline: PRESS ON PROBATION AS ENQUIRY BEGINS INTO SELF-REGULATION. There was a serious risk that some sort of privacy legislation, long discussed, might this time be forthcoming. Ten days later Mellor found his private life exposed on a grand scale and, once the People had broken the story, spread across the pages of all the nation’s newspapers.

Those parts of the press who felt most at risk from the threat of legislation were quick to link the two stories. ‘This is the man charged with deciding whether Britain’s press should be shackled with a privacy bill,’ marvelled the Daily Mirror.‘How can he be left in charge of a privacy bill?’ wondered the Sun.‘How can it be argued that a law should be passed rendering [Mellor’s affair] an unfit subject for publication?’ asked the Daily Mail. The glee occasioned in the media by his departure from office was, in short, not entirely disinterested. The national heritage select committee held an inquiry into the issues raised, starting in autumn 1992, but by the time they reported with a call for legislation to protect privacy, the government had learnt its lesson and lost any resolve to change things.

Apart from the newspapers, the other beneficiary from the affair was Max Clifford, who found himself a tabloid figure in his own right and seemed rather to enjoy the attention. He also got a taste for humiliating Tories – ‘I was glad it was damaging,’ he gloated – and let it be publicly known that his media skills were now available to anyone else with a scandalous tale to sell. No one quite realised at that stage how many such stories there would be in the coming years.

For John Major, there was the unwelcome departure from the cabinet of a trusted friend and ally, of whom he had all too few, as well as one of his better salesmen, of whom he had still fewer. Mellor, though mocked in many quarters for a puffed-up sense of self-importance, was a grammar-school boy with something approaching a common touch, a competent and quick-witted media performer in a government not over-blessed with such figures. In the wake of Black Wednesday, as the issue of Europe became ever more cancerous in the Conservative Party, the absence of the Euro-friendly Mellor from the top table was increasingly regretted. He found a new career in journalism and on the radio, but the ridicule that hounded him out of office was not quickly forgotten and he remained the butt of gags. ‘He bestrode the political scene like a colossus,’ joked Clive James, on a television review of the year, ‘with one foot in his mouth and one foot in hers.’ Mellor’s value as a Major loyalist, commentating from the sidelines, was much reduced.

The autumn of 1992 was already proving deeply uncongenial to the government. As if to prove the old maxim about trouble coming in threes, Black Wednesday and Mellor’s resignation were swiftly followed by another self-inflicted wound, this time at the hands of the cabinet’s most populist figure, Michael Heseltine. In the reshuffle that followed the election, he had moved to the trade and industry department – reviving the slightly pompous old title of President of the Board of Trade – and found he had been handed a long-ticking time-bomb.

Back in the late 1980s, when the electricity industry had been privatised, the newly floated power companies had inherited contracts with British Coal to supply fuel for their generating stations. These contracts were due to come up for renewal in 1993, and it was clear that demand for coal was going to fall substantially. With memories of the miners’ strike a few years earlier, the generators had no desire to preserve their dependence on an unreliable source and had already begun switching to gas as their primary fuel. And since the primary obligation of the private companies was to their shareholders, they had discovered that it was cheaper for them to buy what coal they needed from abroad. It was estimated that consumption of domestic coal would fall by at least a third, possibly by up to a half. Moreover, there were already millions of tonnes stockpiled at every power station, pit and depot in the country, and production was being heavily subsidised by taxpayers in an attempt to keep it vaguely competitive.

Only one rational conclusion could be reached, Heseltine decided, and the argument for swingeing cuts to the mining industry was strengthened by the knowledge that the miners had lost the industrial muscle they had once possessed. In Norman Lamont’s words, no matter how drastic the course of action, ‘The lights would not go out.’

Rational argument, however, is not the only requirement of a government, and the announcement by Heseltine and British Coal that thirty-one pits were to be closed with the loss of 30,000 jobs (more than half the workforce) caused a public outcry greater than anything since the poll tax. Certainly the protests were far more widespread than they had been during the great strike of 1984, with even the most solidly Tory parts of the country up in arms. Apart from anything else, there was fury in Conservative ranks that the closures would hit Nottinghamshire, where miners had continued working throughout that strike, standing up heroically – as it was portrayed – against the bullyboy tactics of Arthur Scargill’s National Union of Mineworkers. They had even formed their own breakaway organisation, the Union of Democratic Mineworkers (UDM). Now, it appeared, they were to be abandoned, their jobs sacrificed alongside those of their militant former colleagues, with the closure of seven of the thirteen mines in the area, and the Thatcherite wing of the party was incensed. ‘We have an enduring obligation to the Notts miners,’ one of them exclaimed. ‘I cannot believe my ears listening to ministers.’

Such outrage could not altogether be separated from the Thatcher loyalists’ delight at finding a stick with which to beat Heseltine, their bête noire, but there was no doubt where public sympathies lay. A quarter of a million people marched in London against the proposals, there were demonstrations right across the country, and three tonnes of coal were dumped at the entrance to Heseltine’s house in Oxfordshire. ‘The trouble with this bloody government,’ one demonstrator told Norman Tebbit, ‘is they don’t care what we think. They only care what fucking bloody foreigners think.’

Marcus Fox, chairman of the 1922 Committee of Tory backbenchers, said the cuts were ‘totally unacceptable’, the CBI voiced its opposition, and the press were vociferous and pretty much unanimous, with the blame attaching to Major and Heseltine in almost equal measure. The Sun ran a blank front page with just the headline THIS IS WHAT MICHAEL HESELTINE KNOWS ABOUT INDUSTRY (a little harsh on the man who had founded the successful Haymarket publishing company). Another asked IS MAJOR A GONER? And an editorial in The Times ended with a damning verdict on the prime minister: ‘He looks weak. He is weak.’

Arthur Scargill suddenly found himself being courted by a media that had long ago written him off as an irrelevancy in modern Britain, and he took every opportunity to urge a strike ballot against the proposed closures. More powerful still was the image of UDM leader Neil Greatrex going a stage further and arguing that, with coal stocks at their current levels, there was a limit to what the miners could do alone; he demanded instead a general strike, a suggestion that was traditionally the preserve of the Trotskyist fringe. Indeed the front page of the Socialist Worker carried precisely that call and saw its weekly sales double. Meanwhile, Roy Lynk, the founder and national president of the UDM, who had been awarded an OBE in the 1990 New Year’s honours list, staged an underground sit-in protest. (The Sun sent him a hamper from Harrods to sustain him in his struggle.)

Within days Heseltine was on his feet in the Commons announcing a climb-down. Only ten pits would close immediately, while a review examined the cases of others, and more money had been found to increase the already generous redundancy packages. It was just enough for the government to survive a parliamentary vote, despite rebellions and abstentions by Conservative MPs, though Heseltine was later to admit that, during that debate, ‘I have rarely felt so alone.’ It was quite an admission from a man who had considerable experience of isolation within his own party.

Ultimately the furore wasn’t really about severance payments. In rejecting the notion that there was no such thing as society, the country had come to feel the loss of community and, through a combination of guilt and sentimentality, the pit villages of Yorkshire and the North-East were chosen to symbolise what was perceived to have been lost. It was a feeling reflected in two of the most cherished British films of the next few years. Billy Elliot (2000), the tale of a ballet-dancing son of a Durham miner, was set against the backdrop of the 1984–5 strike and – unlike the television coverage of the time – saw the dispute from the miners’ side, the camera directed at the intimidating lines of riot police, rather than from behind their shields. More poignantly, Brassed Off (1996) was set in the aftermath of Heseltine’s announcement, focusing on the works brass band of Grimley Colliery, a pit being threatened by closure.

Based on the story of the celebrated Grimethorpe Colliery Band (who, under the baton of John Anderson, provided the music for the soundtrack), Brassed Off depicted a close-knit community under attack and clinging desperately on to its own distinctive culture. ‘If they close down the pit, knock it down, fill it up like they’ve done with all t’bloody rest,’ argues the bandmaster Danny (Pete Postlethwaite), ‘years to come there’ll only be one reminder of a hundred bloody years’ hard graft. This bloody band.’ Other, younger members of the band are less convinced that there’s anything left worth fighting for. Andy (Ewan McGregor) declares he has ‘No hope, just principles’, while Phil (Stephen Tompkinson) tersely sums up their obsolete status: ‘Dinosaurs. Dodos. Miners.’ In one of the most powerful scenes, Phil, who has lost everything – ‘wife, kids, house, job, self-respect’ – is seen in his alternative guise as a party entertainer. In full clown make-up, he is supposed to be amusing a group of children at a Harvest Festival, but is unable to escape the horror of his disintegrating life. He snaps, launches into an attack on the Tories, and turns to a statue of Christ, demanding to know why God hasn’t yet taken Margaret Thatcher: ‘What’s He sodding playing at?’

Despite their despair, the miners vote for the redundancy deal and the pit closes, but in a last hurrah the band make it for the first time to the Brass Band Finals at the Royal Albert Hall, where they win first prize. Danny turns down the award in a speech that explicitly attacks the policies of the Conservatives: ‘Over the last ten years, this bloody government has systematically destroyed an entire industry, our industry. And not just our industry. Our communities, our homes, our lives. All in the name of progress and for a few lousy bob.’ As the band celebrate their victory on top of a London bus, they pass the Houses of Parliament, and break into a rendition of what Danny refers to as ‘Land of Hope and bloody Glory’. For the best part of two centuries the brass band had been one of the most beautiful and evocative sounds in British culture, and as its elegiac interpretation of Elgar’s music swells, a caption appears: ‘Since 1984 there have been 140 pit closures in Great Britain at the cost of nearly a quarter of a million jobs.’

The huge and unexpected success of Brassed Off reflected the somewhat belated public disquiet at the virtual death of an industry that had at its peak employed over a million men. John Major was later to claim that he knew the pit-closure policy was wrong from the outset, but ‘My feelings were based on instinct, which is not easy to justify against the logical economic judgements when the economy is ailing, and your chancellor and your energy secretary are sure the policy will work.’ So soon after Black Wednesday, it is perhaps pardonable that he didn’t fully trust his gut feeling, but for the electorate that merely compounded the problem. As an unnamed cabinet minister admitted in the Sunday Times: ‘We all took our eye off the ball. It was a cock-up.’

As the anger of October 1992 faded away, the pit closures went ahead anyway, though more quietly and more piecemeal than originally planned. But the damage sustained by the government was not easily shaken off. In the space of four months, it had contrived to have a major sex scandal, to suffer economic humiliation in front of the whole world, and to misjudge entirely the sentiments of the nation. The misery Major expressed to Ann Widdecombe as 1992 closed was not misplaced; truly, nothing had gone right since the election. One of the few things the Conservatives had left in their locker was their reputation as the low-tax party. Then, in March 1993, the government threw that away as well.

In what proved to be his last budget as chancellor, Norman Lamont announced an extra £10 billion of taxes to be phased in over the next three years, including an increase in National Insurance contributions – NI being an income tax in all but name – and a curtailment of mortgage tax relief. There was even talk of introducing NHS prescription charges for pensioners. For a party that had campaigned just twelve months earlier on the danger of higher taxes if Labour were to win, such a policy reversal was almost indefensible, ‘the biggest tax increase since the British went off to fight Napoleon’. Worse yet, Lamont had said in his pre-election budget: ‘I have no need, no proposals and plans either to raise or extend the scope of VAT.’ Now, in the most controversial move of all, came the introduction of VAT on domestic fuel, which had previously been exempt from tax. It was to start at 8 per cent from April 1994, rising the year after to the then-standard rate of 17.5 per cent and, when in full force, would add nearly £100 to the average annual bill.

There was a lacklustre attempt to claim this as some sort of ‘green tax’, designed to help combat global warming, but even loyal Tories struggled to accept that it was motivated by anything other than the wish to raise billions in revenue. For everyone else, it was immediately apparent that it would have the greatest impact upon the poorest, in a year when state pensions rose by just seventy pence a week. It was also, in effect, a new poll tax, since it applied not merely to fuel consumption, but also to standing charges about which the householder could do nothing. As might have been predicted, the new tax met with outright hostility, and in opinion polls its introduction was opposed by over 90 per cent of the population. Equally predictable was Labour’s rush to capitalise on such an unpopular move. ‘You can never trust the Tories on tax again,’ thundered the shadow chancellor, Gordon Brown, in a neat and highly effective inversion of the long-established order.

Nonetheless, the government held firm to its policy and in December 1994 it brought the proposal to implement the second phase, the rise to 17.5 per cent, to the House of Commons. And there it was defeated by a majority of eight votes, the first substantial reverse the Conservatives had faced on a fiscal measure since their election in 1979. The defeat was largely the work of a group of Eurosceptic MPs from whom the whip had been withdrawn as punishment for not supporting the government on a previous occasion, and who therefore felt that they had no obligation to act as lobby-fodder. ‘We did the party a favour,’ insisted Teresa Gorman, one of the Tory rebels who voted with the opposition. ‘The policy was strongly resented in the country, and widely believed to have cost us council seats.’ She was right on the second count, but the damage had already been done, as Major later acknowledged: ‘The VAT increase was a political millstone which cost us dearly.’

The impression given through all this was of a government of bunglers and amateurs, a political establishment for whom ridicule was an appropriate response. And the disease seemed to be spreading through other institutions. A couple of weeks after that 1993 budget, the running of the Grand National hit problems, initially with a demonstration on the course by animal rights protestors, and then with a false start which required the riders to pull up before the first fence. A second attempt to run the race was also called off after the starting tape got entangled around the neck of one of the jockeys, but this time the recall system – which still depended upon a primitive system of flags – failed, and thirty of the thirty-nine riders continued on their way, unaware that the race had been called off. Seven horses completed the course, including Esha Ness ridden by John White, who finished with the second fastest time ever recorded. The 50–1 shot never made it to the record books, however, for the race was declared void for the first time in a history stretching back over a hundred and fifty years, and there was no official winner. It was nothing to do with the government, of course, but the shambles raised parallels for some, including one reader of the People.‘I can’t help thinking how John Major’s idea of running the country is like this year’s Grand National,’ she wrote to the paper. ‘After a number of false starts, he has simply abandoned the whole thing.’

The apparent ineptitude of the government was matched by a feeling that it had lost any sense of the electorate’s wishes and aspirations. In the 1980s there had been plenty of complaints from the left that Margaret Thatcher was interested only in those who shared her vision and was prepared to neglect the rest of the country; now even traditional Tory supporters found there was little to cheer about.

At the highest level, the 1993 Leasehold Reform Act – which opened the possibility of leaseholders buying the freehold on their properties, whether their landlord wished to sell or not – prompted the resignation from the Conservative Party of the Duke of Westminster, the richest man in Britain. In a more humble world, a plan to restructure the police force was announced and provoked the biggest protest rally in the history of the British police, with more than 20,000 officers converging on Wembley Arena to make their voice heard. The home secretary, Michael Howard, declined an invitation to attend, but his opposite number, Tony Blair, made the most of his opportunity. ‘The case for reform is whether it helps to cut crime,’ he said, to an appreciative audience, ‘not whether it allows the Treasury to cut corners or satisfies some mistaken dogma.’

Nor was the military, that most totemic issue for the dyed-in-the-tweed Tory, exempt. Proposals were brought forward to close down the Royal Navy dockyards at Rosyth and Devonport, while the Options for Change military review – prompted by the ending of the Cold War – saw the disappearance of several of the country’s most venerable and cherished regiments. This hit particularly hard in Scotland where the Gordon Highlanders, with two hundred years of history behind them, were merged with the Queen’s Own Highlanders (themselves the product of an earlier amalgamation of the Seaforth Highlanders and the Queen’s Own Cameron Highlanders) to form the non-specific Highlanders. A protracted campaign did, however, secure a temporary reprieve for the Royal Scots, the oldest infantry regiment of the line in the army.

While it was thus busy alienating its own supporters, the government, of course, continued also to cause outrage on the liberal left. At times this seemed to be the result of little more than a desperate publicity stunt, designed to outflank and embarrass Labour, as when Michael Howard announced that identity cards would be introduced, before backing down from the proposal. At others, it seemed to reflect a genuine intolerance of civil liberties, so that the 1994 Criminal Justice and Public Order Act shifted the balance of power away from the citizen and decisively towards the police, allowing for greater use of stop and search, for the taking and retention of fingerprints and body samples, and for a suspect’s silence under questioning to be raised in court. It also attacked several areas of what were seen as dissenting lifestyles, including the repeal of the duty of local authorities to provide sites for travellers, and the introduction of provisions aimed at hunt saboteurs, anti-road protestors and those who attended raves.

Indeed this Act covered so many bases that few in the legislature, let alone amongst the public, were able to keep up with it. When introduced as a Bill, it ran to 112 pages; by the time it passed into law it had nearly doubled in size to 214 pages. Additions and amendments were seemingly made up on the hoof, as the Conservatives tried unsuccessfully to find a measure so extreme that the Labour Party wouldn’t back it, thus enabling the opposition to be portrayed as soft on law and order.

Then there was the government’s simple insensitivity to issues that required at least the lip-service of concern. Chief amongst the culprits here was Ann Widdecombe, who had made her name in the Commons as a doughty campaigner against abortion, having been elected in 1987 as the MP for Maidstone, where the local Tories had once turned down Margaret Thatcher as their candidate. In John Major’s government there were so few women – none at all in his first cabinet – that she was bound to be noticed when she became a minister, but in all likelihood she would have stood out in almost any era. She displayed such a fierce refusal to care about her look (‘I am short and fat and ugly,’ was her own assessment) that it became the most readily identifiable image in the House; with her dumpy stature and jet-black pudding-bowl hairdo, she resembled, thought Gyles Brandreth, ‘a death-watch beetle’. Coupled with that was a willingness to express forthright opinions in plain-speaking language that was lapped up by a media ruing Edwina Currie’s absence from the government. ‘She is as hard as nails and as cold a politician as you would fear to meet,’ one anonymous colleague told the press, feeding the myth of the most heartless Tory of them all.

She first made public waves as a social security minister in 1991 when a study published by National Children’s Homes concluded that the welfare state was failing the poorest; in the families of those receiving benefits, it was claimed, 10 per cent of children under five were missing meals because of poverty, and one parent in five regularly went hungry. Widdecombe retorted that this meant the vast majority of those on benefits were eating sufficiently, and that the research should therefore have concentrated instead on the differences between those who did eat properly and those who did not, in order that the latter might be pointed in the right direction. Her comments displayed logic but little compassion, and much of the media turned against her, particularly the Daily Mirror, for whom she became a hate figure to rival the position of Labour’s Clare Short at the Sun; the paper missed few opportunities to point out that she was unmarried – a virgin, even – and apparently was thus, by definition, a woman out of touch with the mass of the people.

The biggest storm came in January 1996 with the broadcast of a Channel 4 documentary that showed a pregnant prisoner being shackled to warders as she was taken from Holloway Prison to the Whittington Hospital in North London to give birth. This was standard policy, following a disproportionate number of escapes by women prisoners on their way to hospital in recent years, and a practice with which Widdecombe, now the prisons minister, professed herself content: ‘I was perfectly happy for women to be secured between prison and hospital. I was perfectly happy with the procedure that you removed the restraints as soon as medical treatment started, that was, when labour started.’

Again it was a logical position, but not one likely to attract much public support, and the Mirror’s abuse became ever more personal. The ‘mums-in-chains minister’, she was called in what should have been a muck-raking article (except that there was no muck to rake) headlined LOVELESS LIFE OF THE WOMAN THEY CALL DORIS KARLOFF. The policy was Swiftly changed so that restraints would be removed from pregnant prisoners on their arrival at hospital, but the whole story followed a pattern that had become characteristic of John Major’s government: an unpopular policy was allowed to fester and to attract opprobrium before being abandoned in a humiliating retreat.

Even in those areas where government initiatives were clearly progressive, poor public relations squandered opportunities to generate favourable headlines. A campaign against age prejudice at work in 1993 attracted as little attention as did the rough sleeper initiative.

The latter was a response to the homelessness that had been growing steadily since the mid-1980s, most visibly in London where thousands of people, generally young, were sleeping on the streets. These were the inhabitants of cardboard boxes to whom Labour had rightly drawn attention in the 1992 election campaign. Their plight had been highlighted in one of the better recent storylines of the television soap EastEnders, in which Sophie Lawrence played Diane Butcher, the sixteen-year-old daughter of Frank (Mike Reid), with whom she has a difficult relationship. Running away from home in 1990, Diane ends up living on the streets of London, encountering prostitution, violence and hopelessness – though even the grittiest soap was unable to convey the hunger, cold and sheer, numbing tedium of sleeping rough.

Homelessness in this form was an extreme symptom of a wider and deeper housing problem, a long-term shortage of accommodation exacerbated, in the words of LSE lecturer Anne Power, by a range of factors including ‘the growth in family break-up, lone parenthood and the accelerated closures of mental hospitals, children’s homes and other large institutions’. In the early years of the decade, when the wave of house repossessions caused by the recession meant that home ownership no longer looked an entirely secure option, a substantial layer of the population watched the story of Diane Butcher with a feeling of ‘there, but for the grace of God’.

As environment secretary, Michael Heseltine launched a programme to address the issue, putting money into building new single-person flats for social housing, as well as making more basic contributions, such as the provision of mobile phones for charity workers, so that availability of accommodation at hostels could be checked in advance. Coming at the same time as other programmes, particularly the launch in 1991 by John Bird of The Big Issue, a street newspaper sold by the homeless to earn money, the initiative proved a modest success, reducing the numbers on the streets substantially, though it received far less coverage than had the original scandal. Solutions are, of course, far less newsworthy than problems, but in a media age it was part of a competent government’s job to draw attention to its successes. Competent was not an adjective often applied to Major’s administration.

Nor, regrettably, was the word ‘decent’, particularly after the government’s behaviour over the Civil Rights (Disabled Persons) Bill. This backbench measure, sponsored by MPs from all parties, sought to ensure that access for the disabled was provided in places of employment, on public transport and in public buildings. But when the Bill came to the Commons in 1994, five Tory backbenchers submitted some eighty amendments between them, the clear intention of which was to wreck the proposed legislation by ensuring that the debate ran out of time. There were suspicions that the backbenchers were acting on government orders, a charge flatly denied by Nicholas Scott, the minister for disabled people, until it was demonstrated to be true; Scott’s department was indeed behind the drafting of the amendments, anxious to scupper the Bill but lacking the courage to admit the fact in public. Calls for Scott to resign came both from the Labour Party and from journalists, including the Independent’s Andrew Marr: ‘He blatantly misled the House of Commons but, more important than that, he was party to one of the shabbiest acts of parliamentary sabotage we have seen for years.’ Even Scott’s own daughter, Victoria, who worked with a campaigning group on the issue, joined in the calls: ‘Resignation would be the honourable thing to do.’

Scott was said to be ‘close to tears’ and to have offered to step down, but was persuaded not to do so; instead he was obliged to talk out the Bill himself, speaking for more than eighty minutes in the Commons as he outlined the government’s honest position that ‘it would cost too much money’. As he spoke, a demonstration by disabled people outside Parliament saw thirty or so campaigners abandon their wheelchairs and drag themselves painfully up the steps of the public entrance to the House, where their progress was blocked by police officers. It wasn’t the Conservative Party’s finest hour. Professor Stephen Hawking, the country’s best-known scientist, who was afflicted with a motor neurone disease, joined the condemnation: ‘I don’t think any disabled person should vote for the present government unless they do something to atone for the shabby way they killed the Civil Rights Bill.’ There was subsequently some expiation with the passage of the Disability Discrimination Act in 1995, a weaker measure which made it unlawful to discriminate against people with disabilities, though without the requirement for access. Steered through Parliament by Ann Widdecombe and William Hague (the latter having replaced Scott), the Act didn’t noticeably improve the Conservatives’ image in the country.

As the party’s future leader, Iain Duncan Smith, was later to reflect: ‘Everything we did that was good was despite us, everything we did that was bad was our fault.’

It was somehow appropriate that the most popular television comedies during the tenure of this most ill-starred of governments featured such hapless central characters. ITV’s big hit was Mr Bean, in which Rowan Atkinson played a childlike cartoon of a man whose inability to understand the grown-up world caused chaos and confusion. Meanwhile the BBC was finding success with One Foot in the Grave, a sitcom that contained virtually no jokes, just a succession of unfortunate incidents, coincidences and misunderstandings in a world without meaning or hope. The programme’s creator David Renwick explained its rationale: ‘The show has an attitude. Cynical, resigned, aware of the soddishness of circumstance and hostility of the world around us.’ Many of the storylines were so dark that, with only minimal changes, it would have made a particularly bleak drama. One of the best-known sequences sees the central character Victor Meldrew, played by Richard Wilson, buried up to his neck in the garden, while his wife Margaret (Annette Crosbie) tells him she’s just learnt of the death of her mother, the woman’s body having lain at home undiscovered for five days. Indeed, death is a perpetual presence: a particularly disturbing scene from 1995 depicts a suicide by hanging, and in the final episode in 2000 Meldrew is killed in a hit-and-run accident.

Wilson actively campaigned for the Labour Party, and Victor Meldrew was no Tory either, as he made clear in his reflections on the 1992 election: ‘I just couldn’t believe that last election result. It’s like hiring a man-eating shark as your children’s swimming instructor. “Yes I know it bit my baby’s head off last time, but I still think it deserves another chance.”’ Despite that, his vision of the world could have served as an epitaph for John Major’s government: ‘One thing you can be sure about in life is that just when you think things are never ever going to get better, they suddenly get worse.’

For there seemed to be nothing that the prime minister could do to stem the tide of hostility and even contempt that his government faced. In May 1993 he finally sacked Norman Lamont as chancellor (he offered him the environment department, but Lamont turned it down), and replaced him with the much more popular and laidback Kenneth Clarke, a cheerfully paunchy, cigar-smoking jazz lover, whose taste in Hush Puppy shoes made him seem more louche than he really was. And still the polls were unforgiving, with Major now ‘less loved even than Neville Chamberlain in 1940’. The hero of David Lodge’s novel Therapy reflected that it might all be deliberate: ‘John Major has the lowest popularity rating of any British prime minister since polling began. I’m beginning to feel almost sorry for him. I wonder whether it isn’t a cunning Tory plot to capture the low self-esteem vote.’

Meanwhile Lamont took his expulsion from government very personally indeed. He refused to issue the customary public letter protesting his loyalty to the prime minister, and Major revealed in his memoirs, published in 1999, that the two men hadn’t spoken since the day of the sacking. There were some who detected a note of envy in Lamont’s bitterness. He had arrived in Parliament after a 1972 by-election, seven years before Major, and yet by the middle of the 1980s he had fallen a significant step behind when it came to promotion. Even so, he had managed Major’s leadership campaign in 1990 and clearly felt that he was entitled to continuing support from his senior colleague rather than being, as he saw it, cast in the role of sacrificial offering to the media.

A fortnight after his dismissal, in June 1993, Lamont stood up to make a personal statement to the Commons, a courtesy generally accorded to ministers on leaving office. His speech was trailed in the London newspaper the Evening Standard with an article from David Mellor, the most recent cabinet casualty, headlined WHY LAMONT WON’T TAKE HIS REVENGE. He couldn’t have been more wrong. Lamont clearly had in mind the resignation statements of Nigel Lawson and Geoffrey Howe, which had between them helped put Margaret Thatcher out of office, and sought to replicate their effect: ‘There is something wrong with the way we make our decisions. The government listens too much to the pollsters and the party managers. The trouble is that they’re not even very good at politics and they are entering too much into policy decisions. As a result, there is too much short-termism, too much reacting to events, not enough shaping of events. We give the impression of being in office, but not in power.’

That last phrase – taken, Tony Benn noted, from the title of one of his own published volumes of diaries, Office Without Power – defined the position of the government precisely, and was often to be quoted, but it wasn’t enough to rank with Howe’s ‘conflict of loyalties’, since Lamont lacked the stature to inflict such a killer blow. Though never popular with the public, and inevitably diminished further by Black Wednesday, his move to the back benches posed a problem for the prime minister, not because he was a real rival, but simply because, with his departure, Major’s flank was left exposed; henceforth he would take the full blame for economic bad news. And, in the immediate term, losing a chancellor in such an acrimonious manner could only be bad publicity. ‘Norman’s statement left our side numb, shell-shocked, silent, and the opposition benches cock-a-hoop,’ wrote Gyles Brandreth in his diary, as Major sustained yet another not-quite-fatal wound. It was barely a year since the triumph of the 1992 general election.

None of these problems were of Labour’s making, but the opposition could hardly fail to benefit from the government’s travails. For the first time since the days of Alec Douglas-Home, the party could afford to lie back and wallow in the Tories’ discomfort. To the annoyance of some of the self-proclaimed modernisers – primarily the fast-rising Tony Blair – this was precisely what it appeared to do. Under John Smith’s leadership, the flash of the Sheffield rally was put to one side, replaced by a solid caution and a steadying of the ship.

The influence of the once ubiquitous Peter Mandelson, since the election a mere backbench MP, declined considerably under a leader who thought he was so ‘devious he would one day disappear up his own something or other’. Smith even managed to do his job without benefit of a personal press officer. The focus groups and private polling, on which Neil Kinnock had come to rely so heavily, mostly melted away, and the ceaseless quest for new, middle-of-the-road policies came to an end. The one key exception to the latter was Smith’s determination, following his calamitous shadow budget, that Labour should never again be cast in the role of the high-tax party.

Most disturbingly, from the modernisers’ perspective, Smith was content to work with the trade unions. When he was asked in the early 1980s why he hadn’t joined the SDP, his reply had reflected the fault line running through the left: ‘I am comfortable with the unions.’ For many who had split from Labour in those difficult days, and for others who might have been tempted but remained, this was perhaps an even more significant issue than Europe or nuclear disarmament. In 1992 Tony Blair was asked whether the Labour Party should have a more distant relationship with the TUC – somewhat akin to that between the Tories and the CBI – and he was succinct in his answer: ‘Why not?’

There were new initiatives under Smith, but they were seldom in pursuit of a quick headline. In 1993, for example, a carefully considered speech floated the idea of a reconfiguration and expansion of the Security Council of the United Nations, suggesting the addition of Germany, Japan, India, Brazil and Nigeria as permanent members to augment the five victorious Allies from the Second World War. It was a long-overdue proposal, but one that did little for the narrow party interest of humiliating the government.

It didn’t take long for complaints to surface. By November 1992 Clare Short was using the pages of Tribune magazine to bemoan the leadership’s ‘masterful inactivity’, while from the right of the party the MP Nick Raynsford was denouncing the ‘tranquillity’ of John Smith’s leadership: ‘the party appears to be substituting a state of anaesthetised torpor for a previous mood of hyperactive aggression.’ Writing in the Fabian Review, Raynsford warned: ‘Simply relying on the incompetence and failure of the Tories to deliver us a victory in 1996–97 will not be sufficient.’ Tony Benn wasn’t the only one to read such comments as a thinly coded ‘demand that Gordon Brown and Tony Blair take over the leadership and deputy leadership’.

Even with this air of calm, however, the party was continuing to reform itself. In 1993 the annual conference, responding to two decades of concern about the under-representation of women in the Commons, voted in favour of all-women shortlists for the selection of some parliamentary candidates; these were to be used in half of all marginal constituencies and in half of those seats where a Labour MP was retiring. It wasn’t an entirely popular move – Tony Blair would later insist that the 50 per cent rule was ‘a target’, not a requirement – but it was accepted as a short-term, interim measure to address a historical deficit. In the event, it turned out to be even more temporary than anticipated; the policy was successfully challenged at an industrial tribunal by two men, arguing that they had faced discrimination on grounds of gender, and the practice had to be abandoned. During its brief life, however, it had already resulted in the selection of several candidates, and its fruits were to be seen at the next election.

If the modernisers had not yet taken over, there was certainly a mood in the party for moderation. Every year at the conference, the results were announced of the voting for the seven members of Labour’s national executive committee (NEC) chosen by the constituency parties’ rank-and-file members. Those elected were almost always MPs (as leader of Sheffield council, David Blunkett had been a rare exception in the 1980s), and for the last couple of decades they had tended to be on the left of the party. Now, with membership at a post-war low, it appeared as though the rank and file that remained were following the leadership in a drift towards the right. In the 1992 contest Bryan Gould and the leftist hero Dennis Skinner were voted off the NEC, replaced by Gordon Brown and Tony Blair. Then in 1993 came the final break when Tony Benn, after an unbroken period of thirty-four years, was removed in favour of Harriet Harman.

This truly was the end of an era, the cutting of a thread that ran all the way back to the 1959 election, when Benn himself had been the moderniser, dragging Labour into the era of television and the mass media. For the last decade and a half he had rivalled Denis Healey as the most recognisable Labour politician in the country, capable of arousing passions on both sides, of hatred and of devotion, in a way that could be matched perhaps only by Enoch Powell and Margaret Thatcher. His move to the left in the 1970s had come close to capturing the party for full-blooded socialism, had precipitated the splintering off of the SDP, and had transformed British politics. More than anything Kinnock, Smith or Blair had done or would do, the decision of ordinary party members that Benn should lose his seat on the NEC was the symbolic moment marking the birth of a new incarnation of Labour.

As the results were announced, Benn was given a standing ovation in recognition of his extraordinarily long service, but also surely in acknowledgement that his influence was now a thing of the past, that the membership had had enough of principled opposition. Labour had shrunk, both in aspiration and size. Some had left because they had been forced out – in 1991 the purge of entryists had finally forced the departure of Militant to form its own party, Militant Labour – while others had simply given up in despair. ‘A lot of people have left the Party,’ Benn noted sadly on the day of his defeat, ‘and I think a lot more will leave.’

Ironically it was at the same 1993 conference that John Smith showed how much he had learned from Benn’s strategic thinking. Benn’s attempts to transform Labour in the latter days of James Callaghan’s leadership had focused on changing the constitution in the name of democracy, giving more power to constituency parties to select and deselect their parliamentary candidates, and wresting control of the election of the leader away from the grasp of MPs alone. Now Smith adopted exactly the same tactic, picking up an idea, heavily canvassed by Bryan Gould in recent years, that the trade union block vote – whereby union leaders cast the votes of their members without any need for consultation with those members – should be abolished at conference, and that both unions and constituency parties should henceforth be balloted as individuals when it came to choosing the party leader. Importantly, though, the electoral college, which weighted the various component parts of the Labour movement, would remain.

As with Benn’s reforms, the principle of one member, one vote (OMOV, as it was swiftly abbreviated) was touted as a move to a greater democracy, but it was controversial and by no means guaranteed of success, since it could only be passed if the trade union leaders cast their block votes against their own immediate interests. Many were disinclined so to do, arguing that if the union movement was bankrolling the party, it had a right to be closely involved in its decision-making. ‘No say, no pay,’ as Tom Sawyer, leader of NUPE, expressed it. Few leading politicians were prepared to risk union displeasure by campaigning hard on the issue, though Tony Blair conducted a number of interviews supporting reform, observing as he did so: ‘Why can’t you get Gordon or any of the others to do this?’ It wasn’t the last time that Gordon Brown’s absence at a time of controversy was to be noted.

Meanwhile, Smith was adamant that this was a necessary change if Labour were ever to shed the impression that it was not merely the creation but also the creature of the trade unions. He had no ideological issue with the industrial wing of the movement, but he shared a common feeling that it was time to readjust the balance of power, and he let it be known that he would resign as leader if he failed to win the day. What really swung the debate, however, was not Smith’s resignation threat or Blair’s support, but the contribution of John Prescott.

Like Smith, Prescott had been born in 1938 and had entered the Commons in 1970 (defeating a young Conservative hopeful named Norman Lamont), but the paths the two men had taken on their way to Parliament had been very different. While Smith was winning the Observer Mace debating competition as a law student at Glasgow University, Prescott was working as a steward on cruise liners, gaining a reputation as a trade union activist and trying his hand at amateur boxing. Having failed the eleven-plus, he had painstakingly remedied the deficiencies of his education as a mature student at Ruskin College, Oxford and the University of Hull, though many commentators struggled to see much beyond his northern accent and his often garbled syntax.

His speech in support of OMOV was perhaps his finest moment, even if it suffered a little when transcribed: ‘There’s no doubt this man, our leader, put his head on the block when he said he believes, because he fervently believes, of a relationship and a strong one with the trade unions and the Labour Party. He’s put his head there; now’s the time to vote; give us a bit of trust and let’s have this vote supported.’ Linda Smith once observed, ‘I suspect language isn’t his first language’, while Matthew Parris in The Times (in a piece cited by Prescott in his autobiography) wrote of the OMOV speech: ‘John Prescott went twelve rounds with the English language and left it slumped and bleeding over the ropes.’ But, added Parris, ‘somehow, everybody guesses what he meant.’ Giles Radice summed up the performance more succinctly, saying that Prescott was ‘incoherently eloquent’. And he was indeed eloquent. Prescott was far from being the inarticulate fool of his caricatures, and he knew exactly what he was doing. His own account of that speech made clear his intentions: ‘I had to turn it into something which was about emotion, that they would feel safe about going back to their constituencies. It was the theatre of politics.’

The following week, at the Conservative Party conference, a recording of the speech was played, with the words running backwards, over a selection of images from the film Jurassic Park. It was very funny, but it revealed the Tories’ failure to understand the nature of Prescott. He was very far from being a dinosaur, left over from an era when extremists walked the Earth; he was amongst the sharpest politicians of his generation and one of the key players in the reinvention of the Labour Party. As he put it in the House of Commons many years later: ‘I may get the grammar wrong, that’s true, and I’ll have to take the blame for that – that was my education, I’m responsible for it – but you know I’d sooner get perhaps the words wrong than getting my judgement wrong.’ On OMOV his judgement was absolutely right, and his intervention swung the vote for John Smith. Had Smith had the chance to move on to the next stage of his proposed changes – a statement of core beliefs to augment Clause IV of the party constitution – there is little doubt that Prescott would have been there to support that as well.

Despite the criticisms from within his own party, Smith’s reassuring, gradualist approach to Labour’s repositioning played extremely well with the public. By the beginning of 1994 Labour held a commanding lead in opinion polls, with the Tories sometimes slipping into third place. Smith was recording the best figures of any Labour leader since Harold Wilson three decades earlier, while Major was judged by more than four-fifths of the population to be ‘not really in charge’.

‘What fools we were to believe this lot,’ the Sun concluded of the government that January. ‘Today our eyes are wide open. We can see we have been conned.’ Even Major’s former lover, Edwina Currie, shared the same perspective, reflecting in 1994 that the party should have chosen Michael Heseltine to succeed Thatcher: ‘What a mistake we all made, me most of all.’ The prime minister appeared on Jimmy Young’s Radio 2 programme in March to be confronted by some home truths. ‘Love her or hate her, at least voters took Lady Thatcher seriously,’ said the disc jockey, ‘while they laugh and make fun of you.’

In the only two by-elections held in 1993, the Tories had lost both seats, with massive swings to the Liberal Democrats – 28 per cent in Newbury, 35 per cent in Christchurch – and nervous glances were being thrown across the Atlantic to Canada, where the ruling Progressive Conservative Party had suffered a defeat in federal elections so comprehensive that it had been reduced from 151 seats to just two.

This appalling spectre hovered over John Major’s Tories in the early months of 1994, as the volume was turned up in the whispering campaign against the prime minister. Kenneth Baker was heard to say that Major was ‘dead in the water’, the right-wing cabinet minister Michael Portillo was suggesting that Michael Heseltine might be useful as ‘a transitional short-term figure whose virtues might win them an election’, and Gyles Brandreth was recording the latest tearoom gossip in his diaries: ‘Open speculation is rife again. Today’s most popular prediction: a leadership challenge in the autumn, with Lamont as the stalking-horse, pre-empted by Major stepping down to be replaced by a so-called “dream team”: Heseltine as PM, Portillo as deputy.’ Others were more open. Edwina Currie told the prime minister bluntly that he ought to resign, and the absurdly right-wing MP John Carlisle appeared on Radio 4’s Today programme, offering himself as a stalking-horse candidate. Major’s position, many were arguing, had become untenable.

Then, just after eight o’clock on the morning of 12 May 1994, John Smith was struck down with a heart attack. He died barely an hour later, and suddenly everything was up for grabs again.

The shock of Smith’s death, and the mourning that followed, was genuine, but the idea that he might not become prime minister had surfaced in various forms throughout his tenure of the Labour leadership. Bryan Gould remembered Neil Kinnock telling him in 1992 not to stand against Smith, but to keep his powder dry: ‘He won’t last the course. It’s important that you’re there to pick up the pieces.’ Similarly in 1993 John Major had predicted that Smith wouldn’t be leader come the next election: ‘It’s just a fingertip thing, a pricking of my thumbs. I’m not sure why, but I just don’t believe John’ll make it.’ There was also the odd story of the night, about a month before Smith died, when Tony Blair woke up suddenly and turned to his wife, Cherie. ‘If John dies, I will be leader,’ he told her, according to his memoirs. ‘And somehow, I think this will happen. I just think it will.’ Perhaps it was this Macbeth-like premonition that gave him a head start on his rivals in the race to succeed.

‘Britain’s next prime minister died yesterday,’ opened the report of Smith’s death in the Sun, an indication of how far the Tories had fallen, and a stark reminder to the Labour Party that this time the stakes were as high as they could possibly be.

It had long been accepted that there was one outstanding candidate for the job. ‘Until the 1992 election,’ said Neil Kinnock, ‘my assumption had been that if we had formed the government in 1992 my successor would be Gordon, and if we lost the election then John Smith’s successor would be Gordon.’ But things were different now. Gordon Brown was shadow chancellor, and his refusal to sanction any policy commitment that might come with a price tag had made him less popular with his colleagues than he had once been. Nor did his personal behaviour endear him to others; when backbencher Peter Hain co-authored a pamphlet arguing for a Keynesian economic policy, he was summoned to Brown’s office, where the shadow chancellor ‘rounded on me in a bullying rant’. In the annual elections to the shadow cabinet, after five years of topping the poll, Brown slipped to third place in 1993, behind Robin Cook and John Prescott. In his last days, Smith was said to have remarked that Brown’s position as heir apparent had changed: ‘He’d have no chance to be leader if there was an election now.’

Brown too had changed. The responsibility of his office seemed to weigh him down, as it had Kinnock, and he was starting to bore people, the witty and feared Commons debater now reduced to reciting reams of statistics and espousing policy positions that came in long, numbered lists. Even the sympathetic Guardian journalist Hugo Young struggled to stay awake. ‘I have given a very poor account of what he said about economic policy,’ he observed in his notes of a meeting with Brown. ‘He kept coming back to it, and I fear I kept switching off.’ Brown’s personal awkwardness was also being noted by the likes of the BBC’s political correspondent Jon Sopel, who wrote of ‘his somewhat dour appearance, and the strange rehearsed smile that would appear in the middle of his answer for no discernible reason’. Others had their suspicions of his much-vaunted ability. ‘Funnily enough, I have not only never spoken to him,’ wrote Tony Benn in his diary after a 1993 Commons debate, ‘but I have never heard him speak before and I was glad I hadn’t.’ He went on to conclude that Brown ‘looks as if you could not trust him with a corner shop’.

By any normal standards Robin Cook, Labour’s most effective Commons performer and a politician of integrity and intelligence, should have been a serious contender for the succession. But there was something a bit too prickly about Cook and he didn’t inspire much warmth. ‘Very irritating,’ was Benn’s assessment, which had a certain irony given that Peter Mandelson described Cook as ‘the thinking man’s Tony Benn’. Meanwhile John Prescott was wonderfully barbed: ‘He was probably the most brilliant parliamentarian of our times – but he was well aware of it.’ Anyway, as Cook observed: ‘apparently I am too ugly to be the next Labour leader.’ (Damien in Drop the Dead Donkey claimed he looked like the Mekon from Dan Dare.)

Instead the real threat to Brown’s ambitions came from his closest ally in Westminster, Tony Blair. Appointed by Smith to be shadow home secretary, Blair had really come into his own in the last two years, particularly since the 1993 launch of a slogan donated to him by Brown: ‘Tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime.’ Repeated over and over again in speeches and interviews, this was less a soundbite than a catchphrase; although the policy implications were never fully explored, it was sufficient to send a signal that the issue of law and order, hitherto a Conservative preserve, was now on the Labour agenda. Blair had shown that – as with Brown’s handling of tax increases – he could take on the Tories at their own game and score heavily, and he was clearly a bright, articulate young man who was good on television.

He was also very ambitious and in something of a hurry. Despite not standing for the leadership or deputy leadership in 1992, he had taken the trouble of inviting the right-wing journalist Barbara Amiel to his house and secured an interview that ran as the cover story in the Sunday Times magazine on the weekend after John Smith’s election. ‘Some feel the party should have skipped a generation and gone for Tony Blair,’ wrote Amiel, and one felt that Blair himself was foremost amongst their number. In a 1992 episode of The New Statesman, Alan B’Stard had explained the kind of person Britain wanted as prime minister: ‘She needs somebody young, somebody sexy, somebody twenty-first century, a sort of English Bill Clinton. Only with brains obviously.’ Tony Blair, many in the Labour Party were concluding, fitted the bill perfectly.

Most importantly he appeared to be acceptable to the South-East of England, the issue that had preoccupied Bryan Gould, Giles Radice and others for so long. He was born in Edinburgh with a Scottish father, and had been educated in Durham and Edinburgh, but he had attended private schools and no surviving trace of a northern or Scottish accent was discernible; to all intents and purposes, Blair was a middle-class Londoner. Moreover, for the first time since 1976, the Labour Party would be able to present a leader from an English constituency. This was not merely a question of public perception. As Peter Shore had pointed out in 1993: ‘It is difficult indeed for Scots, in their almost Nordic political culture where Labour and social democracy are still dominant, to realise the extent of the alienation in middle and southern England that still exists between the Labour Party and the electorate.’

There was no doubt that Blair grasped the extent of the problem and he made overcoming it his primary political goal. When, in the wake of Smith’s death, a newly resurgent Peter Mandelson wrote to Gordon Brown making clear – as straightforwardly as he was able – that the race had a new favourite, he stressed that Blair’s strongest card was his ‘southern appeal’, and said this was the answer to ‘our overriding question, is Labour serious about conquering the South?’

Mandelson’s defection to the cause of Blair was a recognition that the wind had already changed. Blair was anointed the winner by Fleet Street virtually before the starting-pistol had been fired, urged on by a team of cheerleaders that included the tabloid journalist Alastair Campbell, who would subsequently become Blair’s press secretary. Within three days of Smith’s death, opinion polls were being published that gave Blair a lead over his nearest challengers, Gordon Brown and John Prescott, of up to 15 percentage points, and the momentum had become unstoppable.

Brown was persuaded not to enter the contest, for fear of a humiliating defeat, and the only candidates to stand against Blair were Prescott and Margaret Beckett, the latter having served as interim leader after Smith’s death. Due formalities were observed, but with bookies quoting Blair at odds of 8–1 on, the result was a foregone conclusion and he was duly crowned, having secured on the first count an outright majority of the vote amongst MPs, constituencies and unions (though not union leaders). This was unmistakably a new era, as Paddy Ashdown had noted at Smith’s funeral, which was attended by hundreds of party members from around the country, ‘there not just to mourn John Smith, but also the passing of the old Labour Party, of which John was almost the last bastion’.

In electoral terms there could be little question that the right person had been chosen. For that assessment of Brown’s limited geographical appeal was entirely accurate; he was just too Scottish for southern tastes, and where Smith had looked like the kind of bank manager you’d approach for a loan, Brown looked like the kind who’d refuse you and probably take pleasure in doing so, thinking he was teaching you a lesson about financial prudence. Or, as a Labour whip told John Major: ‘He’s too like one of those undertakers in old western films that measure you for a coffin before the gunfight.’

Beyond the image, though, the political philosophies of Blair and Brown were, as far as anyone could ascertain, identical in almost all regards. The important thing, wrote Giles Radice in his diary, was that they had ‘avoided the trap of self-defeating competition into which [Roy] Jenkins, [Tony] Crosland and [Denis] Healey all fell – especially when they ran against each other in the 1976 leadership election. Their rivalry fatally weakened their ideological position in the party.’ Nearly twenty years on, Radice was to revise this opinion and suggest that if Brown had stood for the leadership in 1994 and had been beaten in a straight fight with Blair, ‘it might have been better for the country’. Mandelson agreed. ‘I now believe I should have done more to encourage Gordon to stand,’ he wrote in his memoirs; ‘an open contest with a clear result would have removed the temptation for him to agonise about what might have been, and brood that he had somehow been unfairly pushed aside.’

By then the story of the rivalry between Blair and Brown had become the most-analysed political soap opera since the war, fuelled by a grudge that made Edward Heath seem like a model of Christian forgiveness. But in 1994 the appearance, in public at any rate, was of a happy new order. Brown somehow looked a more substantial figure, secure in his post as shadow chancellor, while Blair, the youngest leader in Labour’s history, was simply untouchable, a fresh-faced picture of innocent enthusiasm. He was nicknamed Bambi by the press, Tony Blur by the Tories, and Spitting Image portrayed him as a schoolboy, but there was also a sporting parallel for an increasingly football-obsessed era. ‘Tony Blair has become the Gary Lineker of British politics,’ complained a Conservative minister; ‘anyone who criticises him ends up sounding nasty.’