‘I get knocked down but I get up again’
There are at least two oppositions in the House of Commons and one of them is Conservative.
Gillian Shephard (1994)
After the defeat there will be the mother of all battles over the future of the Tory party.
John Biffen (1994)
UNLUCKY ALF: Oh, bugger!
Paul Whitehouse & Charlie Higson, The Fast Show (1994)
On Thursday, 22 June 1995 John Major took the second of his twice-weekly sessions of prime minister’s questions, where observers noted that he seemed more confident and relaxed than he had been for some time. Asked about stories that divisions within his party were undermining negotiations on the future of Northern Ireland, he casually brushed such talk aside, while also finding time to point out – in a characteristic piece of understatement – that ‘terrorism is unpleasant and should be resisted’. An hour or so later, having caught up with the third-place play-off in the rugby world cup (England were being comprehensively trounced by the French), he stepped out into the rose garden of 10 Downing Street, a blue-spotted tie providing the only colour in his otherwise monochrome appearance. A crowd of journalists were gathered, summoned there for a press conference and left waiting in the hot sun. The atmosphere was less of eager anticipation than of slightly irritated boredom, since none had any inkling what the content of the prime minister’s message was likely to be, and few expected that they would be recording anything of any note.
They were wrong, for the prime minister of Great Britain and Northern Ireland had called them together to announce that he was resigning as the leader of the Conservative Party. This meant, he explained, that there would now be an election in which Tory MPs would be balloted to choose who they wished to be leader of their party, and therefore who would be the prime minister. The short, three-minute statement caught politicians, journalists and public entirely by surprise, but the real shock came in the second half of the announcement, when Major declared that he himself would be a candidate in that election. It was, he explained, an attempt to flush out all those who had been whispering behind his back, destabilising his premiership. ‘I am no longer prepared to tolerate the present situation,’ he said. ‘In short, it is time to put up or shut up.’
The move was entirely without precedent in British politics – premiers had left office before, but never as a temporary tactic to wrong-foot their political opponents – and it was of slightly dubious constitutional propriety, for Major intended to continue serving as prime minister during the election period, although he would not be the leader of his party. It was though, according to Matthew Parris in a Times article that bore all the hallmarks of an off-the-record Major briefing, a genuine question: did the party really wish him to remain as leader? ‘He just wants an answer, one way or the other,’ wrote Parris. ‘I believe Major would regard losing this contest as second best, but a good deal better than carrying on as before.’
The motivation was plain to see, for the news continued to be resolutely dreadful for the government and for Major in particular. In the local authority elections of May 1994 – the last fought by Labour under John Smith’s leadership – the Tories had shed 429 seats, losing control of half the councils they had held. The performance was repeated in May 1995, leaving them now firmly in third place in terms of numbers of councillors, having been overtaken by the Liberal Democrats. A poll in the Daily Telegraph the following month suggested that at least seventy Conservative MPs supported the idea of a leadership election. A challenge was surely going to come.
Major himself was looking ever weaker, the arrival of Tony Blair having reduced still further what little was left of his dwindling appeal. A survey in September 1994, for example, had asked who in public life would make the ideal next-door neighbour; this would once have been Major’s long suit, but now he was eclipsed by Blair, who came in at number twelve, with Major ranking fifteenth, just one place ahead of television prankster Jeremy Beadle. (The top slot went, somewhat surprisingly, to Jack Charlton, who had recently coached the Republic of Ireland football team in the World Cup.) Perhaps in response to Blair’s encroachment on his territory, the prime minister stepped up the homely rhetoric in which he had always specialised, though by now the folksiness was becoming almost self-parodic. Spotting a squirrel in a park, hoarding nuts for winter, he slipped into characteristic Chauncey Gardiner mode: ‘Sometimes I feel like that about the British economy. We need to conserve the wealth we have and use it wisely.’ His speech at that year’s party conference, which the press was told he had written himself, opened with the defiantly low-key greeting, ‘Glad you could make it,’ and went on to offer such bathetic insights as: ‘Running a country isn’t like walking down a road.’
Meanwhile the murmurs of backbench discontent were growing ever louder. Word got out that a meeting in mid-June 1995 between Major and sixty or so MPs from the Fresh Start Group, which was supposed to resolve differences within the party, had been a bad-tempered disaster, with backbenchers barracking their leader. ‘It was a terrible meeting,’ confirmed Iain Duncan Smith. ‘He was the prime minister and you’ve got to treat him with a bit of respect. I think a lot of people forgot that and it got quite disrespectful. It got too personal.’ According to other accounts, Duncan Smith was amongst those heckling and interrupting Major’s speech. Certainly the encounter was one of the factors that prompted Major’s decision to resign, calculating that he could never compromise with such people, and that he should strike before they did. ‘They were very rude,’ said Douglas Hurd. ‘It meant that any lingering tendency he might have to move a bit towards them had vanished.’ But if Major was starting to look like a liability, who could possibly replace him and restore Tory fortunes?
Given a free choice of who to lead the party into the next election, Conservative voters in the country would probably at this stage have opted for Michael Heseltine, who retained high levels of public support despite his attempts to close down the mines and privatise the Post Office. But he was never really an option, certainly at the outset. He had proved personally loyal to Major, to whom he owed his current position, and he was firmly identified with the Europhile wing of the party. Above all, he had too much form, having been the man responsible for Margaret Thatcher’s demise; to remove one prime minister might be regarded as doing the party a service, to remove two would start to look like appallingly naked ambition. Loyal Thatcherites were inclined to agree with Norman Tebbit’s recent comment that anyone considering Heseltine as a leader should ‘lie down in a dark room until the feeling goes away’. Nonetheless, the aspiration was evident enough to be mocked on television by the satirist Armando Iannucci: ‘I fully support the prime minister, though if he were to fail to secure sufficient votes to avoid a second ballot, and if I were in turn asked to stand in the interests of the party – I’d love to.’
Iannucci’s mention of a second ballot referred to the option that still existed within the Conservative voting system for a stalking-horse candidate: a no-hoper whose function in a first ballot was to attract protest votes and thus destroy the incumbent, so that more substantial candidates might enter in the second round, without having dirtied their hands in the process. Various names were put forward for this role, from the unknown Barry Field through the embittered Norman Lamont to the publicity-hungry Teresa Gorman. (‘I’m ready to stand if no one else will,’ she told her colleagues. ‘It’s about time we had another woman at the helm.’)
The idea of a stalking-horse, however, was a side issue; the real question was whether one of the three ‘bastards’ that Major had identified within his cabinet might be prepared to stand against him in the open at the first time of asking, thus removing the need for a stalking-horse altogether. To do so would require considerable political courage, for it couldn’t be done from within the cabinet, and resignation as a minister would guarantee becoming a political pariah should the challenge fail; it was hardly the best career move, unless there was a real chance of success. It was on the horns of that dilemma that Major wished to skewer his opponents.
There was no doubt about the identity of the principal target of the ploy. Michael Portillo had been promoted into the cabinet following the 1992 election, had now risen to become the secretary of state for employment and was very clearly the emerging star of the government. The son of an exiled Spanish Republican, he was, by the normal standards of politics, a very handsome man. ‘He preened, he spat, he flicked his hair, he pouted his luscious Latino lips,’ wrote Emma Forrest in the Sunday Times of a 1994 appearance on Question Time. ‘He is the Mick Jagger of the 1990s.’ If that was a little too effusive and extravagant when talking of a cabinet minister, it did capture some of the narcissism evident in those politicians who mistake good looks for charisma, and some of the delusion of their followers; ‘he attracts the same kind of fervour and devotion as a pop star,’ noted the BBC journalist Jon Sopel. Private Eye evoked François Mitterrand’s famous description of Margaret Thatcher (the eyes of Caligula and the mouth of Marilyn Monroe), saying Portillo had ‘the eyes of an assassin and the lips of a tyrant’.
Politically, Portillo had been very careful to position himself on the right of the party, enjoying his status as Margaret Thatcher’s anointed one. He was the latest in a long list of such sons and heirs that had once included Major himself; as far back as 1991 she had suggested that if John Major lost the next election, the answer was to ‘Skip a generation: go for Portillo.’ His heavily trailed speeches ranged far beyond his cabinet brief, but seldom ventured much deeper than a tabloid leader-column about scroungers and single mothers. ‘We must listen to the still small voice of Britain’s quiet majority,’ ran a typical passage, delivered in his disconcertingly deep, booming tones. ‘The quiet majority is dismayed by much that goes on around it: standing in the Post Office queue watching handouts going to people who seem capable of work; reading of yobbos sent on sailing cruises; being told that competition in schools is divisive or demoralising.’
Amongst the party membership, he was irresistible, seen as a younger, more right-wing Heseltine, with a similarly impressive coiffure. The foreign origins were forgiven by the faithful since he was so unequivocally opposed to the European project, while others saw a connection between these two facts; Tristan Garel-Jones likened him to ‘a Jew overcompensating for foreignness’. Beyond the party, however, he aroused deep distrust bordering on hatred, seeming to represent all that was most unpleasant about the younger Thatcherite Tories. When the comedy writers Laurence Marks and Maurice Gran were developing the idea for their sitcom The New Statesman, they approached Portillo (Marks lived in his Southgate constituency) for advice, and he happily showed them around the Commons, answering their questions. Some interpreted the broadcast result, in which Rik Mayall depicted a pushy, amoral, quasi-fascist Tory MP, swaggering and murdering his way through the ranks, as a caricature of Portillo. As his star continued to rise, the Family Cat, a North London indie group, enjoyed some success with their song ‘Bring Me the Head of Michael Portillo’.
A 1994 leader column in the Independent tried to discover what made this ‘privately courteous, publicly arrogant’ man tick, and concluded that he was ‘a peacock, but not a pea-brain, who squawks some of the crudest messages that are currently to be heard in mainstream British politics’. Hugo Young of the Guardian was no more enthused. ‘Portillo struck me as totally ambitious, utterly calculating and perhaps not as chastened as he should be by his lack of experience,’ he wrote, after meeting him. ‘It’s a long time since I’ve met a more coldly dedicated politician.’
He was also capable of foolish misjudgements. In 1994 the Sunday Telegraph revealed that to celebrate the tenth anniversary of Portillo’s arrival in Parliament, a party was being planned for a thousand people at Alexandra Palace in North London, complete with a firework display, a guest list headed by Margaret Thatcher and Norman Tebbit, and the screening of a specially commissioned film about the great man’s life, from his appearance in a Ribena advert at the age of eight onwards. Once news of the party got out, however, it was drowned in a sea of ridicule. Ten years as an MP might deserve some kind of commemoration – Virginia Bottomley had recently held a barbecue at a friend’s house to celebrate her first decade in the House – but this all seemed a touch too extravagant, smacking of hubris when humility might be more appropriate. As the Sun observed: ‘There’s nothing worse than blowing your own trumpet.’
In a state of embarrassed panic, the planning was scaled back, the fireworks cancelled, the film pulled at the last minute. Thatcher and Tebbit failed to turn up, and the five hundred or so guests who did arrive for the £30-a-head black-tie dinner had to be escorted in through the back entrance by police in riot gear, there to provide protection from a crowd of protestors armed with eggs and flour and chanting: ‘Choke on your champagne, you bastards.’ In fact, although Dom Pérignon was available, most settled for less elevated refreshments – Penfolds Bluestone Ridge from Australia (£8.50 a bottle at the cash bar) proved the most popular choice – as they tucked into an unadventurous menu of smoked salmon, fillet of beef and baked Alaska. Meanwhile a string quartet fought to be heard in the vast hall, decorated for the occasion with pink bows and purple and white balloons, before giving up the attempt and handing over to the amplified, but still tasteful, sounds of the cabaret band Tuxedo Class.
The highlight came with a slightly low-key speech from a clearly uncomfortable Portillo. ‘I could tell from the way his voice was wobbling and his leg was shaking,’ noted Gyles Brandreth, the MC for the evening, ‘that Michael was hating every second of it.’ Indeed he was. ‘It was horrible, horrible,’ he moaned in an interview some years later. ‘The whole thing was a living nightmare.’ For some of the guests, however, his mere presence was enough; one young woman was reported to have travelled down from Scotland for the occasion and was in raptures: ‘He’s an orgasmatron. I just hope I don’t faint if he talks to me.’
Despite the perceived arrogance, and the charges of insincere playing to the gallery, the last few years had been successful ones for Portillo. The entire political world knew by the end of 1994 that he was Major’s greatest potential rival, and when the prime minister announced his resignation, the call went out immediately for him to enter the lists. The Conservative Party needed ‘a man who speaks the language of the people’, announced the Sun. ‘That man is Michael Portillo. He must not be kept waiting in the wings.’ But not all Portillo’s flaws had yet been revealed, and it now transpired that his ambition was not quite as ruthless as had been assumed. He dithered and dallied, unwilling to take on the responsibility for striking the fatal blow, and eventually declared his support for Major, thereby ruling himself out of the first ballot.
Yet the right remained convinced of the need for change, and a candidate had to be found. Otherwise the Eurosceptic wing would look impotent, capable of sniping from the sidelines but unable to fight openly and honestly. So if Portillo wasn’t prepared to risk a challenge to Major, and if his colleague Peter Lilley, who did consider the possibility, was also unwilling to put his head above the parapet, who else was there?
The answer was John Redwood, who had come into the cabinet as secretary of state for Wales in the reshuffle following the departure of Norman Lamont, and who was being described in the press as ‘the cabinet’s most junior member and its resident rightwing rottweiler’. In his memoirs, Major hinted that Redwood acted because ‘he had heard gossip that there was a sporting chance that he might not survive the reshuffle planned for July’, but that was ungenerous. Redwood was a politician of deep conviction and principle, and his decision to resign from the cabinet to put himself up for the leadership took real political guts. Though little known to the public, he was still only forty-four, he had an ultra-safe constituency and he could confidently look forward to more senior posts in government.
He was, however, lacking the aura of leadership, to an even greater extent than Major. Having catapulted himself into the headlines, he now came under serious media scrutiny for the first time, and he never really recovered from the footage that was discovered of him on a platform in his early days as Welsh secretary trying to mime to ‘Hen Wlad Fy Nhadau’, the Welsh national anthem, with hilarious ineptitude. His head wobbled, his face seemed petrified into vacancy and he managed to look both feeble-minded and patronising, like an Oxford don reading a storybook to a primary-school class. But that was just a single incident, albeit one rebroadcast frequently over the period of the leadership election. The real problems came when he actually spoke. Because, although no one ever really defined it, something wasn’t quite right about Redwood’s public persona.
He was self-evidently the most constructive and gifted thinker in Major’s cabinet, the one Tory working to develop new policies that could extend the Thatcherite revolution without being enslaved to her memory. His track record was impressive; he had been one of the first to advocate privatisation of state assets, long before Thatcher herself espoused the concept, but he had later argued with her against the introduction of the poll tax. He also had a keen understanding of the aspirations of first-generation suburban families. This was the same constituency to whom Major made his pitch, but the difference between the two men was instructive: in place of Major’s apparent empathy, there was a remoteness to Redwood, a lack of warmth, an inability to communicate a sense that politics was anything more than a cerebral conundrum.
This perception was unfortunate and unfair, for Redwood was certainly a practical politician, not an abstract intellectual, but it proved impossible to shake. And it was most commonly associated with Matthew Parris’s description of him as resembling Mr Spock from Star Trek. In fact Parris did not restrict his characterisation to Redwood alone; the conceit, spread over several political sketches in The Times from 1989 onwards, was that the Conservative Party was being taken over by members of the Vulcan tendency, ‘infiltrators from a strange and distant planet’ who were ‘courteous, clever and ruthlessly logical’. Included in their ranks were Francis Maude, Peter Lilley, David Curry, Alan Howarth and Michael Portillo as well as Redwood, while in 1994 Parris revealed that the military strategists on Vulcan had now refined their design and that Tony Blair was ‘an improved version, with added charm’. It was only with Redwood, however, that the tag stuck, seeming to capture something of the awkwardness of the man.
In terms of other politicians, he was most often compared to Keith Joseph, the self-flagellating prophet of Thatcherism in the 1970s, and to Enoch Powell in his romantic reverence for the nation. But there was also an element of Tony Benn: polite, calm, uncontaminated by scandal (‘John has never been exposed to germs,’ according to a colleague) and absolutely convinced that what he was saying was blindingly obvious common sense. ‘The key to Redwood was that he had very simple views expressed in a subtle and original manner,’ wrote his adviser, Hywel Williams. ‘Hence a view of the history of England that was not so far removed from the stories of the Boys’ Own Bumper Book of History.’ When interviewed on television, Redwood exhibited a strange half-smile, suggestive of a private joke at the audience’s expense and, although those who knew him insisted he was a witty man, his attempts at humour in public mostly displayed a clumsy jocularity. He once said that he’d like to be Mr Blobby – ‘He’s nice and everyone likes him’ – but if comparison with a children’s television character was sought, then rather more accurate was Gyles Brandreth’s suggestion of Daddy Woodentop.
Major claimed in retrospect that Redwood was the ideal opponent – ‘beatable, Eurosceptic and a cabinet colleague’ – but it seems unlikely that at the time, with Portillo refusing to break cover, he was expecting such a heavyweight challenge. For despite his obvious limitations as a communicator, Redwood was a serious candidate, with a plausible alternative vision of where the Conservative Party should be heading. This was not simply a stalking-horse campaign, preparing the way for others, but the action of a man who had ideas above his station as Welsh secretary, even if these had hitherto been confined to dreams of the chancellorship. To the surprise of many, he turned out to be a fighter, and the fact that he was prepared to resign from the cabinet to battle for his beliefs won him some grudging respect.
There was, of course, little chance that Redwood would actually win – certainly he didn’t expect to do so – and none at all that he would win at the first ballot, but there was a very real danger that he could do Major sufficient damage to force the prime minister’s departure. In that event, it was assumed, Michael Heseltine and Michael Portillo would enter the race and decide the leadership between them, though the memory of 1975 – when Margaret Thatcher stood in the first round and built up sufficient head of steam to knock out supposedly more weighty candidates – was never far from the minds of protagonists, electorate or commentators.
Nor was there any possibility that a Conservative Party led by Redwood would win the next election. Indeed his own analysis was that, following the ‘decisive disaster’ of Black Wednesday, the Tories were destined to lose regardless of what they now did (a feeling shared by Major). But he was, he pointed out, one of the few who had argued against membership of the ERM from the outset; he could at least present himself as a clean pair of hands.
Redwood’s cause did go on to attract a handful of serious players, including Norman Tebbit and Iain Duncan Smith, one of the more highly regarded of the new intake of MPs, but it was the campaign launch that shaped much of the coverage that was to come. Recognisable faces alongside the candidate were in short supply – the only major figure was Lamont – and the rest looked a distinctly unimpressive crowd, dominated by Teresa Gorman in characteristically overstated outfit (a shoulder-padded, puff-sleeved jacket in vivid green, worn over a turquoise blouse) and by Tony Marlow, the man who had the previous year demanded Major’s resignation in the House of Commons and had recently called him ‘a nice guy, but a loser’. Remarkably, Marlow’s outfit overshadowed even that of Gorman, a striped blazer that, thought Major, ‘would have looked good on a cricket field in the 1890s’. In fact it was the official blazer of the Old Wellingtonian Society, reflecting the fact that, unlike Major, he was a public schoolboy. In an early indication of sympathy for Redwood’s challenge, the Daily Telegraph delicately cropped the photo of the launch to exclude Marlow.
Indeed Redwood enjoyed far more support from the press than he might have expected, though virtually everything else was against him. The stock market plunged seventy points after his announcement, with £15 billion lost in the value of shares, the cabinet remained publicly loyal to Major (though Virginia Bottomley did say she would be prepared to serve in a Redwood cabinet if asked), and a poll in The Economist showed that the Conservatives would fare even worse under Redwood than under the current prime minister. The same was true, it appeared, of Michael Portillo and Kenneth Clarke, while the best option was Michael Heseltine; with him as leader, the Labour lead would be cut, though it would still stand at nineteen percentage points.
But the dislike of Major in the Tory press meant that Redwood attracted some powerful backers. Rumours circulated that Rupert Murdoch, Viscount Rothermere and Conrad Black – proprietors of News International, Associated Newspapers and the Telegraph Group respectively – had met and decided to throw their weight against Major. Certainly Redwood met Black, in an encounter arranged by Simon Heffer, and won his qualified support. It was, though, only a temporary position. During the feverish leadership speculation the previous year, just before John Smith’s death, Portillo had met with Conrad Black in the company of Michael Spicer, who recorded in his diary that Black ‘will back Portillo and will get Murdoch alongside’.
The headlines as the ballot approached were horrendous for the prime minister. TIME TO DITCH THE CAPTAIN said the Daily Mail, REDWOOD VS DEADWOOD mocked the Sun, while the Times spelt it out on polling day: ‘Today good Conservatives should vote against Mr Major.’ Most enduring, though it played no real part in the contest at hand, was an article by Simon Jenkins in The Times that was headlined THE NASTY PARTY – the phrase captured so perfectly the public perception of the modern Conservative Party that it was to stick for a decade and more.
These papers’ overriding concern was the European Union, Britain’s membership of which was opposed by both the Canadian Conrad Black and the Australian-born American Rupert Murdoch. With Major now held to be guilty of ‘appeasement’ in relation to Europe, and with Margaret Thatcher and Norman Tebbit too far into retirement for recall, there was a need to find a new face of Euroscepticism that would be acceptable to the public; the logic was thus to build up Redwood as Major’s assassin, enabling Portillo to emerge from the ensuing fray and lead Britain away from the EU.
There was therefore considerable excitement when it was discovered that Portillo’s supporters were preparing a campaign headquarters for him. In anticipation of the contest going to a second ballot, a bank of phone lines were installed in – and furniture removed from – a house in Lord North Street in Westminster that had been earmarked for Portillo’s use. It was a development that brought one of Major’s better jokes. Asked at prime minister’s questions about the indecent haste with which twenty telephones were being installed, he replied merely that the speed of the operation was ‘a tribute to privatisation’.
Those phone lines proved unnecessary. When the MPs were balloted on 4 July 1995, John Major secured just about enough support to survive as leader. He registered 218 votes, with 89 voting for John Redwood and 22 abstaining. Though far from impressive – a third of the parliamentary party had failed to support their leader – it was nevertheless a technical victory. Major had privately set himself a minimum of 215 votes and just about scraped over his own hurdle. ‘It was not really enough,’ he reflected later, ‘but it was three votes too many to allow me to walk away.’
This being a secret ballot, the dissidents had no obligation to out themselves, and only twenty-eight did so. As Redwood identified, however, many of those who supported him were from marginal constituencies, where the need to find a new leader was at its most acute. Even amongst those who voted for Major, enthusiasm was not always apparent; he was merely ‘the least worst option’, according to transport minister Steven Norris.
Major’s own comments revealed how beleaguered he felt, with the press in open opposition to him. ‘The election has been decided by MPs in Westminster, not by commentators outside,’ he said, and the Daily Telegraph, one of his chief tormentors, conceded the point: ‘It is healthy for democracy when MPs, or the electorate at large, force a spell of humility upon the scribblers.’ Rupert Murdoch’s papers weren’t such good losers. ‘Yesterday Conservative MPs threw away their last best opportunity to win the next general election,’ seethed The Times, while the Sun gave up all hope of the party: CHICKENS HAND IT TO BLAIR ran their headline.
Indeed the outcome of the vote was received with glee by the Labour leader – ‘That’s perfect, exactly the result we want’ – though it was the narrowness of the victory rather than the identity of the winner that counted. Far from strengthening Major’s position, the episode left him looking even more wounded. ‘None of us could help cheering,’ noted Peter Mandelson, of the response of those gathered in Blair’s office to hear the result. ‘It was a rather brilliant tactic,’ Tony Blair was later to write of the resignation and re-election, but ‘Major made the same error as Labour had in the 1980s: he appealed for unity rather than a mandate. So the bold tactic was not accompanied by a bold strategy.’ There was some truth in the analogy, though at least Labour had waited until it was in opposition before really settling down to internecine warfare. The Tories had this period of self-indulgence yet to come.
‘My re-election ended the frenzy in the party, but not the conflict,’ was Major’s mature verdict on the episode, though he also admitted that, had he not jumped the gun, he would have faced a leadership challenge that autumn and would probably not have won. Whether a change of leader would have served the party any better, however, is doubtful. Major did at least have a proven track record, having succeeded against the odds in 1992, and no other potential candidate could claim a remotely comparable achievement. Heseltine seemed like a more popular option, and would have been more combative in taking the fight to Blair, but he too would have struggled to unite a party determined to be divided. ‘I don’t think it settled anything,’ reflected Iain Duncan Smith of Major’s gamble. ‘He said it was to clear the air, but you never clear the air of something like that, it is unclearable. It didn’t win with the public, because the public believed that that was it: the government was no longer in control of its destiny.’
Meanwhile John Redwood returned to the back benches not quite in triumph but certainly with his reputation on the right enhanced. He set up a think tank, Conservative 2000, under the leadership of his former adviser, Hywel Williams, to generate new policy initiatives, and he continued to argue for his view of where the Tories should be heading. In any future leadership contest, he was now certain to be a candidate, even if he hadn’t quite eclipsed the claim of Michael Portillo to the succession, and even if he was still regarded with suspicion by many Thatcher loyalists (‘slightly loopy’, was Alan Clark’s assessment).
In the mini-reshuffle that followed the election, Heseltine was promoted to deputy prime minister and first secretary of state, and given wide-ranging authority over other departments. He set up a presentation committee that was intended to coordinate initiatives and announcements, though the fact that no such body already existed was something of a comment on the government’s management thus far. Both he and Major denied that his career advancement was the result of any pre-contest deal between the two men, though inevitably that was how it was seen; it was ‘some kind of Faustian bargain,’ reflected Major’s press secretary, Christopher Meyer, ‘but I could never work out who was Faust and who the Devil.’
The other major development, though its significance was not yet obvious, was the promotion of William Hague to take over from Redwood as Welsh secretary. At the age of thirty-four, Hague became the youngest cabinet minister of the twentieth century.
If the main impression of the Conservative Party was now one of disunity, it was compounded by a growing reputation for corruption, potentially threatening the perception of politics in Britain more widely. This was regularly lumped in with all the sexual improprieties under the banner headline of sleaze, though as with the Back to Basics circus, some of the stories were less important than others.
They included a 1994 Sunday Times campaign in which undercover reporters, posing as businessmen, approached twenty MPs with the offer of £1,000 in exchange for putting down a question in Parliament. All refused save for two Conservatives, Graham Riddick and David Tredinnick, who accepted the proposal, only to find themselves featured prominently in the paper the following week. There was some justifiable resentment amongst Tories of the tactics used; it was little more than entrapment, in the same way that plain-clothes police officers had once loitered in public lavatories, hoping to provoke homosexual men into making an approach – though, in this instance, there was little condemnation from the liberal left. It was even possible to see the results of the investigation as being relatively reassuring, since they revealed that 90 per cent of the sampled MPs (and one had to assume that it was a targeted selection) were honest; of the two MPs who did accept the offer, Riddick thought better of it later, and had already returned the cheque before the story was printed.
Among the more serious cases were those centring on the controversial figure of Mohammed Al-Fayed. In 1985 Al-Fayed and his brothers had bought the Harrods department store in a deal that prompted an investigation by the Department of Trade and Industry. When that investigation finally reported in 1990, it was critical of the brothers and, while it did not recommend that any action be taken, it did somewhat tarnish their image, concluding that they had ‘misrepresented their origins, wealth and business interests’. The story really took off, though, in October 1994 when Al-Fayed claimed that, during the 1980s, Ian Greer, the lobbyist he had retained to represent his interests, had asked for money in order to acquire the services of a couple of Conservative MPs, Neil Hamilton and Tim Smith, so that they might ask questions in the House on his behalf. The cash was said to have been passed on in what were always referred to as ‘brown envelopes’, a phrase that had overtones of the ‘plain brown wrappers’ in which pornography was traditionally posted.
In another phrase that stuck in the public consciousness, Al-Fayed alleged that Greer had said: ‘You need to rent an MP just like you rent a London taxi.’ Al-Fayed added: ‘Every month we got a bill for parliamentary services and it would vary from £8,000 to £10,000, depending on the number of questions.’ Both Hamilton and Smith were now ministers, and were obliged to resign, with Smith admitting that he had indeed taken Al-Fayed’s money (though not via Greer). Hamilton, on the other hand, denied the allegations; he and Greer issued writs against the Guardian, which had broken the story, although they withdrew their case in 1996. It was not, however, the end of the matter.
Also caught up in Al-Fayed’s orbit was Jonathan Aitken, the chief secretary to the Treasury, who was accused – again by the Guardian, this time in conjunction with the ITV programme World in Action– of some dubious business dealings, including a stay at the Fayed-owned Paris Ritz hotel, paid for by a Saudi businessman. There were further allegations that the arms company, BMARC, of which Aitken was a non-executive director, had broken an arms embargo on Iran in the 1980s. ‘He was a man with whom one could do business,’ Michael Heseltine noted drily of Aitken. ‘Unfortunately, others felt the same and there arose a series of allegations about his business relationships, especially in the Middle East.’ Aitken too launched a libel action against both the Guardian and World in Action, issuing a clarion cry that was to come back to haunt him: ‘If it falls to me to start a fight to cut out the cancer of bent and twisted journalism in our country with the simple sword of truth and the trusty shield of British fair play, so be it. I am ready for the fight.’
As these stories broke, an opinion poll in October 1994 found 61 per cent of the public agreeing with the statement that ‘the Tories these days give the impression of being very sleazy and disreputable’. If it had been only individual MPs, such tales might have made little impact on the public; it was less fun to read about a politician seemingly found with his hand in the till than one caught with his trousers down. They acquired greater significance, however, for coming in the wake of the much more serious arms-to-Iraq affair.
The story started in October 1989, shortly after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, when three directors of Matrix Churchill, a machine tools company based in Coventry, were charged with having supplied parts to Iraq which, it was suggested, could have been used for making munitions. Such sales were potentially in breach of a United Nations embargo and of British government regulations, introduced earlier in the decade, banning the export of lethal equipment to either side in the Iran–Iraq War.
The resulting controversy hinged on the use of public interest immunity certificates (PIIs), a procedure that required a minister to sign a paper requesting that certain documents should not be made available in a courtroom for reasons of national security. These became known – largely thanks to the persistence of Labour’s Robin Cook – as ‘gagging orders’, though that was slightly misleading; it was up to the judge in a case to decide whether or not to act upon a PII, and although in practice the presumption was likely to be in the government’s favour, no politician had the right to demand silence.
In the Matrix Churchill case, which came to court in 1992, several PII certificates were issued, and their effect was to prevent the defendants from arguing that the government both knew and approved of what they were doing, the regulations having been secretly relaxed. Their case rested upon the claim that the Ministry of Defence had knowingly helped them to evade restrictions on arms exports to Iraq, but in the absence of the relevant documentation, this would be hard to prove. On the government’s side, the argument was that intelligence secrets had to be protected at all costs; indeed one of the defendants was himself working unpaid for British intelligence. But there was a general suspicion that this had nothing to do with national security and everything to do with avoiding embarrassment for the government and the civil service. Michael Heseltine at the Department of Trade and Industry was prevailed upon to sign a PII relating to a time before his incumbency, though he insisted: ‘The more I looked through the files, the more appalled I was.’ He later said that it seemed ‘everyone knew’ what was going on.
It was, however, a previous minister in the department who brought the sorry episode to an end. Alan Clark, a man who, in Geoffrey Howe’s memorable phrase, ‘couldn’t see an apple-cart without wanting to overturn it’, gave an interview admitting the truth: that he saw it as his job to encourage exports ‘despite guidelines which I regarded as tiresome and intrusive’, and that as far as he was concerned, ‘the interests of the West were well served by Iran and Iraq fighting each other’. He subsequently acknowledged in court that he had knowingly helped the Matrix Churchill directors obtain an export licence, in defiance of the arms embargo, by being ‘economical with the actualité’. The trial collapsed, amidst much talk of cover-up and conspiracy.
There was a suggestion that Clark might be prosecuted for giving false evidence in his original written statement in the case, but – with his usual flair for escapology – he ended up as the hero of the hour. Had it not been for the belated honesty of his testimony, the public believed, the government would happily have seen the men go to jail (they faced a possible sentence of up to seven years) rather than own up to its collusion in the sales of arms to Iraq, a country that had waged a genocidal war against its Kurdish minority population. ‘How can they believe this of people like Michael [Heseltine] and me?’ protested John Major, but sadly the truth was that even he was looking tainted by the relentless media focus on sleaze.
Major set up an inquiry under a high court judge, Richard Scott, to which he himself gave evidence that failed to enhance his image. ‘I can’t be expected to read everything,’ he complained, to little public sympathy. ‘He came out,’ concluded Giles Radice, ‘with little respect left. “Don’t blame me, I’m just the PM” might be the best summing up of his approach.’ The former foreign secretary, Geoffrey Howe, also gave evidence, explaining – in words that deserved to become as notorious as Clark’s phrase – that the government hadn’t announced its change in policy after the Iran–Iraq War ended in 1988 because of ‘the extremely emotional way in which such debates are debated in public’.
Worse still for the government, the inquiry dragged on for years and did not report until 1996, ensuring that the story remained alive well beyond what would normally have been its expiry date. To keep the pot boiling, a judicial review in 1994 concluded that the Thatcher government’s provision of funds for a project to build the Pergau Dam in Malaysia had been unlawful, a misallocation of overseas development money in reciprocation for an arms deal. Although this happened before Major’s time, it implicated his former foreign secretary, Douglas Hurd, and further added to the perception of dishonesty.
When Scott’s report did finally emerge, it was a vast document comprising a million words and 2,400 pages, without a summary and couched in the most convoluted language. ‘I accept the genuineness of his belief that he was personally, as opposed to constitutionally, blameless,’ wrote Scott of Nicholas Lyell, the attorney general. ‘But I do not accept that he was not personally at fault.’ Parliament had been ‘designedly’ misled, but ministers had not ‘acted with any duplicitous intent’. Other parts revealed that the careful circumlocutions of Yes, Minister, which had so entertained the nation in the previous decade, were rooted in reality; the danger of the truth being found out was translated into civil service jargon as: ‘we could find ourselves in a presentational difficulty.’
In such a morass of meaning, it was hard to pin down any specific criticisms, and the government – in the form of Ian Lang, who had succeeded Heseltine as president of the Board of Trade – managed to find enough material to feel able to claim: ‘There was no conspiracy. There was no cover up.’ William Waldegrave was amongst those ministers criticised, though he professed himself unconcerned: ‘It will be hairy for ten days. But that will be all.’ The political response was to quote selectively from Scott’s words and thus claim that a clean bill of health had been given. Civil servants colluded with this spin operation, issuing a Cabinet Office paper that blandly, and misleadingly, stated: ‘Answers given to Parliamentary questions gave an accurate description of the government’s policy on exports to Iran and Iraq.’
A subsequent Commons debate was dominated by a bravura performance by the shadow foreign secretary, Robin Cook, who – having had very little time to absorb the report – broadened the attack to take in the whole of ‘an arrogant government that has been around too long to remember it is accountable to the people’. It was ‘one of the most startling speeches I have ever heard in the House,’ wrote Paddy Ashdown. ‘Quite the best piece of debating I have ever seen, and a Parliamentary occasion to match Geoffrey Howe’s resignation speech.’ So rattled was the government that yet another threat of a confidence motion was required in order to secure a majority, albeit by just one vote.
But the government did survive and no ministers resigned over the issue. Nor was anyone prosecuted, though the perception remained that ministers and civil servants had facilitated a breach of regulations, perhaps believing that in pursuit of foreign earnings the country could not afford what Alan Clark called ‘the luxuries of moral posturing’.
Such episodes further damaged John Major and the Conservatives. It was probably true that the party’s standing with the public was already at an all-time low, but the appearance of being, in Paddy Ashdown’s words, ‘grubby and wheedling’ certainly helped keep it there. Even the phraseology was unfortunate. Clark’s expression ‘economical with the actualité’ derived from the cabinet secretary, Robert Armstrong, in 1986. Giving evidence in the government’s attempt to ban Peter Wright’s book Spycatcher, Armstrong had spoken of the need sometimes to be ‘economical with the truth’ and, although the phrase was not new, it attached itself to the Tories, all the more so now that Clark had revived it. By the mid-1990s, it had been transmuted, in the hands of comic novelist Tristan Hawkins, into ‘being conservative with the truth’.
As the scandals mounted, Major responded in 1994 by appointing Lord Nolan to head a committee on standards in public life, charged with leading an inquiry into the outside financial interests of politicians, civil servants and members of quangos. The committee reported in May 1995 with a broadly positive message – ‘much of the public anxiety about standards of conduct in public life is based upon perceptions and beliefs which are not supported by the facts’ – and an uncontroversial list of attributes that should be exercised by those in office: selflessness, integrity, objectivity, accountability, openness, honesty and leadership. It also, however, brought forward fifty-five recommendations that included a ban on MPs working for lobbying companies, the full disclosure of all extra-parliamentary income and the ending of MPs’ self-regulation, to be replaced by a newly created Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards.
The proposals raised the hackles of many members. ‘We in this House know far more of what is going on with our fellow members than any bureaucrat brought in from outside,’ protested Edward Heath, to loud cheers from the Tory back benches. ‘I deeply resent the inference in Nolan that all of us are crooks,’ added the respected MP Anthony Steen. That hadn’t actually been Nolan’s message, but such protestations helped fix the idea in the minds of the public that it might well have been so. Insisting, correctly, that implementation of Nolan was a matter for Parliament, not the government, Major allowed a free vote in the subsequent debate, and twenty Tory members joined the whipped opposition MPs in accepting the proposals. It was undoubtedly another political victory for Labour, and did nothing to remove the impression of corruption which had so indelibly tainted the Conservatives.
Nolan also voiced concern about the way in which ministers who had been responsible for privatising various industries seemed destined, once they had left office, to end up on the boards of the resulting companies, so that Norman Fowler, Peter Walker and Norman Tebbit, for example, found paid employment with National Freight, British Gas and British Telecom respectively. Similarly John Wakeham, the former energy secretary who had been responsible for privatising the electricity industry, was appointed to the board of NM Rothschild, a bank that had advised regional power companies during that process. ‘What is really sleazy,’ wrote Richard Littlejohn in the Sun, ‘is the number of Tories sticking their noses into a trough they have created themselves.’
Some of these appointments dated back to the days of Margaret Thatcher’s premiership, but the controversy over them remained, particularly as a storm grew over the remuneration being offered to the heads of privatised companies. Huge profits were being made and much of the money appeared to be finding its way into the pockets of directors. In 1991 it was reported that, amongst other cases, the chief executive of PowerGen had enjoyed a pay rise of over 250 per cent in two years, prompting Frank Dobson, the shadow energy secretary, to promise that a future Labour government would impose pay controls on those he referred to as ‘fat cats’. Since many of those in such positions were the people who had been running the companies when they were in public ownership, the argument that high pay was needed to attract the best candidates seemed not to apply. ‘You’re doing the same job you used to do before privatisation,’ spits Pascoe at an executive of Mid-Yorks Water, in Reginald Hill’s novel On Beulah Height. ‘And if what they paid you then was peanuts, what’s that make you now but a monkey with a bloated bank balance?’
The popular perception that the government looked after its own was widespread. In ‘An Innocent Man’, a 1994 episode of Pie in the Sky, ‘an old hippy’ who has become ‘a very rich bastard’ bids unsuccessfully for one of the new rail franchises. A colleague advises him: ‘Join the Tory Party. Give them a hundred grand, and you might squeak in, “Sir” Duncan.’ It was also noted that politicians’ wives seemed to get more than their fair share of plum jobs. ‘We should ask why the Tories put so many of their wives on quangos,’ suggests Helen in Drop the Dead Donkey, and Henry provides an answer: ‘It’s so their wives are out while they’re shagging their mistresses.’
These arguments – about Tory ministers on boards, about profits and about salaries – were brought together by Gordon Brown in 1993, as he called for a one-off tax on the privatised companies to be used to subsidise job creation schemes. ‘We are unearthing a scandal,’ he said, linking the issue to a broader Labour theme of standards in public life. It was a highly effective line of attack, especially when attached to Dobson’s ‘fat cats’ phrase, and by 1995 the Daily Mirror, which had been making much of the running, was able to declare that this was ‘the number one issue in the country’.
Labour was no longer proposing to curb remuneration in the private sector, but the stories of massive pay rises continued, with Cedric Brown of British Gas coming in for particular condemnation as he took a 75 per cent increase in late 1994, soon after 25,000 workers were laid off by the company. The political damage to the Conservatives was considerable. ‘Government was powerless,’ admitted Michael Heseltine, ‘but the criticism was nonetheless intense and damaging.’ Meanwhile the idea of a so-called ‘windfall tax’ – borrowed without attribution from Thatcher’s first term, when it had been applied to bank profits – had taken root.
A suspicion was growing that during the hard times of the recession, those at the top of business had been protected, and that now recovery was under way, they were taking every opportunity to line their pockets. Even when wrongdoing occurred, it felt to many as though appropriate punishment was not forthcoming. The trial of four men for fraudulent dealings in shares of the brewer Guinness produced guilty verdicts in 1990, but the chief executive of the company, Ernest Saunders, served just ten months of his five-year sentence, after an appeal judge accepted that he was suffering from premature Alzheimer’s disease. Happily, the symptoms of this appalling condition eased with his release.
In 1993 Asil Nadir, a businessman whose Polly Peck company had collapsed a couple of years earlier and who had been a major donor to Tory funds, fled to Northern Cyprus rather than face sixty-six charges of theft and fraud. Not only did he thus evade justice, but he also caused the resignation of a Northern Ireland minister, Michael Mates, who had written to the attorney general complaining about Nadir’s treatment. Mates had also, in ‘a light-hearted gesture’, given the failed businessman a watch inscribed with the message: ‘Don’t let the buggers get you down.’
Labour had its own embarrassing associations, most notably with its former MP Robert Maxwell. As the proprietor of the Daily and Sunday Mirror, Maxwell had become a major figure in British public life during the 1980s and, despite widespread concern that he was not entirely scrupulous in his business practices, he was feted by politicians. In November 1991 his body was found floating off the Canary Islands, after he fell – or possibly jumped – from his yacht. ‘This is truly tragic news,’ lamented Labour leader Neil Kinnock. ‘Bob Maxwell was a unique figure who attracted controversy, envy and loyalty in great measure throughout his rumbustious life.’
After Maxwell’s death, it emerged that the scale of his misbehaviour had been massively underestimated; hundreds of millions of pounds had been appropriated from the Mirror Group’s pension funds to bail out a company that was in deep financial problems. He was indeed a crook and a fraud, despite the denials issued by his writ-happy lawyers and printed in his papers. His connections with Labour would surface from time to time, but seldom in a way that actually damaged the party, mostly because Maxwell was such a larger-than-life character that he was easily recast in the public mind as an absurd pantomime villain. A year after his death, he was featuring as the punchline to ‘A Bigger Splash’, an episode of The New Statesman. Here he is shown to have faked his own death, only to find himself in a crate being thrown off his yacht, which by now is owned by Alan B’Stard.
Such jovial treatment was not extended to the Conservatives. With his ministers continuing to be washed away by the waves of sexual and financial sleaze, Major was in a hopeless position. And still the sniping from the right continued.
Shortly before his re-election as Tory leader, Margaret Thatcher had published the second volume of her memoirs, The Path to Power. The story ended on page 461 with her 1979 election victory, but there followed a further 150 or so pages about her time after leaving office, many of which were devoted to attacking her successor’s performance. ‘The problem with John Major’s alternative approach,’ she explained, running through the Maastricht Treaty saga one more time, was that ‘it left the fundamental problems unresolved’. Hers was not a noticeably helpful intervention, though the response of Major loyalists only stoked the fire still further: off-the-record briefings by senior Tories described the former prime minister as ‘an irrelevance’, ‘out of touch’ and ‘suffering the effects of sour grapes’, which served to infuriate those who still venerated her.
Under continuing pressure, and with the leadership election results showing how large the problem was within the parliamentary party, Major began to modify his tone and then his position on Europe. ‘We are all Eurosceptics now,’ gloated Norman Lamont in a speech on the fringe of the 1995 Conservative conference. The following year came the crucial decision, a public commitment that there would be a referendum before Britain joined the proposed single currency. ‘His own intellectual analysis of Britain’s interests remained the same,’ reflected Douglas Hurd, ‘but he would no longer show any personal enthusiasm for the EU.’ Kenneth Clarke, the leading Europhile in the cabinet, was saddened by the new stance. ‘The truth is,’ he noted, ‘that, privately, John Major has changed his mind. He’s changed sides.’
Clarke himself came under pressure, as media stories circulated that he was threatening to resign over the issue of Europe and that Brian Mawhinney, chairman of the Conservative Party, was flirting with the idea of ‘new chancellor, new chance’. Clarke reportedly told Mawhinney to stop briefing the press, coining the memorable phrase: ‘Tell your kids to get their scooters of my lawn.’ (It was an allusion to Harold Wilson’s 1969 words to the engineering union leader Hugh Scanlon, during pay negotiations: ‘Hughie, get your tanks off my lawn.’) Clarke was subsequently obliged to issue a statement to the effect that he had no intention of resigning as chancellor; the announcement itself revealed how much damage the government had sustained.
Others who shared Clarke’s dismay at the way things were going proved to be less loyal, and several defections by MPs reduced still further the government’s majority. In 1995 Alan Howarth, who had been a minister for education and science until the 1992 election, became the first Tory MP to defect straight to Labour, while later that year Emma Nicholson also crossed the floor to become a Liberal Democrat, explaining that the Conservative Party now seemed ‘class-ridden, prejudiced, fratricidal and distanced in ignorance from the mass of the people’. Always on the liberal wing, Nicholson had nevertheless given the appearance of being a solid, traditional pearls-and-twinset Tory – if there was no room for her in the modern Conservatives, it didn’t augur well for the party. A couple of months later Peter Thurnham, MP for a marginal Bolton constituency, announced that he had resigned the whip and was now an independent Conservative; he too subsequently joined the Liberal Democrats.
The sense of hopelessness touched even those not yet in Parliament. Alan Clark had chosen not to stand for re-election in 1992, but had been regretting that decision ever since and was actively seeking a constituency that would be prepared to take him on, despite his controversial reputation. His moment came in the autumn of 1996 when Nicholas Scott, the MP for Kensington and Chelsea, was found lying drunk and unconscious in a gutter in Bournemouth during the Conservative conference. Scott was subsequently deselected as the candidate by his local party and replaced by Clark. How committed Clark was to the cause, however, was doubtful. ‘What I hope, quite firmly now,’ he wrote in his diary, ‘is that the Tory Party is smashed to pieces and a huge number of people lose their seats. Then, at last perhaps, my particular brand of radicalism can grow.’
Others who stayed outwardly loyal were also committing treason in their hearts. ‘There are bad moments when I pray that Blair wins with a big majority to get this shower out,’ confided Edwina Currie to her diary in 1996. Michael Portillo, it seemed, was not prepared to wait for such an eventuality. Having been promoted to defence secretary in the reshuffle following Major’s re-election, he electrified the 1995 conference with a speech that encapsulated his public persona. It was a transparent bid for his future leadership, using the defence brief as a loose metaphor for his other concerns, particularly the European Union, which, he mocked, would soon want to ‘harmonise uniforms and cap badges, or even to metricate them’, and would seek to impose a forty-hour working week on British forces. But he also took in education – calling for the teaching of British history, ‘the real history of heroes and bravery, of good versus evil, of freedom against tyranny, of Nelson, Wellington and Churchill’ – and hinted heavily at his opposition to the single currency, as well as insisting that Britain would not join a ‘single European army’. British troops were prepared to die ‘for Britain, not for Brussels’, he declared, momentarily forgetting the role of the Welsh Guards in liberating that city in 1944 and the contribution made to the defeat of Nazism by the Free Belgian Forces based in Britain.
He ended with a notorious peroration: ‘Around the world three letters send a chill down the spine of the enemy: SAS. And those letters spell out one clear message: don’t mess with Britain.’ This was not quite so gratuitous a reference as it was portrayed; the European Court had recently ruled that the SAS’s shooting of three IRA activists in Gibraltar in 1988 had been in contravention of the terrorists’ human rights. Even so, it appeared a little presumptuous – and inappropriate, given his own timidity in the leadership election – when he appropriated the motto of the regiment, ‘Who Dares Wins’, for his resounding conclusion: ‘We dare. We will win.’
It all went down a storm in the conference hall, and won a huge standing ovation, but few others were impressed. ‘Cheap and nasty,’ decided the Daily Mirror, while Andrew Marr wrote of how ‘grown newspapermen were slack-jawed and white-faced at the sheer gung-ho relish with which he took on the factual world and defeated it with overwhelming verbal force’. Jacques Santer, the president of the European Commission, was said to have found the speech ‘deplorable’ and ‘grotesque’, John Redwood dismissed it as ‘rabble-rousing’, and Leon Brittan – former Tory home secretary and now an EU commissioner – was outraged: ‘He has damaged the Conservative image and he has actually damaged himself.’ Most worryingly, many senior army officers and SAS sources shared those views. Even Portillo was a little embarrassed by himself, according to Gyles Brandreth who bumped into him on the evening of the speech: ‘He knows he went too far. He’s had a good summer, been taken seriously, impressed and surprised the brass hats. This devalues the currency.’
The speech did, however, allow Portillo to regain from Redwood the mantle of the right’s favoured candidate for the succession. It was his name that was again mentioned most often, although the prospect of a leadership challenge was fast receding. Officially there was an election for the leader’s job every autumn, even if this was seldom enacted and the incumbent was assumed to have been returned unopposed. In a pre-emptive strike, the executive of the backbench 1922 Committee announced in February 1996 that, with a general election impending, that provision would be suspended for one year. This was presumably intended to silence the whispers, though in fact it merely allowed for the emergence of a new rumour: that John Major would voluntarily step down in favour of Heseltine before the election.
But most of the stories were now about the battle that would follow the widely expected defeat at the ballot boxes, with new names emerging at Westminster and in the press on a regular basis. Malcolm Rifkind, Michael Howard, Michael Forsyth, Stephen Dorrell, Kenneth Clarke – all joined the proposed list of candidates, alongside the familiar nominations of Heseltine and Portillo. The Times even allowed room for William Rees-Mogg, its former editor, to float the outlandish suggestion that Alan Clark might be the man for the job: ‘he is rash, amusing, grand, Eurosceptic, outspoken, scandalous, clever, arrogant, the extraordinary rather than the ordinary.’ (Rees-Mogg’s inability to foresee the future had long been a standing joke at Private Eye, though the best gag came from Boris Johnson, who once wrote of him that he ‘has predicted twelve of the last two recessions’.)
The rumours grew into open speculation during that final year before the general election, which was now widely expected to be held in May 1997. This was the last possible date that Major could call it, and the assumption was that he was holding on in the hope that the public might change minds that had been made up years ago. The Tories had been behind in the opinion polls since Black Wednesday and the gap between them and Labour was now hitting levels in excess of thirty-five percentage points, with over half the country saying they were going to vote for Tony Blair’s party.
Yet for almost exactly the same period, the economy had been growing. The recession that had opened the decade had long since come to an end, and the opinion polls showed that the public understood that to be the case. But they gave no credit to the Tories, believing that, in John Redwood’s words, ‘the recovery took place in spite of rather than because of the government’s policies’.
Part of the problem was that the price of that recession had been so painful, as Major admitted: ‘Unemployment rose from 1.75 million on the day I became prime minister to a peak of just under three million.’ This was the price that had apparently been worth paying for getting inflation under control, and, in this respect at least, it had been a success; although there was no prospect of a return to full employment, the high rates of inflation, once so familiar, had been vanquished and did not reappear. Keeping inflation at bay during the subsequent recovery was seen by some as a tribute to the work of Kenneth Clarke as chancellor of the exchequer – the combination of growth and low inflation had last been achieved under Roy Jenkins back in the 1960s – but it brought its own problems. Annual wage increases were smaller and, though this merely reflected low price rises, the illusion of a fast-growing pay packet wasn’t in evidence to help build what was known in the jargon of the time as ‘the feelgood factor’.
Economic growth did, however, feed into the mood of the country in other areas, and it helped shape the celebratory nature of the national culture in the mid-1990s. Unfortunately for the government, the political benefits from the good times were enjoyed almost entirely by the Labour Party, with Tony Blair being widely regarded as the prime minister in waiting; there was a simple impatience with the Tories that they didn’t know when to leave the stage for the rightful incumbent. Perhaps the last hope for the Tories was that England might win Euro 96 and send the country into a fever of patriotic rejoicing, with the government deriving some vicarious credit. Alastair Campbell was among those attending the semi-final, where ‘for political reasons I found myself rooting privately for Germany’, and noted that Major looked ‘a bit ashen’ as England fell at the penultimate hurdle. The corresponding relief in the Labour camp was summed up by Blair: ‘Jetzt sind die Tories gefuckt.’
The real reason why the Conservatives got no thanks for the recovery, however, was that by now they were getting no credit at all for anything from anyone, with the possible exception of Inspector Morse, who experienced ‘a wholly unprecedented sense of gratitude to the Tory government for its reform of the Sunday licensing laws’. Everyone knew that the end was coming for John Major, no matter how long he waited for the polls to turn. This time he knew it too and, unlike 1992, he had no faith in victory. He was ‘mildly depressed’, observed Tristan Garel-Jones. ‘At times, I can’t conceal it, he gets into black despair, very black moments.’
Signs of the government’s unpopularity were everywhere evident. Just before kick-off in an England rugby international at Twickenham, an announcement was made on the public address system that Virginia Bottomley was present and a chorus of boos and jeers was heard from every corner of the ground. The Labour MP Dennis Turner, who had once been a bingo caller, revealed that the call for the number 10, which had been ‘Major’s Den’ (following on from the better known ‘Maggie’s Den’), had now changed to ‘Blair’s Lair’. A 1995 film of a book by Sister Helen Prejean had popularised the phrase Dead Man Walking and it was hard to resist applying those words to the prime minister. Even Edwina Currie, on the day before the election was called, was talking openly about the need for a clean and quick leadership race after the coming defeat: ‘If there’s going to be a contest, please John, please don’t make us hang around.’
As the general election approached, there was finally a feelgood factor abroad, though it was hardly of the kind Major had hoped for. ‘As I look around me, I see more and more faint traces of a smile on people’s faces,’ wrote Armando Iannucci. It came, he concluded, from the knowledge that ‘very soon the whole damn load of clammy, innumerate, Europhobic, rate-capping, utility whoring, supergun smuggling, wayward penised carcasses who’ve been incompetently slabbering around the corridors of power for the last eighteen years will be really, actually and measurably out on their arses for ever’.