‘Things can only get better’
A tidal wave has burst over the Conservative Party tonight, and it’s not a matter of putting your finger in the dike. The sea wall is collapsing all around us.
David Mellor (1997)
It is a great rising up of we, the nation, against all the greed, lack of principles and of respect for real people and their problems.
Helen Fielding, Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason (1999)
Because I haven’t always been a Conservative, I know how a lot of people see us. People loathe the Tories. That’s why we lost.
Daniel Finkelstein (1997)
In August 1992, during John Major’s glorious summer between the landslide election vote and the disaster of Black Wednesday, nineteen Tories, both MPs and officials from Conservative Central Office, flew out to America to attend the National Convention of the Republican Party in Houston, Texas. There was something of a valedictory tone to the gathering, with a final appearance by Richard Nixon, the most controversial president of recent times, and the last-ever speech by Ronald Reagan, the man who had – with Margaret Thatcher – dominated western politics in the previous decade. Many feared that it might also prove a farewell for the incumbent president. With an election just ten weeks away, George Bush was trailing in the opinion polls, some considerable distance behind his younger, more charismatic Democrat rival, Bill Clinton.
In this company, the visiting Tories were greeted as loyal allies in the cause, especially in light of the story (denied by the British government) that the Home Office had been prevailed upon to check its files, seeking any dirt there might be on Clinton from his days as a Rhodes scholar at Oxford. They were also received as conquering heroes for having triumphed against the odds earlier in the year. The Conservative Party organisation was ‘half a generation ahead of anything in the United States’, enthused the senior Republican congressman, Newt Gingrich, and there was much that the Americans could learn from their British friends. How much was actually learnt, however, was unclear, for George Bush was subsequently unseated by Clinton. And by the time of the presidential election, Major’s moment in the sun had passed; it seemed entirely in keeping with his new image as the unluckiest man in British politics that his party had been seen so ostentatiously to have backed a loser.
That election, though, was not exactly a resounding success for the Democrats. Clinton won with just 43 per cent, the lowest share gained by a winning candidate in modern times, making him the first president since Nixon in 1968 to be elected on less than half the vote. His victory was less an endorsement of his campaign than a reflection of the way that Bush haemorrhaged support to the wild-card candidate, businessman Ross Perot, who secured the largest third-party turnout in eighty years. Clinton in fact attracted a lower share than had his predecessor as Democrat candidate, Michael Dukakis, when losing in 1988.
Nonetheless, it was a welcome win for the centre-left, the first time the Democrats had taken the White House since 1976, at a time when the Republicans were irredeemably tainted by the Watergate scandal, ending a run of defeats almost as long as that endured by the Labour Party. If the British right had turned out to have nothing to teach their American counterparts, maybe there were things to be learned in the other direction on the left. And so, in January 1993, as Clinton took office, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, the rising stars of Labour, made their way across the Atlantic to pay tribute and to see if their party could benefit from the new president’s experience. They were followed shortly afterwards by Peter Mandelson.
The key lessons, it appeared, were to distance the party from its past image and to avoid anything so definite as a policy, so that one might instead confound one’s opponents with a moving target. In the days after his election, one of Clinton’s close aides said that his first task was to demonstrate ‘that things are going to be different, that these are new Democrats and that he has a positive agenda for change’. That phrase ‘new Democrats’ stuck in the minds of the British visitors. So too did the concept of triangulation, whereby the left-wing and right-wing positions on an issue were worked out and a place found distinct from the two, the alternatives being vehemently denounced as extremist. This process didn’t necessarily mean that a midway position should be adopted; if Labour had traditionally been seen as insufficiently tough on low-level crime, for example, then the answer was to outflank the Tories on the right.
This was the tactical expression of what was becoming known as the Third Way, an increasingly popular political concept in the English-speaking world that promised to blend free-market economics with a leftist social policy of ‘fairness’, though its exact definition remained obscure at best. In an attempt to explore what it meant, several conferences were to be held over the next few years, including a major gathering staged in New York in 1998, which was addressed by Blair, Clinton, the Bulgarian president, Peter Stoyanov, and the Italian prime minister, Romano Prodi; amongst those attending was Christopher Meyer, now the British ambassador to America, who concluded that ‘the Third Way was less a coherent philosophy of government, more a tactic for election-winning’.
On their return to Britain in 1993, Blair and Brown found that their enthusiasm for Clinton’s brand of politics was not matched by others in the Labour Party. John Smith was still the leader and was content to continue ploughing a more traditional furrow. There was a sense that Clinton was doing little more than Neil Kinnock had tried, chasing after focus groups and attempting to tailor policy to the supposed middle ground. ‘All the ideas from Clinton are an elite few running a party on the basis of the information they get from the polls,’ observed John Prescott in 1993. ‘That is not the way the Labour Party has been run, and while we’ve tried it in the last couple of elections, it does seem to be that we’ve lost, doesn’t it?’ Smith was more forthright: ‘We don’t need any of that fucking Clinton stuff over here.’
The feeling that there was no need for a change in direction was supported, as it happened, by the very polls that Prescott professed to despise. In the last opinion poll published before Smith’s death in May 1994, Labour stood at 45.5 per cent, with the Liberal Democrats and Conservatives neck-and-neck, more than twenty points behind. The assumption on the part of the electorate was that Labour could, almost certainly would, win the next election and that Smith was a serious leader. Westminster too was increasingly impressed by his performance. On the night before his death, a clip of Smith was shown on the television news and Paddy Ashdown recorded in his diary that he turned to his wife and ‘said that for the first time he looked like a potential prime minister’.
Almost uniquely in modern British politics, Smith avoided ridicule. As Tony Benn pointed out, Spitting Image‘doesn’t mention the Labour Party now. There is nothing to say about the Labour Party – the whole of British politics is completely stagnant.’ What Benn found objectionable, however, cheered others; Smith’s Labour wasn’t mocked because it was too unthreatening to warrant attack. ‘John was making the party feel more and more comfortable with itself,’ reflected Clare Short in 1996. ‘My own view is that he would have done that with the country.’
He did not, of course, get the chance to do so, and his replacement by Tony Blair ushered in a frantic new phase of jettisoning the luggage of Labour’s history. Much of the groundwork for this had already been laid by Smith, under whom one member, one vote had been introduced, and during whose time Gordon Brown, as shadow chancellor, had proclaimed: ‘Labour is not against wealth, nor will we seek to penalise it. The next Labour government will not tax for its own sake.’ In an interview shortly before his death, Smith had stressed this point to the BBC’s John Cole, saying that tax was the big issue: ‘he was not going to add to the burdens of what he unselfconsciously called “our own people”.’ His core values also foreshadowed those associated with Blair: ‘An abiding theme, in this and other conversations, was restoration of the role of the family in British society.’
But Blair undoubtedly accelerated the so-called modernisation of the party, stressing the ‘southern appeal’ of which Peter Mandelson had spoken. Blair himself was quite clear where he stood. ‘I was middle class and my politics were in many ways middle class,’ he wrote in his memoirs. He understood the need to appeal to the suburban South, the non-unionised private-sector workers and self-employed who had come to see Labour as the enemy of enterprise, the party of high taxation that wished to penalise middle England, though even here the groundwork had already been laid. In the elections to the European Parliament that were held between the death of Smith and the accession of Blair, Labour enjoyed an average swing of 12 per cent nationally, with the figure rising to 15 per cent in London and the South-East.
In 1993 Andy McSmith, Kinnock’s former press officer, had predicted the emergence of a Labour Party that would be ‘more European than the Tories, very strong on law and order, with a promise of electoral reform, and social welfare without excessive tax increases’. This would be ‘a party where the upwardly mobile could feel at home, not unlike the one which David Owen tried to create a decade ago’. In essence this was the party that Smith was creating and very much the party that Blair wished to lead, though preferably without any public nod to Owen, whose recently ended career as an MP was littered with broken parties and with personal and political animosities.
Unusually for Labour, Blair became leader as the head of a clearly defined faction. Previously, figures such as Harold Wilson, Michael Foot and Neil Kinnock had been associated with the left, Hugh Gaitskell, James Callaghan and John Smith with the right, but all were broadly acceptable to most sections of the party and all were cautious about campaigning on a ticket of transforming the party in their own image. Blair, on the other hand, came in saying from the outset that he was going to change everything. And he began as he meant to carry on, by deliberately picking a fight with the left of the party.
In fact, it was an old battle, albeit one that seemed to have been settled more than thirty-five years earlier. The Labour constitution contained in Clause IV a statement of the aims and values of the party, including a broad definition of the socialist society to which it aspired, committing Labour ‘to secure for the workers by hand or by brain the full fruits of their industry’ and stating that the way to achieve this was through ‘the common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange’. Written in 1917, the year of the Soviet revolution in Russia, the intention was clear: the anarchy of the market should be replaced by state planning and state ownership of industry. It was, wrote Jack Straw, ‘one of the most explicit statements of Marxist-Leninist values of any left-wing party in western Europe’.
Though never pushed to its logical conclusion, this philosophy had inspired both the great reforming government of Clement Attlee in 1945 and, subsequently, some of the more radical thinkers on the left. It had come under threat, however, during the leadership of Hugh Gaitskell in the late 1950s, with an attempt to rewrite the clause. ‘The changing character of labour, full employment, new housing and the new way of living based on the telly, the fridge, the car and the glossy magazines – all these have had their effects on our political strength,’ argued Gaitskell. ‘We have to show we are a modern, mid-twentieth century party, looking to the future not to the past.’ But his attempt to rewrite the party’s aims was defeated at the 1959 conference, and thereafter the relevant passage from Clause IV was printed on every membership card as a token of a covenant.
For some in the party, however, this was still a stumbling block. Amongst them were Jack Straw, who published a pamphlet ‘Policy and Ideology’ in 1993 proposing a new statement of the party’s aims, Will Hutton, who wrote that year of the need to change Clause IV, and Giles Radice, who met Blair a week after the results of the leadership election were announced in 1994, urging him to revise the clause. The debate having been started, Blair decided that this was indeed to be his great statement of intent to the British people.
Towards the end of his first conference speech as leader, he included the line: ‘It is time we had a clear up-to-date statement of the objects and objectives of our party.’ That was as far as he went in the hall, with no mention of Clause IV at all, but backstage his spin doctors were briefing the media that this was precisely what he was talking about. There was a certain irony that a man who was insisting in public, ‘Let us say what we mean and mean what we say,’ was doing nothing of the kind, and leaving his publicists to join the dots for journalists. But it was also an entirely successful strategy, ensuring that there was no shocked outrage to disrupt his standing ovation, while making his point to the wider public. ‘Tony Blair yesterday delivered the ultimate proof of his determination to change the Labour Party by sounding the death knell for Clause IV,’ was the opening to The Times’ coverage of the speech, which continued: ‘A source close to Mr Blair confirmed that Clause IV would be replaced, and that Mr Blair regarded it as a “narrow and inadequate” description of socialism.’
The fact that some concern would have been voiced if Blair had come out into the open was demonstrated later that week when the conference voted for a resolution in support of the existing Clause IV, but by then it was too late to halt the momentum, much of it generated by the media. Alastair Campbell recorded in his diary that David English, chairman of Associated Newspapers who published the Daily Mail, ‘was in raptures’, and Campbell also found himself fielding interview requests from such unlikely sources as the editor of the society gossip magazine Tatler: ‘She said Tatler readers were flocking over to Labour.’ By the end of the year even Sir Royston Merchant, the fictional mogul behind GlobeLink News on Drop the Dead Donkey, had swung into line, and Gus Hedges, Sir Royston’s jargon-spouting henchman, had installed a huge photograph of Blair in his office. ‘We’re underachieving in the team togetherness department,’ Gus would urge an office full of cynics, and he sounded as though he might fit rather well into the new model Labour Party.
The key to getting a revised Clause IV through was said to be John Prescott, the hero of the leadership’s OMOV battle the previous year, and he was assiduously courted by Blair and Campbell. It was not so much that Prescott represented the left, as that he was in the mould of the old-fashioned trade union fixers who had always dominated party conferences and who had, except for the occasional lapse, ensured that the left was kept firmly under control. Now, boosted by his victory in the election to choose the party’s deputy leader – on his third attempt to get the job – he had no intention of rocking the boat. Nor did anyone else much, so averse had the party become to appearing divided. Blair staged a series of meetings around the country, arguing persuasively for a redefinition, and creating a mood in which a postal ballot of the membership endorsed the change overwhelmingly.
In April 1995 a special conference was held in the Methodist Central Hall in London, where the original Clause IV had been adopted in 1918, to approve the new wording issued by the leadership. One of the few to speak against was Arthur Scargill, the miners’ leader, whose speech was accompanied by slow handclapping. ‘That began making me feel as if I was at a Nuremberg Rally,’ wrote Tony Benn in his diary, which seemed slightly to be overstating the case; certainly the reception was discourteous and intolerant, but it was no more than Benn’s own supporters had meted out to his opponents in the 1980s. In any event, Scargill’s was an isolated voice (‘Yesterday the loony left became the lonely left,’ gloated the Sunday Times) and early the following year he turned his back on Labour to found the Socialist Labour Party, though it was not a notable success – at a 1996 by-election in Barnsley, Scargill’s home town, the SLP won fewer than a thousand votes. Also to leave Labour, though without quite as much fanfare, was Bruce Kent, who in the 1980s had been the public face of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.
The new statement formally adopted in 1996 was hardly the most inspiring call to arms, combining the crashingly obvious (‘by the strength of our common endeavour, we achieve more than we achieve alone’) with vague thoughts about empowerment (we should all have ‘the means to realise our true potential’). It also reasserted one of Blair’s common themes about the position of the individual in society: ‘the rights we enjoy reflect the duties we owe.’ The blandness of the aspiration was the point of the exercise. Blair wished to let the electorate know that his party, which he was already referring to privately as New Labour even during his leadership campaign, was moderate, mainstream and safe.
The episode encapsulated much of Blair’s leadership style. There was the less-than-honest conference speech, illustrating the way that statements would now be made not in public view, but behind the scenes, announced first to the media, rather than to elected representatives and party members. There was the emphasis on the process of change rather than the end result: ‘I was surprised how little thought had gone into what might take its place,’ mused Robin Cook. There was the fascination with words and technicalities that made absolutely no difference in real terms – it had been a long time since the party thought of Clause IV as a guide to economic policy – but which sent signals to the media that progress was being made. And there was the studied non-involvement of Gordon Brown, remaining aloof from the fray.
How successful, or necessary, any of it might have been, was hard to tell. At the start of 1994, when John Smith was still alive, a Gallup poll had found 79 per cent agreeing with the statement ‘Labour is a much more moderate and sensible party than it used to be’; in the month that the new Clause IV was adopted this proportion had risen by a negligible fraction to 80 per cent. A great deal of energy had been expended to no measurable end.
Meanwhile, the reforming radicalism of which Blair spoke so often bore little fruit in terms of actual proposals. In his memoirs, he insisted that ‘there was no room for compromise on essentials’, going on to list those areas where New Labour was prepared to accept the changes wrought during the eighteen years of Conservative government: trade union legislation, privatisation of utilities (including the railways), income tax levels, nuclear defence and grammar schools. He added: ‘On the NHS and schools we also compromised.’ With the best will in the world, it was hard to discern what remained of the ‘essentials’ on which compromise was ruled out.
In any event, policy was never going to be the strong suit of a Blair-led Labour Party, though there was at the time an unusual public appetite for new thoughts on how society and the economy could be reconstructed. The mood was evident in the runaway success of The State We’re In (1995), a book written by Will Hutton, economics editor of the Guardian, which was said to have achieved sales of 150,000 in hardback alone. It was a powerful assault on the short-termism of British capitalism and the Conservatives’ economic liberalism, coupled with a call for ‘the recognition that the market economy has to be managed and regulated’, and it was devoured with great enthusiasm on the left. For a while Hutton’s language – ‘social citizenship’, ‘the stakeholder society’ – was seldom far from the lips of New Labour, though the phrases didn’t last.
In the highest echelons of the party there seemed to be little time for innovative thought, despite the appointment of a clever young man named David Miliband, who was clearly on the right wavelength, as head of policy. (‘The old answers are inadequate, and our generation has the chance to play with new ideas,’ enthused Miliband in 1993.) Those who were closest to the leader and whose opinion really counted, however, were more focused on short-term goals, especially Alastair Campbell – much more involved in decision-making than his title of press secretary would indicate – and Philip Gould, a pollster first employed by Peter Mandelson for the 1987 election and subsequently involved in Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign. The experience of the latter was spelt out in an article co-written with Patricia Hewitt: ‘The lessons which the British left can learn are not so much about content as about process.’
Gould specialised in running focus groups, small gatherings of a dozen or so people who were encouraged to discuss their views and perceptions with the others, thereby – it was claimed – giving a deeper sense of the public mood than crude opinion polling could provide. The technique was sufficiently new to Britain that the year before Blair’s elevation to leader it was still being referred to in inverted commas in the press. Gould’s role lay in interpreting the results of his research, which more often than not reinforced his leader’s gut instinct. ‘He trusts his own judgement more than anything else,’ Gould said of Blair. ‘He just somehow thinks he is in touch with the British people.’ Equally influential, though, was the philosophy of politics that Gould brought with him, and which chimed with the approach of Campbell and Mandelson. The job of a leader in the modern world, argued Gould, was the winning of ‘a daily mandate in which strength comes from popularity’. The pursuit of the news agenda and the attempt to dominate it each and every day was to become more important to New Labour than the development of policy. In the campaign to win power, detailed proposals were less important than broad-stroke buzzwords. The crucial issue was the building of an image of resolution and determination.
For if there was one thing that Blair admired in the political arena, it was strength, an attribute that always prompted the same epithet: Rupert Murdoch ‘had balls’, Alastair Campbell and Michael Heseltine were both said to have ‘clanking great balls’, while Peter Mandelson had ‘balls of steel’. Blair was not so immodest as to claim the same for himself – though he made sure to place on record Murdoch’s praise for his ‘brass nerve’ – but he did like to talk about himself as a conviction politician in the hard-hitting mould of Margaret Thatcher.
This overlooked, however, a critical difference. Certainly Blair was prepared to take his party in unfamiliar and unloved directions, but it was always in pursuit of a wider popularity, whereas Thatcher had imposed unwelcome and difficult changes both on her party and on the country itself. In his acceptance speech on becoming leader, he had talked of ‘tough choices’, and that was to remain a familiar catchphrase over the next decade, but there was little evidence in domestic policy of decisions being made that a moderate Tory, say John Major, would have found particularly tough.
And perhaps it was because his first priority was to find out where the people were and then follow them, that Blair tended to sound less like Thatcher and more like Major, even in his phrase-making. The new Clause IV, for example, included the promise to create a society where ‘power, wealth and opportunity are in the hands of the many, not the few’; the formulation echoed Major’s speeches, in which he rejected ‘the notion that excellence for the few excuses mediocrity for the many’, and said that the elimination of inheritance tax would bring ‘wealth for the many, not the few’. Blair’s rhetoric about the welfare state – that it should provide ‘a hand up, not a hand out’ – was often attributed to the influence of Bill Clinton, but had been foreshadowed by Major too, in a 1991 speech to the Conservative Party’s women’s conference: ‘Our Conservatism is about developing personal independence. It is designed to give people a hand up, not a hand out.’ Similarly, Blair may have borrowed ‘with opportunity must come responsibility’ from Clinton (‘we offer opportunity; we demand responsibility’) for his 1994 conference speech, but it wasn’t a radical break from Major’s speech earlier the same year: ‘our policies are based on individual choice, individual opportunity, individual responsibility.’ It was a theme that both men stressed. Absolutely central to the concept of the Third Way, argued Blair, was the creation of ‘a modern relationship between the responsibilities of the citizen and those of society’, a refusal to be fooled by the false dichotomy between self-interest and the collective good. Or, as Major put it in 1991: ‘Some people tend to see individualism and social responsibility as mutually exclusive. We make no such mistake.’ Major himself noticed the debt: ‘The language of New Labour may have been first-rate, but it was second-hand.’
What was new, both to the Labour Party and to British politics, was an obsession with the press and the broadcasters. ‘We paid inordinate attention in the early days of New Labour to courting, assuaging and persuading the media,’ Blair acknowledged in later years. ‘In our own defence, after eighteen years of opposition and the, at times, ferocious hostility of parts of the media, it was hard to see any alternative.’ Lessons had been learnt from the way in which Michael Foot and Neil Kinnock had been destroyed by the press, and there was a determination that nothing of the sort should happen again.
Part of the answer was the assiduous courtship of proprietors, so that famously Blair and his entourage flew to Australia in the summer of 1995 to speak to Rupert Murdoch and his senior executives. At the same time John Major was on holiday in the south of France with Nicholas Lloyd, the outgoing editor of the Daily Express, a much less powerful figure.
Just as important, though, was the engagement in what Blair called ‘hand to hand fighting’ to shape the news agenda. It was in pursuit of this goal that Labour invested millions of pounds in its Excalibur computer system in late 1995, and began the process of feeding in thousands upon thousands of articles, speeches and statistics that could be searched instantly to reveal any contradictions or discrepancies in the words of Conservative politicians. Excalibur lay at the heart of Labour’s anti-government campaigning, based on a simple insight articulated by Dave Hill, the party’s media spokesperson: ‘Journalists are inherently lazy and our rebuttal unit has made it easier for them.’ From now on, any speech by a Tory cabinet minister was followed almost instantly by a Labour Party press release commenting adversely upon it. Sometimes the rebuttal even preceded the announcement, the so-called ‘prebuttal’, while the use of electronic pagers meant that even during a statement in the House of Commons, information could be fed to key MPs so that they might intervene more effectively.
The success of the approach partially depended upon the recent proliferation of media outlets, and the consequent dilution of resources available to any one organisation. Since the late 1980s, newspaper revenue had come under pressure from the growth in magazine publication and from a long-term decline in circulation, much of it among the young, while the broadcasters were confronted by the rise of satellite and then internet outlets. As a result, there was a coming together of the media, a growing mutual dependence.
It was seen first in the now ubiquitous radio phone-in shows, which were based almost exclusively on listeners’ reactions to stories that had appeared in the newspapers. That pattern then became standard on television, where commentators were struggling to fill 24-hour news channels. But since the papers were themselves cutting back on their reporting staff, they in turn found television and radio a useful source of material for comment. The rising number of outlets was sold as a broadening of choice, but actually brought into being a much more monolithic news establishment that spent more and more of its time examining itself, chasing its own tail in ever decreasing circles. New Labour bought into this system entirely, adding a postmodern politics to a postmodern media, in which story became more important than reality.
And since Labour’s own policy was being deliberately kept to a minimum, to avoid making any promises beyond the most mundane, its own positive message – as opposed to its attacks on the government – mostly consisted of press conferences that proclaimed for a second or third time, in excited tones, longstanding and already announced commitments. The fact that this simple tactic worked, that it was accepted by a media world increasingly devoid of a sense of history, set the tone for much that was to follow.
At the same time, any comments by frontbenchers that smacked of old Labour were curbed. When such statements did slip through, retaliation was swift. A few months after Blair had made such a stout defence of Harriet Harman’s choice of school for her son, Clare Short casually mentioned in a television interview that ‘in a fair tax system people like me would pay a little more’. At the time, MPs received a salary of £34,000 and the idea that ‘middle income families’ might be more heavily taxed under a Labour government was precisely the image that Blair did not wish to project; official policy was that no one under £40,000 would face an income tax rise. There was fury at the way Short had ‘fucked up’, in Alastair Campbell’s words. ‘She cannot be trusted to behave in a professional or competent way,’ was his verdict, while John Prescott was more succinct: ‘That woman is fucking mad.’
Short’s offence was minor compared to the dissent being heard from within Conservative ranks – ‘We won’t win under Major,’ ran a fairly unexceptional comment, this time from the MP Graham Riddick; ‘he and his cabinet are a load of deadbeats and has-beens’ – but caused a huge over-reaction in leadership circles. Battered into submission by a barrage of briefing, Short fell silent for a while, but later in 1996 was to be found in the New Statesman criticising the ‘people who live in the dark’ behind Blair. She was, in a phrase that first surfaced that year and that became the ultimate denunciation of those who said anything hinting of Labour’s past, ‘off message’.
‘How can I be off-message when I am the message?’ John Major was once quoted as saying, and Tony Blair would have understood the point entirely, for he too was the message made flesh; nothing else in New Labour came remotely close to the importance of getting Blair elected as the prime minister. This was the sole item on the agenda of what was touted as the ‘New Labour project’. (That terminology, incidentally, was not itself new; there were Labour MPs in the 1980s who had talked disparagingly about the ‘Mandelson project’, while the party’s press officer Andy McSmith used to refer to ‘the Kinnockite project’.)
Not even Gordon Brown was of much significance in terms of public presentation, and his best-known speech in opposition had been the one containing the explanation in 1994 that ‘Our new economic approach is rooted in ideas which stress the importance of macro-economic, neoclassical endogenous growth theory.’ The subsequent discovery that this had been written by Brown’s youthful adviser, Ed Balls, prompted one of Michael Heseltine’s crowd-pleasing gags at the Tory conference, when he announced of the policy that ‘It’s not Brown’s, it’s Balls’.
The response to Blair in the Labour Party was mixed. Membership rose sharply in the first years after the leadership election – it had ‘the fastest-growing membership of any party in the western world’, boasted Blair in 1996 – but many comrades of longer standing weren’t enthused to the same degree. The openly expressed admiration of Thatcher alienated traditionalists, who shared Neil Kinnock’s feelings: ‘That woman fucking killed people.’ And the distrust wasn’t confined to the left. ‘They all loathe Blair,’ wrote Tony Benn of the old right-wing councillors in his Chesterfield constituency. ‘Blair doesn’t inspire anyone. Nobody loves him, because he doesn’t want them to do anything except admire him, obey him and give money.’
There was, indeed, something unlovable about Blair’s persona, even in those early days. Unlike Bill Clinton, he was not a charismatic figure, but he had learnt the trick of behaving as though he were, of projecting an ostentatious self-belief that stood in stark contrast to John Major’s diffidence. His performances were reminiscent somehow of Kevin Keegan, at that time the manager of Newcastle United, a man who during his playing career was generally considered to have turned himself into a great footballer by sheer application, compensating for a lack of natural brilliance by working harder than anyone else; it seemed entirely appropriate that in 1995 Blair staged a photo-opportunity with Keegan, playing keepie-uppie for the cameras. The long-honed professionalism acquired a new polish now that he was leader, but increasingly it came at the price of warmth and spontaneity. ‘At times his competence is almost chilling,’ observed Matthew Parris in 1996.
Similarly, Blair was not blessed as an orator, but he had studied hard (‘If only I could speak like that,’ he yearned, after seeing Tony Benn, then at the peak of his powers, in the early 1980s) and he developed, at his best, a conversational style, with flashes of humour and lashings of self-confidence, that projected a relaxed tone. It was a studied informality, as analysed by Alan Partridge: ‘He’d take his jacket off and throw it over his shoulder, as if to say: I’m a regular guy, not a stick-in-the-mud, I like a pint, why not vote for me?’ The same nonchalant note was evident in public when talking about opposition from within the party; asked about comments from the left-wing MP Dennis Canavan that he was too authoritarian, Blair’s typically jokey response was: ‘I thought I told him not to say that.’
That relaxed image, of course, had also been the hallmark of John Major, before the Eurosceptic rebellion wore him down and, for all their differences, there were points of comparison between the two men. ‘One of his skills is that everybody thinks he agrees with them. It’s not because he says one thing to one person and another to another. It’s the way he expresses his views.’ That was Kenneth Clarke on Major in 1993, but it became too a common assessment of Blair. ‘Tony has a habit of saying things people want to hear,’ wrote John Prescott. ‘They believe him, because they are charmed by his smiles and nods.’
Blair’s mode as a platform speaker was less convincing, a jerky series of staccato sentences, often untroubled by verbs, that was intended to convey passion and vision, but sounded rather as if he were in a brainstorming session at an advertising agency. ‘Standing together, stronger together, weaker apart. Better off together, worse off split apart,’ he urged, when discussing Scottish devolution. Or again, in a characteristic flourish at the 1996 Labour conference: ‘The buck stops here. For the future, not the past. For the many, not the few. For trust, not betrayal. For the age of achievement, not the age of decline.’ It was a style ruthlessly parodied by satirist Craig Brown. ‘Yesterday has gone and past,’ declaimed one of his characters, Barbara Vacant, in the television comedy Norman Ormal. ‘Today is the day before tomorrow. Tomorrow is another day. Yesterday is two days away from tomorrow. Tomorrow will be today tomorrow. And the day after tomorrow will be the day before yesterday.’
Even when Blair was at his most eloquent, there was a certain hollowness where the fire should have been. Some of his earlier speeches as opposition leader read better on the page than they sounded in the flesh: ‘I have spent sixteen years being angry, passionate and indignant about young people huddled in doorways, families made wretched by unemployment, the poor unable to make ends meet. I am fed up with anger. They don’t need our anger, they need action. And they will not get it through the rage of opposition.’
That speech encapsulated his greatest appeal for the Labour Party. He was driven above all else by the wish to win elections. ‘My ambition is clear and simple: to get Labour into government,’ he said, while still shadow home secretary, and there was much more of the same after he became leader. ‘Power without principle is barren,’ he declared in 1994, ‘but principle without power is futile. This is a party of government and I will lead it as a party of government.’ Many in the party suspected that the power element of that equation meant more to Blair than did the principle, but twenty years on from the last general election victory, most were prepared to sacrifice a few sacred cows if it meant winning. After all, so much of the movement’s identity and history had been given up already.
‘What’s got into Labour?’ wondered Henry Davenport in Drop the Dead Donkey during John Smith’s leadership. ‘It’s full of Perrier-drinking PR prannies who want to replace “The Red Flag” with “The Sun Has Got His Hat On”, and think the Tolpuddle Martyrs are an American football team.’ For the 1994 Labour conference, Blair did indeed try to ditch the traditional singing of ‘The Red Flag’, but was persuaded that it was a symbolic step too far; instead a jazz version of the anthem was played, and delegates were issued with little Union flags to wave during its performance, lest television viewers might think the lyrics hinted at a solidarity with the international working class. It was not to be the last such assault on tradition. As Blair told Paddy Ashdown: ‘From my experience, you have to take your party members and shove their faces in it before they really understand.’
The Conservative response to Blair, on the other hand, was simply confused. Even the normally acute Matthew Parris managed, in the space of a single article in 1994, to depict him as ‘a vampire’, as ‘general secretary of a small, service-sector union’ and as the ‘manager of a small plastics factory in Enfield, where he is also sidesman in the local church and takes his daughters to pony classes in a newish Volvo’. The question of how best to tackle this threat was never satisfactorily resolved, and the early attempts to characterise Blair were simply confused.
Some senior figures, like Michael Heseltine, believed that he was an opportunistic thief of Tory clothing. ‘The greatest con job of modern times,’ seethed Heseltine. ‘Blair is a total cynic.’ The implication of that position was that in office the new Labour leader would resort to more left-wing policies, to high taxes and high levels of spending, because he wasn’t really convinced of the need to change; he was, in effect, Neil Kinnock in middle-England clothing. But others, including the more astute Chris Patten, recognised that Blair represented a genuinely new political force and argued from the outset that it would be ‘a mistake to try and pretend he is a lefty’.
The Conservative campaign that eventually emerged, at the beginning of 1996, attempted to straddle both approaches and fell squarely in the middle. NEW LABOUR, NEW DANGER ran the strapline to the posters, managing both to emphasise the newness of Blair’s approach – the single most desirable attribute for any product, according to conventional wisdom in the advertising world – and to offer the left a crumb of comfort, suggesting that their compromises were being made in a good cause.
The most enduring image from this campaign was the one that showed Blair displaying his over-toothed grin with a strip ripped across the centre of his face to reveal a pair of badly drawn red eyes. It immediately became known as the ‘demon eyes’ poster and was controversial from the outset. The Advertising Standards Authority ruled that it was dishonest and ordered it not to be used again, while Peter Mandelson professed himself outraged. ‘Tony Blair is a practising Christian,’ he protested; ‘to portray him as the devil is a crass, clumsy move.’ On the other hand, Campaign magazine, the industry’s weekly journal, named it campaign of the year, saying that it ‘drew on the public’s underlying concerns about Tony Blair: that he smiles too much to be sincere and will do or say anything to be elected’. Neither response was particularly appropriate, serving only to inflate further the self-importance of advertisers, since, despite all the media attention, the poster made no impact whatsoever on public opinion.
Nor did the government make up ground with a follow-up poster, NEW LABOUR, NEW TAXES, which merely provided an opportunity for Labour to talk about the promises on tax made by the Tories during the 1992 election and since broken. In January 1997 Gordon Brown revealed that there would be no increases in income tax or VAT under a Labour government and that, as chancellor, he would adhere to the spending levels already announced by Kenneth Clarke. The most important pledge to be made in the run-up to the general election, it worked because it confirmed everything that Labour had been saying since that controversial shadow budget nearly five years earlier.
Against this, the Tories – the party that had increased VAT and had then applied it to domestic fuel – had no answer whatsoever. Polling in 1992 had shown that 75 per cent of the electorate thought a Labour government would increase taxes; in 1997 that belief was still held by 64 per cent, but it was significant that more now thought that the same would be true of a re-elected Tory government. The one possible angle of attack on Labour’s tax announcement, that it was a flagrant breach of party democracy, a decision taken by Blair and Brown without consulting even the shadow cabinet, would simply have reinforced the perception of Blair as a strong leader.
And anyway, none of it really mattered. The first opinion poll conducted after Blair became leader showed Labour pulling still further ahead of the Conservatives, and by the end of 1994 the gap had widened to a record level of thirty-nine points. Meanwhile Blair himself was recording an approval rating of 68 per cent, the highest ever for a leader of the opposition and considerably in excess of John Smith’s best figure of 53 per cent. Victory had been certain under Smith, but now a landslide seemed the most likely outcome of the next election. In fact, it appeared Labour had won a landslide the last time around, so great were the numbers now telling the pollsters they had supported the party in 1992. Public disillusion was such that the electorate was rewriting its past, denying that it had ever voted in a Conservative government.
The only slight concern for Labour was that support was running higher amongst men than amongst women, and in November 1996 the Financial Times ran a story – immediately decried and denied – that Blair had ‘flattened his bouffant hairstyle as part of a campaign to build bridges with women voters’. It was an echo of a story in The Times four years earlier, claiming that John Major was ‘worried enough about his wan appearance to go to the trouble of having his hair tinted at Trumpers, the Curzon Street hairdressing salon’. That too was denied, though rather more convincingly. ‘If I really were dyeing my hair,’ reasoned Major, ‘would I have chosen this colour?’ The fact that serious newspapers were prepared to publish such inconsequential stories was seen by many as an indication of how trivial the British media had become. ‘It was a black day in the history of FT journalism,’ was the official response of Alastair Campbell, the man credited with having created the myth that John Major tucked his shirt into his underpants. He was later to complain: ‘Political coverage in this country is a joke. Most of the national media treat politics as a soap opera.’
There was also an argument, however, that this frivolity was all that was left now that policy differences had largely disappeared. The accusation that the two major parties were almost indistinguishable had often been made in the past – in a different context it had been at the heart of Jonathan Swift’s Lilliputian satire nearly three centuries earlier – but this time it really was difficult to find differences of opinion between Major and Blair on what had once been the defining issues of British politics: the operation of the free market, nuclear weapons, Europe, trade unions, taxation, crime, welfare, the virtues of competition, the legacy of Thatcherism. This was what Daniel Finkelstein, director of the Social Market Foundation think tank, dubbed ‘Blajorism’, in tribute to the Butskellism of the 1950s. Not to be left out, Paddy Ashdown complained that ‘Labour has stolen our ground comprehensively’ and worried that, following the election: ‘Our policies are too close to Labour’s for us to be a genuine opposition.’
The key difference between Blair and the others, though, was that he was leading a party so exhausted by pessimism, so scarred by defeat that it was prepared to unite behind him, pretty much regardless of what he said. Debate was discouraged, but for now there were few indications that it was much missed.
It was in response to Blair’s occupation of Tory territory that some in the Conservative Party called for a move further right. There was talk of putting ‘clear blue water’ between them and New Labour, if not before the election, then certainly after the coming defeat.
That phrase, ‘clear blue water’, which first appeared in the month that Blair was elected leader, rapidly became something of a cliché; it was used, for example, as the title of a pamphlet compiling extracts from speeches by Michael Portillo, put together by the Eurosceptic MP George Gardiner. Other voices, though, urged caution. Phillip Oppenheim, conscious that his Amber Valley constituency in Derbyshire was a very tight marginal, was one of the more moderate MPs warning against abandoning the traditional centre-right ground: ‘there’s real danger in diving off your own patch of land just because someone else is muscling on to it. Initially bracing though the clear blue water might be, you may not find any other firm land.’
Amongst those articulating the case for an extension of Margaret Thatcher’s reforming radicalism, the boldest were John Redwood, David Willetts and John Patten, the latter calling for further privatisation of state-held assets: ‘We should now dispose of everything that remains by 1999, so that the new century can begin with a clean slate.’ But there was little appetite in the media or the electorate for a continuation of the Thatcherite permanent revolution. Attention instead focused on personalities, with Portillo still the clear favourite to succeed Major, even if it was hard to pin down precisely where he differed from the government of which he was a member in terms of actual, concrete policy; it was another indication that style was becoming more important than substance.
And the style was now out of step with public taste. Every time the right spoke, it seemed only to reinforce the now widespread perception of the Tories as ‘the nasty party’. In March 1997 David Evans, MP for Welwyn and Hatfield and one of Redwood’s declared supporters two years earlier, gave what he termed ‘a light-hearted interview’ to sixth-formers at a school in his constituency, in which he said that Major was ‘unforgiving and vindictive’, that Virginia Bottomley was ‘dead from the neck up’ and that Melanie Johnson, the Labour challenger for his seat, was ‘a single girl’ with ‘three bastard children’. He also outlined his theory, in the context of the recent rape of a schoolgirl by ‘some black bastard’, that rapists should be castrated. The Sun, which – in the absence of a Portillo-led Conservative Party – was becoming an avowedly Labour paper, declared his comments to be ‘appalling’, though the Daily Telegraph backed him (it was ‘the prissy ideologues who express deep shock at his words who are out of touch’), perhaps revealing more about the triumph of doctrine over manners at the Telegraph than it did about Evans. Certainly his comments didn’t seem likely to inspire a Tory revival in the polls.
Nor was it simply the opinion polls that were prophesying disaster; every time the people had the opportunity to cast a vote, the message was the same. In May 1996, in the last local elections before the general election was due, the Conservatives fared even worse than in previous years, seeing the Thatcherite totem of Basildon taken by Labour, as well as losing heartland councils like Hastings and Wokingham (where John Redwood had a 25,000-strong majority as MP). Meanwhile Tunbridge Wells fell to the Liberal Democrats.
In February 1997 the last by-election of the parliament was held in Wirral South, where Barry Porter had been the Conservative MP ever since the seat was created in 1983, never receiving less than 50 per cent of the vote. Now that was overturned and Labour took the seat, itself winning more than half the vote. It was the twenty-sixth by-election to be fought since John Major had become prime minister, and the Tories had failed to win a single one. In fact it was the thirty-fifth straight Conservative defeat on the mainland, dating back to 1989 (there were also two contests in Northern Ireland in that period). The party’s only shred of hope was that such losses in the past had not precluded victory at the polls in 1992.
But no one really believed that another surprise success was on the cards, and in the last days of the Major government a number of senior figures began casting around for seats that might provide some shelter when the inevitable storm came. In a process that became known as the chicken run, the party chairman Brian Mawhinney left Peterborough to become the candidate for North West Cambridgeshire, social security secretary Peter Lilley similarly abandoned St Albans for Hitchin and Harpenden, and health secretary Stephen Dorrell moved from Loughborough to Charnwood. In a less high profile but more symbolic example of the phenomenon, David Amess, whose triumph in Basildon had set the tone for election night in 1992, quietly made his excuses and left for Southend. Each individual decision was vindicated; the original constituency was lost while the newly adopted seat was retained. The sight of so many Tories running for their political lives, however, did nothing to suggest faith in the government’s future.
Tony Blair, with 1992 still in mind and wary of over-confidence, did his best to dampen down expectations on the Labour side in that last year, but in private his frontbenchers could scarcely contain their excitement. ‘I’ve been here for seventeen years,’ exclaimed Jack Straw in 1996. ‘We’ve been in opposition for all the time I’ve been here. And soon we’re going to be in government.’
Finally, on 17 March 1997, John Major called an election for May Day, ten years on from Margaret Thatcher’s last victory and more than twenty-two years since Labour had last won a general election. With just over six weeks to polling day, it was to be one of the longest election campaigns of modern times, reflecting a Micawberish hope that something would turn up, that some good news might emerge to persuade the voters to return to the Tory fold, that the Labour Party might implode into factional in-fighting or be struck down by a terrible scandal, that the country might get cold feet about entrusting its future to an untried, inexperienced group of politicians. Nothing of the sort happened. Instead there was a demoralising continuation of the sleaze and splits that had so damaged the Conservative Party’s image in the long, miserable slide from the peak of April 1992.
Because even during the campaign, the negative stories continued to emerge. Allan Stewart, the Conservative MP for Eastwood, the safest Tory seat in Scotland, announced that he was withdrawing his candidature after stories of an extra-marital affair emerged. It wasn’t the first time he had made headlines. Two years earlier he had resigned from his government job after an encounter with anti-motorway protestors campaigning against the M77 development in his constituency, in which he was alleged to have waved a pick-axe ‘in a very threatening manner’. His own account of that incident hadn’t sounded very different: ‘I picked up the pick-axe first of all to avoid anybody else picking it up and secondly in possible self-defence. There was then a robust discussion.’ Now he was leaving Parliament altogether and, almost immediately, the man expected to replace him as the candidate in Eastwood, Mickey Hirst, resigned as chairman of the Conservative Party in Scotland just before the Sunday Mail revealed ‘a series of homosexual encounters’.
Meanwhile the MP for Beckenham, Piers Merchant, was alleged to be having some sort of relationship with a seventeen-year-old who worked as a hostess in a Soho nightclub. He denied any sexual involvement and was backed by his constituency party, despite an unequivocal public warning from Michael Heseltine that he should be deselected.
This failure of the Conservative leadership to impose its will on local parties was in stark contrast to the iron discipline of the Labour Party, where the NEC had the right to overrule a candidature even after a constituency had made its selection. In 1995 Liz Davies was removed as the candidate for Leeds North-East after the leadership decided that she was too left-wing and that her association with the newspaper London Left Briefing was too controversial. Tony Blair insisted that people like her were ‘piggybacking’ on the Labour Party: ‘If they stood on a Labour Briefing platform, they’d get 500 votes,’ he pointed out. He was quite correct, of course, though the same charge could have been laid against him, as a candidate who had won his parliamentary seat in 1983 on a manifesto calling for British withdrawal from Europe, unilateral nuclear disarmament and the involvement of trade unions in government.
Worse for the Tories than the cases of Allan Stewart and Piers Merchant, however, were the continuing repercussions from the Mohammed Al-Fayed affair. One of the MPs involved, Tim Smith, announced that he wouldn’t be standing for re-election, but the other, Neil Hamilton, remained defiant and secured the support of his constituency association in Tatton, Cheshire, where he had a majority of nearly 16,000. In a brilliant tactical move, dreamt up by Alastair Campbell, the local Labour and Liberal Democrat parties were persuaded not to field their own candidates, but rather to unite behind an independent ‘anti-sleaze’ figure, the BBC television reporter Martin Bell.
This became one of the more memorable stories of a rather monotonous campaign, since it provided more amusement than any other contest. The star was not Hamilton himself – an intelligent, witty man who was strangely incapable of portraying himself as anything other than smug and bumbling – but his wife, Christine, who turned out to be terrifically entertaining. A former secretary to the lurid 1960s MP Gerald Nabarro, she clearly knew a thing or two about self-promotion, and made her mark early on, hijacking Bell’s first appointment with the press in the constituency and demanding to know whether Bell accepted that her husband was innocent until proved guilty.
It was a rare moment of cheer for the Hamiltons, though not for the Conservatives more generally, since it reminded the country that there were still outstanding accounts in the sleaze files. Perceptions weren’t improved when John Major, on an election walkabout in Braunton, Devon, found himself in a hardware shop run by a man named Frank Slee: a photo-opportunity under a shop sign reading Slees was hardly what the spin doctor ordered.
And still the divisions over Europe would not heal, particularly in relation to the single currency promised at Maastricht. The manifesto had carefully laid out the compromise position: ‘If, during the course of the next parliament, a Conservative government were to conclude that it was in our national interest to join a single currency, we have given a guarantee that no such decision would be implemented unless the British people gave their express approval in a referendum.’
It wasn’t enough for some, and Stephen Dorrell was soon to be heard on the radio saying that Britain would definitely not be in the first wave of countries joining the single currency. His subsequent apology was one of the more impressive examples of the form: ‘My thought process was blurred at that particular moment. I had the government line. The truth is I couldn’t remember precisely at the right moment precisely what the formula was.’
More damagingly, over a hundred Conservative candidates explicitly stated in their election addresses that they would certainly not support joining the single currency during the course of the next parliament. Their actions ‘made a mockery of any attempt to find a common approach’, raged Michael Heseltine, and Major jettisoned both the script of a press conference and a proposed party political broadcast so he could address the issue directly, urging his party not to ‘bind my hands’. It was one of his more impressive performances. ‘He sounds tough and courageous,’ noted Giles Radice. ‘Perhaps if he had been like this earlier, the Tories would not now be in the mess they are in.’ Major’s intervention was portrayed in Eurosceptic quarters, however, as being binding in precisely the way he didn’t wish, picking up on his reference to a referendum: ‘I will not take Britain into a single currency. Only the British nation can do that. Upon that, you may be certain.’ This, said the Daily Mail, was ‘his most dramatic personal pledge yet in defence of the pound’.
A couple of days later, a poll in the Guardian reported that Labour were just five points ahead of the Tories, causing a moment of panic in the opposition camp, though other polls continued to show leads of up to twenty points. Rapidly dismissed as a ‘rogue poll’, this was actually, insisted Iain Duncan Smith, an endorsement of the Eurosceptics, as the faithful began coming back to the Tories: ‘What they thought was a blip, I don’t think was a blip; it was a reality.’ An alternative explanation also offered itself. If it were a real, though short-lived, phenomenon, it could equally have been in response to Major’s rare moment of determined self-confidence.
The issue of Europe was also being exploited by the Referendum Party. Announced in January 1995, and backed by £20 million of businessman James Goldsmith’s money, the organisation had a single aim: to secure a referendum on whether Britain should reject any moves towards a more federal European Union. ‘This is a single-issue, bio-degradable party,’ proclaimed Goldsmith, ‘which will be dissolved once we have achieved our aim.’
Initially dismissed as the folly of an old man who had drifted out of touch with Britain since his retirement to Mexico in 1987, the new party soon began to worry the Conservatives, both with the scale of its ambition – it fielded over five hundred candidates in the general election – and its ability to generate headlines. It attracted the support of Margaret Thatcher’s old financial adviser, Alan Walters, and the former Tory chairman, Alistair McAlpine, as well as media-friendly names like the actor Edward Fox, the broadcaster David Bellamy, the novelist Frederick Forsyth and, to the amusement of many, Robin Page, presenter of the television programme One Man and His Dog, a title that seemed to sum up the enterprise rather well. Even Norman Tebbit, when asked whether he would support the Referendum Party, was prepared at least to entertain the idea: ‘I would not go that far – not yet – but I can understand why many people who do not have such a strong attachment to the Conservative Party are doing so.’
The Referendum Party had little chance of winning a seat, let alone the election, but its very existence was a threat to the Tories, providing a right-wing alternative for disaffected Eurosceptics. A poll in 1996 showed the party on 14 per cent, enough to suggest that Goldsmith might yet play the role of a British Ross Perot, taking support away from a right-wing incumbent. ‘He is in part an anarchist,’ wrote Hugo Young, after meeting Goldsmith; ‘counter-typical as a business tycoon, he is the loosest of all cannons at large in a system he despises.’
The Referendum Party did in fact go into the election with an MP to its name. Serial rebel George Gardiner had finally been deselected by his Reigate constituency party and announced that he was leaving the Conservatives to join Goldsmith’s organisation. Amongst his offences had been a description of John Major as ‘Ken Clarke’s ventriloquist’s dummy’, suggesting that the prime minister was under the control of Europhiles. By ironic coincidence, the most striking poster of the election campaign showed Tony Blair sitting on the knee of the German chancellor, Helmut Kohl, with the slogan DON’T SEND A BOY TO DO A MAN’S JOB, suggesting that a Labour government wouldn’t be able to fight its corner in Europe.
It was a powerful image, if somewhat in contradiction to the message of the ‘demon eyes’ advert, but it aroused a storm of fury amongst Europhile Tories including Edward Heath. A ‘pitiful piece of publicity,’ he thundered, ‘absolutely contemptible.’ The poster, inspired by an old Vicky cartoon of Harold Macmillan sitting on the lap of John F. Kennedy, had been dreamt up by Michael Heseltine, long regarded as a Europhile himself, but now thought to be subtly shifting his ground in anticipation of a leadership bid. Few were convinced by his later protest: ‘This was not a Eurosceptic concept – it was a Blair-sceptic concept.’ There was no such equivocation about the Referendum Party’s subsequent advert, showing Kohl with both Major and Blair, one on each of his knees.
Through all this, the Labour campaign sailed serenely onwards, adhering to a long-planned programme. Its ruthless, relentless professionalism ensured that there were no mistakes, no slip-ups, no excitement, just a repetitive routine of photo-opportunities and stage-managed set-piece speeches that contained not a single memorable sentence. The entire message was to be found in the modest aspirations of the title of the campaign song, D:Ream’s ‘Things Can Only Get Better’. As Alastair Campbell acknowledged to the journalists travelling with Blair: ‘I know you’re bored shitless with it.’
Faced with the New Labour machine, John Major dug out his soapbox in an attempt to revive the spirit of ’92, but it didn’t really work second time around. He looked, wrote the retiring Tory MP Julian Critchley, as though he were ‘clinging to his magic soapbox like a small child with his comfort blanket’. The routine lacked the appearance of spontaneity that had been its main attraction five years earlier. Alan Clark saw one such appearance on College Green and noted that it was a ‘papered house’, with an audience supplied by Central Office. When Major did meet the public, he was again faced by hecklers, but this time round, in Luton at least, they were supporters not of the SWP but of the Referendum Party. Europe simply wouldn’t go away. And when the Tories tried to get beyond that issue, they seemed still to be fighting the election before last, attacking Labour for its links with the trade unions and its position on privatisation. As with some on the left, there was here a willing suspension of disbelief, a deluded insistence that Blair didn’t mean what he said.
But for most of the left, Blair’s position didn’t really matter any more. So hated were the Conservatives that the sole objective was to ensure they were thrown out of office; what came next was very much of secondary importance when compared to the eagerly awaited joy of seeing the Tories humiliated. Amongst the wider public, the anger had turned into simple irritation at the long-delayed departure of the government. ‘There’s none of the bitterness of 1992 when memories of the poll tax were still fresh, we were in deep recession and the pit closures were round the corner,’ wrote Phillip Oppenheim, about the experience of canvassing in his constituency. ‘Instead, just an uneasy boredom which is almost harder to handle.’
By now even Major himself had privately conceded defeat. Iain Duncan Smith came across him one evening at Conservative Central Office. ‘He was sitting, slumped, looking very down, nobody with him at all. So I poked my head around the corner and said: We’ve had some quite good stuff from my area. And he looked up and smiled and said: That’s good. Then he said: It’s not going to change anything.’
The banishment of any doubt that the government would fall was, at least in part, a tribute to Tony Blair’s leadership. The pain of 1992 had convinced many at the time that the Tories would never be beaten, but there was now no trace of that sentiment anywhere in the country. Most of the destructive work had been done by the Conservatives themselves, as they staged a slow-motion political suicide, but the absolute certainty of Labour’s victory in the campaign, the inevitability of the coming landslide – that was largely Blair’s work. For nearly three years he had been the most convincing and authoritative leader of the opposition in living memory, looking more prime ministerial than the current office-holder, and the public had long since taken it as read that he would be moving into Downing Street.
Gordon Brown talked about ending ‘the long night of Tory rule’, but the ending itself was a protracted process, resembling the tactically delayed appearance of a superstar on stage, whipping the crowd into a frenzy of anticipation. Blair’s progress around the country acquired something of the feel of a messianic crusade for the faithful, particularly for those not old enough to remember anything save a Conservative government. The veteran BBC political correspondent Nicholas Jones talked to young Labour activists and detected a new note: ‘I discovered not just admiration but adoration for Blair, and I had to force myself to remember that they were talking not about a pop star but a politician.’ He also reported that his daughter had phoned him during the campaign to say excitedly that she had met Blair: ‘I touched him.’
The press too was becoming increasingly animated and there was a scramble to get aboard the bandwagon. The Sun came out in favour of Blair at the start of the campaign and even swallowed its Euroscepticism in order to stay on message, the courting of the paper’s owner, Rupert Murdoch, having proved worthwhile. Ever since its declaration for Margaret Thatcher in 1979, the Sun had been implacably opposed to Labour and its return to the party fold was greeted with the fatted calf of better access to stories than was given to the Daily Mirror. But then, as media commentator Roy Greenslade pointed out: ‘the Mirror is merely preaching to the converted. The Sun is attempting a much more difficult (and unprecedented) task: to educate its readers into loving the old enemy.’ In fact, of course, most of those readers had already made their minds up.
Meanwhile the Daily Telegraph, Sunday Telegraph, Daily Express, Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday all endorsed the Tories but without any conviction at all, and the impression was of noses being held with the fingers of one hand while a cross was pencilled in with the other. The Daily Express said that it would stick with ‘the devil we know’, but didn’t offer any direct advice to its readers, while the Daily Mail suggested voting Conservative ‘however reluctantly’. Regardless of any recommendations, though, the damage had already been done with the long campaign of sniping from the Daily Mail and the Telegraph titles in particular.
The Times had a less clear party allegiance. While still evidently on the right, it was quite prepared to flirt with the idea of supporting Tony Blair, and ended up suggesting that voters should opt for individual candidates, regardless of party, who would explicitly reject the single currency. London’s Evening Standard was particularly damning in its editorial before the election, listing all the calamities of the previous five years and concluding: ‘None of these farces and fiascos on its own could explain the public contempt for John Major’s government, but putting them all together shows a pattern of unrelieved incompetence the like of which has rarely been seen before.’
The lack of enthusiasm for the government in Fleet Street infuriated traditional Tories. ‘There is widespread umbrage that an unelected media should presume to dictate to the voter the way in which he or she should vote,’ wrote Julian Critchley, conveniently forgetting the decades of unwavering support his own party had enjoyed. In 1992 some 70 per cent of newspaper circulation supported the Tories; in 1997 around the same proportion was supporting Labour.
The lack of self-knowledge was replicated on the other side of the Fleet Street–Westminster divide. On election night, as the shocking news flashed across television screens that Margaret Thatcher’s old seat in Finchley had fallen to Labour, Paul Dacre, editor of the Daily Mail, was reportedly outraged: ‘What the fuck’s going on? These are fucking Mail readers!’ Having spent the last few years undermining the prime minister, it seemed a little late in the day to be expressing surprise.
If the campaign itself was marked, for most of the public, by a tone of bored impatience, election night itself was an extraordinary occasion, a unique moment in the history of political broadcasting in Britain. ‘It was one of the most brilliant evenings of television I’ve ever seen in my whole life,’ said Ian Hislop on Have I Got News for You, and he was not alone. Books about election campaigns had long been a feature of political journalism, but so big a shared event was the 1997 coverage, that for the first time a book – Brian Cathcart’s Were You Still Up for Portillo?– was published that documented the television results programmes themselves.
And even that wasn’t quite enough. While BBC One and ITV provided their traditional Dimbleby-led shows, BBC Two broadcast The Election Night Armistice, in which Armando Iannucci and his usual accomplices tried to maintain some degree of impartiality, despite a clearly partisan audience and a panel of guests largely comprised of alternative comedians (Phill Jupitus, Jo Brand, Kevin Day) who made no attempt to conceal their gloating over the long-delayed defeat of the Conservatives. The show also gave Alan Partridge the opportunity to reveal that even he had had a change of heart: ‘The Referendum Party – insults aside – have probably got more integrity than the whole of the other political parties put together.’ (Sally, the snobbish newsreader in Drop the Dead Donkey, was another supporter of James Goldsmith’s party, on the grounds that ‘So many rich people can’t be wrong.’)
To start with, 1 May 1997 had been a beautifully sunny day. Outside the ranks of the Conservative Party itself, there was a sense of hope and optimism abroad, a feeling that the spell cast long ago by the White Witch to make it always winter but never Christmas was about to be broken. That expectation was confirmed when, shortly after the polls closed, the BBC predicted that the landslide would be so great that the seats of cabinet ministers Malcolm Rifkind, Michael Forsyth and John Selwyn Gummer were at risk of being lost. In the event, Gummer held on to his seat, albeit with a 12 per cent swing against him, but the others were less fortunate. It is a rare thing for a cabinet minister to lose an election; Chris Patten had been defeated in 1992, but before that one had to go back to 1979, when Shirley Williams lost in Hertford and Stevenage. This time, no fewer than seven members of the cabinet found themselves being made unemployed on live television, as the votes were counted. Had so many Tories not swapped seats in the chicken-run days, the number would have hit double figures.
Notable casualties outside the cabinet included Neil Hamilton, who shed over 13,000 votes to be thoroughly beaten by the independent Martin Bell, Jonathan Aitken in South Thanet, and Norman Lamont, whose constituency of Kingston had been abolished and who failed to take what should have been a safe seat in Harrogate and Knaresborough.
The wrath of the voters fell on Eurosceptics and Europhiles alike. On the right, Tony Marlow, Toby Jessel, Ivan Lawrence and Rupert Allason all lost their seats, as did Nicholas Budgen in Wolverhampton South West, a constituency he had taken over from Enoch Powell and which had been Conservative since 1950. George Gardiner, the solitary Referendum Party MP, was beaten into fourth place in Reigate, which did therefore give the Conservatives a gain, even if only on a technicality and even if the party’s majority was reduced by 10,000 votes compared to 1992. On the left, Edwina Currie lost in Derbyshire South, as did Sebastian Coe, the former Olympic athlete who, ever since his election in 1992, had been rather wasted as an asset, buried from public sight in the whips’ office.
Most famously from this wing of the party, David Mellor was beaten in Putney, where James Goldsmith himself was a candidate. Goldsmith’s own vote was an insignificant 1,500, not enough to have swayed the result in a constituency taken by Labour with a 3,000 majority, but the personal animosity between the two men was one of the highlights of election night. Mellor’s speech conceding defeat was punctuated by chants of ‘Out! Out! Out!’ led by Goldsmith, but he still made his point: ‘I would like to say that fifteen hundred votes is a derisory total, and we have shown tonight that the Referendum Party is dead in the water. Sir James, you can get off back to Mexico, knowing your attempt to buy the British political system has failed.’ In a subsequent interview with Michael Buerk, Mellor added a lovely soundbite: ‘Up your hacienda, Jimmy.’
If one way to measure the government’s rout was by the massed ranks of departing MPs, another was by geography. The Tories lost all ten Scottish and all six Welsh seats that they had held. The northern English cities inevitably proved even more hostile territory than they had been in the 1980s, but the battle was also lost in the South-West, where there was now no Conservative representation in cities like Bristol and Plymouth. It could no longer be suggested that this was a national party; the surviving Tory rump was confined almost exclusively to rural areas and, particularly, to the South-East. Not that there was much comfort even here. The Conservatives had gone into the election with forty-one London seats and emerged with just eleven. The national swing to Labour was 10.5 per cent, but this concealed some truly remarkable results, particularly in the London suburbs. Constituencies in places like Harrow, Wimbledon, Croydon and Hendon all saw swings against the Tories of over 15 per cent, while in Brent East a swing of nearly 19 per cent unseated Rhodes Boyson, one of those who could claim to have been a Thatcherite before Thatcher.
There was a warning here for the Labour Party, had it been in a suitably reflective frame of mind. The fact that the southern suburbs registered above-average swings meant that the reverse was true in Labour’s heartlands, where the vote was noticeably less enthusiastic. Peter Mandelson described the 1997 election as a ‘revolution’ and he may well have been right; no one was quite sure what would come next, but there was an overwhelming wish to see the toppling of the ancien régime. It was, though, ‘a bourgeois revolution’, in the words of Hywel Williams, and for MPs who had spent the last few weeks campaigning in traditional Labour areas, the scale of the national victory came as a shock. ‘Nothing prepared me for what happened. During the campaign I saw no particular enthusiasm among my own electorate,’ remarked Chris Mullin of his Sunderland South constituency. ‘I’ve been involved in every election since 1970 and I’ve never seen such apathy and indifference.’ Mullin’s majority in a solid Labour seat went up by more than 5,000, but his actual vote declined by more than two thousand. Just down the coast, in Mandelson’s constituency of Hartlepool, turnout fell by over ten percentage points.
Labour did increase its national vote by some two million, but still polled lower than John Major had five years earlier, while its share, at 43.2 per cent, was only marginally higher than the 43.1 per cent registered by Harold Wilson when losing the 1970 election. And this was on the worst turnout since 1935. Indeed the turnout was perhaps the real story of the election, though it wasn’t widely recognised as such at the time.
The Conservatives had shed four and a half million votes. Even allowing for natural wastage, for Labour’s improved showing and for the interventions of the Referendum Party and the UK Independence Party (who accounted for around 900,000 votes between them), that meant a great many people had absented themselves from the polling booths. They included traditional Labour voters, as in Sunderland, but most attention was fixed on Tory truants. ‘Up and down the country they stayed at home, our people,’ reflected Ann Widdecombe. ‘They stayed at home on a grand scale.’ Amongst those who didn’t bother with the ballot box was Julian Critchley, who couldn’t bring himself to vote for his Eurosceptic successor in Aldershot. Whether someone like Critchley could be regarded as typical of the stay-at-home Tories was a matter of some dispute, though the anti-Europe parties’ comparatively poor showing suggested that he might well have been; it seemed unlikely that the absentees were distressed by the lack of right-wing policies. The debate over who those missing supporters were, and how to win them back, was to preoccupy the Conservative Party for the next decade.
For now, Labour had the luxury of simply ignoring the details. Thanks to the vagaries of the first-past-the-post system, the party had a majority of 179 seats in the Commons, more than 63 per cent of the MPs, and – taking into account boundary changes – had gained 145 seats. In parliamentary terms, it dwarfed even the 1945 landslide of Clement Attlee (though he had won a shade under half the popular vote), a moment that had largely passed into the realm of fable. Meanwhile the Liberal Democrats actually polled fewer votes than in 1992, but more than doubled their number of MPs, a fact which simply revealed the extent of the anti-Tory tactical voting at work. And the Conservatives lost more than half their seats.
Amongst the bedraggled company of 165 Tory MPs who slunk back to the Commons was the former education and employment secretary, Gillian Shephard, though her judgement seemed a little affected by the trauma. ‘The scale of the defeat in terms of parliamentary seats was enormous,’ she subsequently wrote; ‘in terms of actual votes cast, less shattering.’ But whichever way one cut it, the Tory performance was a catastrophe. The disappearance of four and a half million votes gave the party just a 30.7 per cent share – the lowest it had recorded since 1832 – while barely one in five of the registered electorate had been persuaded to come out in support of the government.
More than the raw statistics, however, it was in the atmosphere of election night, and of the next couple of days, that the defeat of the Conservatives truly became tangible. When Tony Blair arrived in London from his Sedgefield constituency and made his way to the South Bank, where a victory party was being staged at the Royal Festival Hall, there was an air of excitement quite unlike that of normal elections. For those on the left, even for many in the centre, this was something more than a success at the ballot box. If there was a recent parallel, perhaps it was with the spirit of the victory parade staged in 1982 to celebrate British success in the Falklands War. ‘This was what it was about,’ Enoch Powell had said of that occasion. ‘England had known itself, it had recognised itself.’ There was a similar sense on the morning of 2 May 1997; it felt as if a country that, some considerable time ago, had decided to divorce itself from the excesses of Thatcherism had finally got round to signing the papers.
It was, wrote Sue Townsend’s character Adrian Mole in his diary, ‘a glorious new dawn of optimism and a celebration of the transcendence of all that is best in humankind’. However absurd that came to seem in retrospect, it wasn’t too much of an exaggeration. Even amongst the large majority who hadn’t cast a vote for the new government, there was a desire to share in the mood of rejoicing. An opinion poll taken shortly after the election showed more than half the population claiming to have turned out for Labour, regardless of the facts. Amongst them was Bridget Jones’s mother, a lifelong Tory, who happily joined in the new order, proudly announcing: ‘We’re having a Tony and Gordon Ladies’ Night at the Rotary! Everyone’s going to call each other by their first name and wear casual wear instead of ties.’ Few, though, can have been happier at the turn of events than George Elliot, a taxi driver in the North-East, who had been so impressed in 1983 by the newly elected MP in the back of his cab that he placed a £10 bet at odds of 500–1 that Blair would be prime minister by the end of the century.
As the results became clear on election night, John Prescott expressed the mood of the moment, riding with his team in his battle-bus around Smith Square in Westminster, where the Conservative Party headquarters were located, and singing as loudly as possible: ‘Out, out, out, at last you’re out, out, out!’
But nothing that night came close to the moment late on in the proceedings when the results were announced from Enfield Southgate in North London. It was one of the safest Conservative seats, with a 15,000 majority, and no one gave the thirty-year-old Labour challenger, Stephen Twigg, a ghost of a chance. Simply the fact that an openly gay man had been selected was a sufficiently welcome sign in itself for many. ‘It’s marvellous that there’s going to be at least one gay candidate fighting the Enfield Southgate constituency and pledged to fight for homosexual equality,’ noted Peter Tatchell. The implied dig was at the incumbent MP, Michael Portillo, the man widely tipped to be John Major’s successor as leader of the party. Indeed the Daily Mail ran an article on election day under the headline PORTILLO POISED TO SEIZE VICTORY FROM DEFEAT, predicting precisely that event. The news that instead his vote had collapsed and that Twigg had taken the seat with a swing of 17 per cent was greeted with disbelieving glee around the country.
‘It was the defining moment of a generation, like VE Day or the moon landing,’ remembered Mark Steel. ‘Portillo had lost.’ It was all the more potent for coming just when celebration fatigue seemed to have set in. ‘It was so relentlessly bad for us, the other parties’ supporters had stopped cheering. They just looked on amazed,’ wrote Gyles Brandreth of the count in Chester, where he was losing his own seat. Even so, ‘poor Portillo’s defeat prompted a standing ovation’. A man having a cigarette outside an election party in North London was reported to have come rushing in, demanding to know what had prompted the ‘cheering and shouting coming out of all the houses’.
Even without the national indulgence in schadenfreude, it was the most significant personal defeat of the night, and a vindication of Tony Blair’s tactics since assuming the leadership. For a Conservative parliamentary party without Portillo suddenly looked a very different beast altogether, one that was unlikely to pose any serious threat. Had John Smith still been Labour leader, there is little doubt that the party would have won the 1997 election, but almost certainly without the same landslide. In particular the London suburbs, where Blair scored most heavily, would have been a much more difficult proposition, and the strong likelihood is that Portillo would have survived to lead a more substantial opposition. That possibility no longer existed and, for the man who had dithered in 1995 over whether to challenge John Major, there appeared to be a sense of relief that the decision had been taken out of his hands. ‘One thing alone I will not miss,’ Portillo said in his concession speech, ‘and that’s all the questions about the leadership.’
For John Major, the defeat was the event for which he had been preparing himself for the last five years. On the day after the 1992 victory he had discussed the result with Chris Patten and concluded that winning next time was unlikely: ‘I believed we had stretched the democratic elastic as far as it would go.’ That had become conventional wisdom over the ensuing period. ‘You can ask the people to elect you once or twice or even three times, and to do so with fair conviction,’ the journalist Robert Harris had written in 1996. ‘But once you start going back and demanding fourth or even fifth helpings of power, you cannot help but look greedy.’
That everything had gone so badly wrong merely confirmed this accepted wisdom, so that there were few options left save for gallows humour. ‘If I had stood unopposed,’ joked Major in 2000, ‘I would still have come second.’ Even so, the enormity of the humiliation was beyond nightmare, and there was a great deal of truth in Robin Cook’s jibe on election night. ‘This is a time to be magnanimous,’ he smirked. ‘It would be churlish to deny the Conservative Party their part in our victory tonight.’
In a better world, Major would have stayed on as leader of his party, just as James Callaghan had after the 1979 election, to give the Tories a chance to adjust to their new circumstances and to conduct a proper inquiry into what had gone so appallingly wrong. But, unsurprisingly, he’d had enough by now. For over four years he had been under constant attack from members of his own party, and he announced his resignation immediately, much to the disgust of at least one erstwhile colleague: ‘it was disgraceful to resign when he did,’ complained Portillo, fifteen months later. ‘Totally selfish.’ There was, of course, a certain self-interest in this position; had Major stayed on, it would have given Portillo a chance to get back into the Commons in a by-election and fight for the succession.
Major’s exit was as dignified as had been his entrance and – for the most part – as had been his conduct during his time in office. ‘When the curtain falls, it’s time to get off the stage,’ he told the assembled media, while quietly he left behind a bottle of champagne for the newly elected prime minister, with a note saying: ‘It’s a great job – enjoy it.’
Any sober judgement on Major’s conduct of economic policy in office would have to take account of the terrible slump of 1990–2, exacerbated by membership of the ERM – the mass unemployment, bankruptcies and home repossessions – and of his role, first as chancellor and then as prime minister, in those events. When he came to write his memoirs, however, he glossed over ‘the recession I inherited’, and relied instead on a simple audit of the position to which he had succeeded, as compared with the one he passed on: interest rates had fallen from 14 to 6 per cent, unemployment from 1.75 million to 1.6 million and, most importantly of all, the inflation that had bedevilled Britain for decades was finally under control, reduced from 9.7 to 2.6 per cent. The tax burden had increased as a share of GDP, but only marginally, from 36.3 to 36.6 per cent, and the economy had been growing for sixteen consecutive quarters. Inequality in wealth, having grown dramatically under Margaret Thatcher, had reached a plateau under her successor. On two measures of Thatcherite policy, the number of owner-occupied houses continued to grow, but the number of shareholders fell from its peak of eleven million in the late 1980s to just seven million by the time Major left office.
There had been hard times in the early 1990s, when ‘all the economic indicators worsened’, but overall, he was happy to conclude: ‘It was a fine legacy.’ As Treasury officials told Gordon Brown, when outlining the economic position immediately after the election: ‘These are fantastically good figures.’
Major could have gone further and claimed, with some justification, that spending on health and education was increasing in real terms – though the electorate failed to discern the impact – and that the official crime rate, once considered impervious to political initiatives, was falling, even if no one believed the figures. He had also articulated a post-Thatcherite, Conservative vision of where the country could go, had anyone cared to listen. And, in political terms, there was one towering achievement which none could deny: he had won in 1992, finally persuading the Labour Party to adopt the Tory agenda. ‘Margaret Thatcher buried old Labour,’ reflected Tristan Garel-Jones, ‘but John Major laid a lump of granite on the grave.’
Yet this was the man who had led the Conservative Party to its worst election result for a century and a half. But perhaps ‘led’ is too strong a word, for there was little inclination in the parliamentary party to accept the discipline of leadership. And there was only one real, underlying cause for the disasters of the last few years. All the sleaze and the scandals, whether sexual or financial, all the errors of judgement about closing down mines, adding VAT to domestic fuel or the shackling of pregnant prisoners, all the awkwardness about a new cultural movement and about the tolerant society it ushered in – ultimately these should have been the flotsam and jetsam of politics, bobbing impotently on a rising tide of prosperity. Even the recession might have been forgiven, if not forgotten. But they were given significance, and the state of the economy was deemed irrelevant, because there was Europe, and because Thatcher and all those loyal to her memory had finally decided that Enoch Powell had been right after all; this was the question that transcended all others.
Ultimately, everything came back to this one subject, whether it manifested itself in Black Wednesday or the Maastricht Treaty, the beef ban or Red Hot Dutch. The position of Britain in relation to the rest of Europe had become the defining issue of post-Empire politics, and a group of obstinate Conservative MPs insisted on regarding the question as one of principle rather than pragmatism. ‘I felt it was beyond the normal ability of someone who felt strongly about constitutional issues that he simply obey the party line,’ said Iain Duncan Smith, and there were enough others who agreed with him, supported by a substantial section of the Tory press, to make Major’s period of leadership almost impossible.
In the process they almost destroyed the Conservative Party. Way back in 1961, Harold Macmillan had warned that membership of the European Community ‘could break the Tory Party’, though he added privately that he wasn’t overly concerned about the possibility: ‘It never hurt the Party to split over something that was really in the national interest.’ The reality had been worse though: the party had not split, so that the acrimony and the disloyalty and the factionalism had bubbled away inside, until every part of the body was diseased. When it came to the critical moment, and Major put down one of his confidence motions, the Eurosceptics could just about be relied upon to fall into line, but the damage caused by the rebellions and squabbles in the periods between those votes was enormous. The prospect of perpetual Tory government, that had loomed so large in 1992, now looked merely risible, replaced by the likelihood of opposition for the foreseeable future.
From a purely party perspective, the actions of the Eurosceptic MPs and their journalist cheerleaders were entirely negative; the bitter divisions that were opened then would take more than a generation to heal. The Tories split between ideologues and managers, with the supposed leader desperately trying to ride both horses. ‘Majorism’, as defined by John Cole, was ‘doing the best a prime minister could in difficult circumstances’. But neither Major, nor probably anyone else, could unite a sullen, dissatisfied tribe. ‘There’s no banter, no joshing, no camaraderie,’ observed John Patten of the parliamentary party in 1997. ‘Can’t you feel the terrible hatred that there is in this place?’
In terms of their overriding concern, on the other hand, the Eurosceptics could claim a qualified victory. The drive towards European integration continued, but on the biggest question of all they had prevailed: Britain was unlikely to join the single currency when it was launched. Moreover, the case had been made with sufficient force that it became a toxic issue for the incoming government as well. Opinion polls at the time had shown a majority against Maastricht and that tendency grew; the proportion of people favouring a complete, unequivocal withdrawal from the EU rose from 29 per cent just before John Redwood’s leadership challenge to 38 per cent at the start of 1997. Whatever else the Tories left behind for Labour, there was precious little enthusiasm for the European project.
Happily for John Major, that was no longer his concern. In 1995, having announced his resignation as Conservative leader in his ‘put up or shut up’ ultimatum, he had gone to Lord’s cricket ground to watch the third day of England’s Test match against the West Indies, and had taken heart from the applause that ensued when a shot of him was projected onto the big video screens: ‘I was warmed and encouraged by this response.’ Now, having resigned for a second and final time, he went to the Oval, where he watched Surrey play the British Universities in a fifty-overs match. For a man who had fought so hard all his life to overcome the limitations of his education, there was something entirely appropriate that the county club he had supported since childhood (and of which, in 2000, he was to become president) should triumph over the combined universities by six wickets, with nearly twenty-five overs to spare. It was even more pleasing that they should do so at the ground so close to his heart that he had chosen it as his luxury item when appearing on Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs.
Again Major encountered the warmth that he so often brought out in people he met in person. ‘You had a rough decision, mate,’ one of the spectators called out to him, and the simple dignity of his response encapsulated some of the character that had helped him win that extraordinary victory, five long years ago: ‘Perhaps. But the umpire’s decision is final.’