John Ball, More Interesting than He Looks
To guide this confusing new Britain, teetering on the edge of a new spate of globalism arrived an unlikely and very English figure, a Prime Minister whose seven years in office make him one of the longer-serving of modern times but who already gets half-overlooked. John Major was not what he seemed. He appeared to be a bland, friendly loyal Thatcherite. She thought so. So did Tory MPs, who elected him their leader because of who he was not. He was not the urbane, posh, old-school Tory Douglas Hurd and he was not the floppy-haired enchanter and lady-killer, Michael Heseltine. So who was he? Major had none of Thatcher’s certainty or harshness. It is a reasonable principle that when you probe the history of a normal, middle-of-the-road English person, you find it surprisingly exotic. That is the case with Major. He was a sensitive boy from the wrong part of town, from a mixed-up, rather rum family. His father was one of the music-hall artistes described much earlier in this book, a remarkable man who had been partly brought up in the United States, returning to Britain in Edwardian times to pursue a long stage career, then rampaging cheerfully round South America, marrying twice and producing two illegitimate children. His name was Tom Ball. The ‘Major’ was a stage name. As John Major said later he might more properly have been named John Ball, like the leader of the peasants’ revolt against the original poll tax.
Major was born late. His father was already an old man, now pursuing yet another career making garden ornaments. When an informal business deal went wrong he lost almost everything and the family moved from their comfortable suburban house to a crowded flat in Brixton, which they shared with a cat-burglar, a Jamaican later arrested for stabbing a policeman, and a trio of cheery Irish tax-dodgers. The flat turned out to be owned by Major’s (much older) secret half brother, though he never knew this at the time. Methodist Grantham this was not. Major, infuriated at being saddled with the name Major-Ball when he was sent to grammar school, was a poor pupil and left at sixteen. His early life was ragged and formless in shape. He worked as a clerk, made garden gnomes with his brother, looked after his mother and endured a ‘degrading’ time of unemployment, before eventually pursuing a career as a banker and becoming a Conservative councillor. Unlike Margaret Thatcher, his politics were formed by the inner city and he was on the anti-Powellite, moderate wing of the party. After a long search, he was finally selected as Tory candidate for the rural seat of Huntingdon and entered Parliament in 1979 as the Thatcher age began.
There he rose almost without trace, through a minor job with the Home Office, to the whips’ office which, as the internal security machine of a parliamentary party, can be a useful training ground for the ambitious, to two years at Social Security. After the 1987 election Thatcher promoted him to the cabinet as Chief Secretary to the Treasury, when he haggled with ministers about their spending plans. She liked him because he had stood up to her in argument, not because he was a stooge. There followed the abrupt further promotions to the Foreign Office where he served as Foreign Secretary for all of ninety-four days, and Treasury. As Chancellor he had promoted a short-lived alternative to monetary union, the ‘hard ecu’, which would have been a kind of voluntary euro, running alongside the old currencies. He had then won Thatcher round to membership of the ERM, though entering as it turned out at too high a rate. By the time he suddenly emerged as a possible candidate to replace her as Prime Minister, Major was known by those who knew him for being affable, reliable, hardworking, self-deprecating and, it was assumed, as her protégé, a model Thatcherite. But to everyone outside Tory politics, he was a blank canvas. He was the least known new Prime Minister in post-war Britain as well as the youngest of the century so far. At forty-seven, he was barely a public figure.
Most Conservatives had grown sick and tired of dramatics. Here was a bloke from next door with an easy smile leading them to easier times. Chris Patten, then the brightest man in the cabinet, acted as its spokesmen when he recalled the prisoners’ chorus to freedom in Beethoven’s opera Fidelio. If only they knew what was coming. Thatcher, belatedly slightly wary, promised to be a good ‘back-seat driver’. Major wanted none of her advice. He considered offering her a job, either in the cabinet or as ambassador to Washington. He decided not to. He talked of building a ‘society of opportunity’ and compassion, and for privileges once available to ‘the few’ to be spread ‘to the many’. This sounds like an early try-out for the language of New Labour: Major came to believe Blair had simply swiped many of his ideas and presented them as his own, with more verve. As we shall see there is some truth in this. But Major had little time to plan his own agenda. There were immediate crises. He was quick to kill off the poll tax and replace it with a new council tax bearing an uncommon resemblance to the old rating system. He was equally quick to meet the elder President Bush and support him through the Gulf War. Above all, he had to turn straight away to confront the great hydra-headed monster that was devouring his party, the federal agenda of Jacques Delors.
If ever a place was well chosen for debating the end of a Europe of independent nation states, it was Maastricht in Holland, an attractive cobbled town nestled so close to the German and Belgian borders it is almost nationless. Here the great showdown of winter 1991 took place. A new treaty was to be agreed and it was one which made the federal project ever more explicit. There was to be fast progress to a single currency. Much of foreign policy, defence policy and home affairs were to come under the ultimate authority of the EU. A ‘social chapter’ would oblige Britain to accept the more expensive work guarantees of the continent and surrender some of the trade union reforms brought in under Thatcher. For a country with a weak industrial base whose economy partly depended on undercutting her continental rivals, all this would be grave. For a Conservative Party which had applauded Lady Thatcher’s defiant Bruges speech, it was almost a declaration of war, in which Europe’s ‘federal’ destiny had become made explicit and imminent. Fretting and moody in exile Thatcher saw Maastricht as a recipe for national suicide. She now believed she had been removed from Downing Street because of her stand over Europe. Hearing Major declare he wanted Britain to be ‘at the heart of Europe’, a mere bromide of a phrase, she added him to the long list of traitors. Her admirers hissed. He refused to rule out a single currency for all time. They became angrier still. So did she.
Major was trying to be practical, not exciting. He decided that he had no absolutist views on the single currency. One day it would happen. It had obvious business and trading advantages. But now was too soon, partly because it would make life harder for the central European countries being freed from communism to join the EU. So he was neither a ‘never’ nor a ‘now’. Most people assumed he was glibly steering between two whirlpools, trying to keep his party united. In his memoirs, a great deal better written than most such books, he protested that he was accused of dithering, procrastination, lacking leadership and conviction. As to his true and subtle position, ‘I have given up hope that this will ever be understood.’ Yet at Maastricht he managed against all the odds during genuinely tense negotiations to slip Britain out of paying fealty to the EU on most of what was demanded. He and his Chancellor, Norman Lamont, negotiated a special British opt-out from monetary union and managed to have the social chapter excluded from the treaty altogether. Major kept haggling late and on every detail, wearing out his fellow leaders with more politeness but as much determination as Thatcher ever had. For a man with a weak hand, under fire from his own side at home, it was quite a feat. Major returned to hosannas in the newspapers and the widely reported remark of an aide that it was ‘game, set and match’ to Britain. He was briefly a hero. He described his reception by the Tory Party in the Commons as the modern equivalent of a Roman triumph, quite something for the boy from Brixton.
Soon after this, flushed with confidence, Major called the election most observers thought he must lose. The economy was so badly awry, the pain of the poll tax so fresh, the Labour Party of Neil Kinnock now so efficiently and ruthlessly organized, that the Tory years were surely ending. Things turned out differently. Lamont’s pre-election budget had helped a lot. It proposed cutting the bottom rate of income tax by five pence in the pound, which would help people on lower incomes, and badly wrong-footed Labour. Under a pugnacious Patten, now the party chairman, the Tories targeted Labour’s enthusiasm for higher taxes. It was tough stuff. Patten called himself ‘the liberal thug’. During the campaign itself, Major found himself returning to his roots in Brixton and mounting a soap-box – in fact, a plastic container – from which he addressed raucous crowds through a megaphone. This stark contrast to the careful control of the Labour campaign struck a chord with the media and he kept it up, playing the underdog to the Kinnock’s ‘government in waiting’. Right at the end, at an eve of the poll rally in Sheffield, Kinnock’s self-control finally gave way and he began punching the air with delight, crying ‘y’aw’right!’ This is often said to have finally turned middle England against him. That seems a bit neat.
On 9 April 1992 Major’s Conservatives won 14 million votes, more than any party in British political history. It was a great personal achievement, also based on people’s fear of higher Labour taxes. It was also one of the biggest percentage leads since 1945, though the vagaries of the electoral system gave Major a majority of just twenty-one seats. Kinnock was devastated and quickly left front-line politics. But never has such a famous victory produced such a rotten result for the winners. Patten lost his seat in Bath and went off to become the final governor of Hong Kong, tussling with the Chinese ahead of the long-agreed handover of Britain’s last proper colony. Despite the popular vote, the smallness of the majority meant Major’s authority was now steadily eaten away. He has not gone down in history as a great leader of this country, but under a parliamentary system greatness is generally related to parliamentary arithmetic. What kind of revolutionary would Margaret Thatcher have been had she had a majority of twenty-one in 1979 or 1983? Nor were the economics propitious. Had Labour won in 1992 it would have been quickly tarnished too. The choice of governing in that year was what rugby players call a hospital pass. For now John Major, the delighted and much-relieved victor, had the slippery ball in his hands and was acknowledging the cheers of the crowds. Meanwhile a platoon of nasty looking, bone-crushing, twenty-stone forwards were just about to jump him.