by A. N. Wilson
The Cabinet performed their ritual assassination of Mrs Thatcher because of personal detestation. By the end, her judgement had deserted her and the riotous public reaction in April 1990 to her scheme to introduce a Poll Tax was only one indication of this fact. Had she resigned after eight or nine years in office, her standing would have been higher with the public. The truth is that the disloyal speeches of Ministers such as Geoffrey Howe–who resigned in a huff at an undignifiedly late stage, allegedly over ‘Europe’–did not damage Thatcher in the eyes of her supporters. They merely showed up her Cabinet for the spineless and disloyal bunch everyone had always seen them to be. (As in the joke: Waiter at luncheon table when Thatcher was taking the Cabinet for a treat at the Ritz: ‘Yes, madam, and what will it be?’ Thatcher: ‘I’ll have a steak, please.’ ‘And for the vegetables, madam?’ Thatcher: ‘They’ll have the same.’)
None of the vegetables will be remembered. Thatcher always will, not merely as a Prime Minister, but as an emblem. She was not loved. She had never set out to be loved–this was part of her electrifying appeal.
Heseltine had toppled his enemy, but he was not to be given the satisfaction of replacing her as Prime Minister. For that there were too many people in the parliamentary party who hated him. The result of a second ballot for the leadership came two votes short of the required majority, but no one doubted that it would lead to the collapse of the other two candidates–Douglas Hurd 56 votes, Heseltine 131 and John Major 185. No one outside the world of political obsessives had much idea of who John Major was. He had been Foreign Secretary and Chancellor of the Exchequer in fast succession, but was he given these elevated offices of state because he was the obvious man for the job, or because the previous occupants of these posts had been unable to tolerate working any longer for Thatcher in her acrimonious decline? With his grey suits, grey hair, grey smile and amiable, bespectacled face, John Major left no impression at all; he was not like the Thatcher favourites of earlier years, spivs such as Parkinson or wide boys such as Archer. Yet, with what must have been irrational optimism, when she heard of his election the former leader burst into the room. She threw her arms around the new Prime Minister’s wife, Norma Major, and exclaimed, ‘It’s everything I’ve dreamed of for such a long time. The future is assured; the future is assured.’31
Part Six
Mr Major’s Britain
21
Nice Mr Major
An exasperated scholar, Charles Dellheim, in an excellent book about the Thatcher years, wrote, ‘Few Americans know, or care, what Ronald Reagan’s father did for a living. But who in Britain does not know, and care one way or the other, that Margaret Thatcher is the daughter of a Grantham grocer?’1
If Thatcher’s family background ‘placed’ her very firmly, what could the public expect of her pleasant-looking bespectacled successor, John Major, the youngest Prime Minister to date in the twentieth century? Here was no stereotype. Indeed, the Dickensian family background was something no one would have guessed from the grey suit, and the demeanour, which was that of a friendly bank manager. (He had worked for the Standard Chartered Bank, in the tricky section of development banking, chiefly in the area of facilitating investment in African countries, before moving over to the Corporate Affairs side of the business.2) Behind the grey suits and the smiles was the tragi-comic pathos of his father’s life. In the bathroom of his parents’ bungalow in Worcester Park, the young John Major could have opened a trunk–as his brother recalled–‘a large black one, with reinforced edges, containing such exotic items as a ginger wig, an evening cane and an opera hat, which as a child, I played with, popping it out and collapsing it over and over again. There were also greasepaints, band parts, false whiskers and a black jacket edged with silk. My sister Pat recalls a trapeze costume with a stars-and-stripes design, strongly suggesting that it dates from his time in America, and a photograph of Father wearing this costume.’3
John Major’s father, born Tom Ball in the West Midlands in 1879, had emigrated to America when his father Abraham, a master bricklayer, went to seek work at the blast furnaces of Andrew Carnegie’s steel works in Pittsburgh. Tom did not follow his father into bricklaying but, having taught himself acrobatics in the cellar (they by then had an independent builders’ business), he left home to work as a trapeze artist in the circus. He subsequently pursued a career in vaudeville, performing in America, and in every town in England which possessed a theatre. His first wife, Kate Edith Grant, began her relationship with Tom as the other half of a music-hall double act, celebrated in its day as Drum and Major. It seems as if it were she who took ‘Major’ as a stage name: Kitty Major. They trod the boards with Dan Leno Junior, Marie Lloyd, Randolph Sutton and many other household names. The Drum and Major act continued until well into the 1920s, with comedy routines and songs, some of them written by Kitty herself:
And can you ever remember a Tommy,
A Swaddie, a Tifly, or Jack,
Hear a word said against Mother England,
And not biff the foreigner back?
Towards the end of the marriage, Tom had formed an attachment to a young dancer named Gwen Coates, twenty-six years younger than himself. She was a brilliant dancer, who continued to be able to do the splits as an old lady. Terry Major-Ball, John’s brother, tells us that ‘Kitty died in June 1928, after a long illness as a result of an accident with a stage prop’. Unfortunately he did not expand. A year later, Tom Ball married Gwen Coates and in 1930, by the age of fifty-one, he had decided to give up his stage career. The pair began to have children–Aston, who died at birth in June 1929; Pat, described on the birth certificate as the child of an actor; and, in 1932, Terry, on whose certificate Tom has become a ‘fuel agent’, selling coke and coal. It was at about this time that Tom began to make garden ornaments, starting small in a spare bedroom of the bungalow, and eventually expanding into Major’s Garden Ornaments–making gnomes out of plaster moulds. The business throve. ‘Father had flourishing outlets all over southern England.’4 The coming of war finished all that. ‘Garden ornaments were the last thing people needed during the war. So he closed down the firm and went into Civil Defence, and Mother took a job in a library.’5
The last child, John Roy Major, was born on 29 March 1943. He had no memory of his parents having been interested in politics, though he assumed that they voted Conservative, ‘if only out of admiration for Winston Churchill’.6 When the future Prime Minister came into the world, his father was already sixty-four. The days of the flying trapeze and of music-hall routines were long over, shut away in the bathroom trunk. John Major grew up with elderly, loving parents who struggled with debt but proudly saw their clever son through Rutlish Grammar School in Wimbledon, where he did not work very hard but he enjoyed playing cricket. He left school at sixteen, and did a variety of jobs, including helping his brother Terry in a business very similar to Major’s Garden Ornaments–Davids’ Rural Industries. ‘We didn’t just turn out these other people’s moulds, we made our own models. Terry was even better at it than I was, and my sister even more than him. Even today if you hand me a lump of clay, I will make you something rather good and make a mould out of it.’7 Eventually, having been a clerk at the District Bank, he sat the exams for the Institute of Banking, and his career, such as it ever was, began.
Major’s Jewish mistress, Edwina Currie, a sometime Junior Minister at the Department of Health, felt qualified to advise him about his wife, Norma–‘being half Jewish–he used to ask me about Jewish things, just at the end of the evening, as if he had been saving it up, something he wanted to know. And the most extraordinary moment was in the bath, when he asked if I believed in God. “Yes”, I said, “but not in all the ritual. I had that stuffed down my throat as a child.” He nodded and patted my back, as if satisfied, as if he’s been asking himself the question a long time, and had now found a satisfactory formula.’8 Currie’s career came unstuck, not through her indiscretions about Major–these were published later as an exhib
itionistic attempt to make some money–but because she had mishandled her Department’s response to an outbreak of salmonella. By bossily, and quite needlessly, telling television viewers not to eat eggs, she managed to do such damage to the chicken farmers that kamikaze was required. (In all the rituals of resignation, she kept her humiliated cool, leaving her office at the Department, drafting her letter, and so on, until the moment when the Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, hugged her–‘gave me a cuddle’, a phrase which, given the two participants, is slightly chilling–and ‘it creased me for a minute’. She was soon back to her normal, brassy form. ‘My trivial objective’, she told her diary at the end of the same day, 21 December 1988, ‘is to get to the end of this Parliament with a fur coat and some decent jewellery.’9 She did this by a relentless campaign of self-publicity, writing various salacious novels which were supposedly autobiographical, and finishing up by publishing details of her relationship with Major. These did her no good, and him no harm at all. If anything, it increased his image among the British public that he was a normal, modern person. If, in the course of marriage to a much nicer woman than Edwina, he had been tempted to step aside, the public attitude was one of sympathy for the Majors, knowledge that such things sometimes happen in a marriage, and recognition that John and Norma Major were both behaving with dignity, whereas Edwina was not. John and Edwina had finished their affair before Major became Prime Minister, but her revelations must have prompted the historically minded to ask when was the last time that a Prime Minister found himself in a comparable position. Thatcher had married a man who had been previously married–a technical adultery in the eyes of some Churches; but though she had loved to flirt with her favoured spivs, she was no Catherine the Great, her interest in power for its own sake surely driving out other passions. Callaghan, though he fathered a well-known adulteress, the Baroness Jay, was not known for his extra-marital adventures, if he had any. There was gossip about Harold Wilson’s baffling relationship with Marcia Falkender, but Wilson was not a conspicuously sexy person. Heath was Heath. Alec Home was obviously a loyal husband. Harold Macmillan was an undersexed cuckold. Eden, like Thatcher, broke the Church’s marriage laws by remarriage after divorce, but was not obviously unfaithful to his second wife, Clarissa. Churchill was undersexed. Attlee’s sexual nature, if existent, was unimaginable. Chamberlain, Baldwin and Ramsay MacDonald were hardly figures whose names are linked ineradicably with bawdry. For a figure comparable to John Major you have to go back in history to Lloyd George. John Major did not conduct himself with the exuberance of Lloyd George, but the knowledge that he had a sexual nature–that he was an attractive person–was a refreshing novelty in political life.
His new style of leadership, after Thatcher’s combative approach, was perceived to be not merely nicer but (at first) more effectual. Most noticeably was this case in December 1991, when Major returned from the European Council at Maastricht, having personally negotiated three crucial opt-outs for Britain from the treaty which sought to bind the nations of Europe in an ever-closer political, legal and social union. First, he would not sign up to the Social Charter governing working conditions. Secondly, he would not sign up for a single currency, and the abolition of sterling. Thirdly, he would not commit Britain to federalism. The Foreign Office were amazed at Major’s skill as a negotiator, and when he returned to tell the Commons there were cheers from the back benches. The election in the following year, which so many pundits predicted would be a disaster for the Conservatives, was a political triumph for Major. Fourteen and a half million people had voted Conservative, compared with the thirteen million who had voted for Thatcher in 1983. In his own constituency of Huntingdon, he had increased his personal majority from 27,500 to 36,000, one of the largest majorities in parliamentary history.10 It was clear that this victory was not simply an answer to the question, ‘Do you want Neil Kinnock to be Prime Minister?’ Clearly, the profound electoral unattractiveness of the Labour dream ticket–Kinnock and Hattersley–made their contribution to the historic Conservative victory. But Major’s personal rating was very high, and voters liked what he promised:
‘I want a Britain where there is a helping hand for those who need it; where people can get a hand up, not just a hand out. A country that is fair and free from prejudice–a classless society, at ease with itself.’ Yet, within months, Major was spoken of as the most disastrous Prime Minister in history; what went wrong?
First, there was a world recession, exacerbated in Europe by the reunification of Germany in November 1989. The German Budget moved from a surplus of $48 billion in 1990 to a deficit of $21 billion in 1991. Britain had been locked into the ERM, joining at a perilous moment when the pound sterling exchanged for 2.95DM, a rate which was never going to be easy for British business, and which in the gathering storm became ruinous for thousands of savers, importers and exporters. Understandably anxious to curb German inflation, Chancellor Kohl would not reduce the high interest rates in Germany. By September, the European markets were in turmoil, and on 16 September Britain was forced out of the ERM. Sterling had in effect been devalued by 10 percent. In panic, the government–effectively, Major, his Chancellor Norman Lamont and the Governor of the Bank of England, reduced interest rates, bringing them down to 9 percent (from a proposed 15 percent) in one week. Savers, pensioners and businesses lost heavily, in many cases ruinously during the so-called Black Wednesday, while currency speculators such as the Hungarian-born George Soros made $1 billion in forty-eight hours. Major had chosen badly by appointing Norman Lamont as Chancellor of the Exchequer, and he also made a mistake in not sacking Lamont immediately after the fateful day. Black Wednesday not only created a country, overnight, which was very much the reverse of ‘at ease with itself’. It opened up an unbridgeable fissure in the Conservative ranks. Thatcher, who had been against joining the ERM in the first place, and who had only been bullied into doing so by Lawson and Howe, could not restrain her harpie-squawks of triumph. She spent Black Wednesday on the telephone to her friends in Washington saying that she had been proved right.11 A collective madness now descended upon the parliamentary party. There was no prospect at this juncture of Britain actually leaving the European Union, and it would have been hard to see how such a course could have improved the by-now-calamitous state of the British economy. Yet, to leave the Union was what the more impassioned of the Eurosceptics desired. In fact, the collapse of the ERM was a felix culpa for the British, proving Thatcher right in economic terms. Sterling could now find its natural level against other currencies, British businesses were now much more free and potentially more profitable. But Black Wednesday made many Conservatives wonder. The ERM calamity had happened because of Britain’s involvement with the EU. The dread of losing British independence within the stultifying bureaucracy of a superstate led many people to think that the Prime Minister’s skilful negotiations at Maastricht were not skilful enough. They wanted out. On the other wing of the party, the social democratically minded figures such as Kenneth Clarke, who became the new Chancellor, after the useless Lamont was eventually sacked in May 1993, or the genial Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd, were understandably alarmed by the disloyalty of the sceptics, and by the silliness of some of their arguments. Their loftiness offended the majority of the public, whose doubts about the European experiment were legitimate and very far from the ‘loony’ figures such as John Redwood, the strange-looking Secretary of State for Wales.
The Conservative Party had, in the previous fifteen or twenty years, been through a series of exhausting transmogrifications. The doctrine-free alliance of the landed classes and the suburbs, which had kept the party in power for much of the twentieth century, had been violently disturbed by the Thatcher Revolution. Whether or not individual voters, or parliamentarians, embraced the sacred doctrines of monetarism, the Conservatives had become the party representing monetarist liberalism. It was not sure any longer who or what it was. It had sucked at the teats of its new wet nurse and drunk deep of the he
ady but potentially toxic draughts which she gave them. The enchantress seemed to lead them to victory and triumph, but when she no longer appeared able to do so, ritual sacrifice seemed the only way out. The massacre of the Money-Mother had been an act of gratuitous violence, but it had momentarily appeased the Fates. Now she returned from the dead, having lost what vestiges of political nous or personal niceness she might once have possessed. Like the witch at a christening, she wanted to curse the baby whom she had at first suckled as her natural heir. And she who had forced through British membership of the European Union now became the High Priestess of the Eurosceptic Cult, screeching her strange imprecations against each and every manifestation of ‘compromise’ from the government, and finding her words echoed by those of Major’s Cabinet colleagues who sensed an electoral advantage in exploiting public concerns. It might have been supposed that this would have encouraged the true believers to embrace Europe, as the old right of the Conservative Party had done in the 1960s. Heath, after all, had been the candidate of the right in those days, and Thatcher had campaigned for a Yes vote in the referendum on British membership of the EEC, wearing a shirt embla-zoned with the flags of the six member states. Black Wednesday, however, had been a demonstration of what happens if a free currency and a free country find themselves locked into currency agreements fixed by others. The enormous opportunities offered British businesses by membership of the largest free trade area in the world were balanced by the political and sometimes economic costs of ‘Brussels’.