A new dawn: Major takes office in 1990

John Major's premiership is remembered now for infighting over Europe, sleaze and scandal, and the decline to an historic election defeat, but it didn't always look like that

With alarm I realise it’s more than 30 years since John Major became prime minister, after the resignation of Margaret Thatcher. The Iron Lady had been in office for more than 11 years, and some found it hard to imagine politics without her. She had not successfully groomed a crown prince, and her only rival seemed to be Michael Heseltine, who had walked out of her cabinet in January 1986 and spent the next five years courting the party’s grassroots. But the Conservative Party was aware of the adage, thought by many to be Shakespearean but actually coined by Heseltine himself: “I knew that he who wields the knife never wears the crown.”

When Heseltine’s challenge eventually came, in November 1990, he had been spurred on by Sir Geoffrey Howe’s devastating resignation speech, in which the famously mild-mannered former chancellor and foreign secretary had declared, almost speaking directly to Heseltine, “The time has come for others to consider their own response to the tragic conflict of loyalties with which I have myself wrestled for perhaps too long.” The man once dubbed Tarzan could resist no longer, and offered himself as a candidate for the leadership in the yearly re-election process.

His own maxim notwithstanding, Heseltine’s chances seemed strong. Who else was there? After more than a decade in office, Thatcher had become a political upas tree, laying low all around her, and her cabinet contained few obvious stars. John Major, the chancellor of the exchequer, had only run his own department for 18 months; Douglas Hurd, foreign secretary, was the acme of a British diplomat but his Eton-and-Cambridge background looked outdated (imagine that!) and he could be stiff on television; the home secretary, David Waddington, was over 60 and a steady but unshowy figure. And the second rank? Kenneth Clarke, education secretary, was a bruiser but still untested at the very top; Chris Patten, environment secretary, was thought clever but too wet for Thatcher to endorse; Malcolm Rifkind, Scottish secretary, was a fluent and capable lawyer but seemed stuck as Scotland’s viceroy.

Thatcher expected to win. Since her arrival in the Commons in 1959, she had never lost an election. And her supporters looked at the unpromising cabinet and could not contemplate the party which owed her so much turning against her. They failed to see her growing autocracy and attachment to disastrous policies like the Community Charge. After a catastrophically mismanaged leadership campaign run by her PPS, the pickled and unhappy Peter Morrison, she beat Heseltine in the first round of voting, but not by the margin required to avoid another poll. After much agonising, she withdrew before the second round and allowed her ministers to fight it out. Major and Hurd threw their hats into the ring, and Heseltine’s prediction proved right. The results came in: Major, 185; Heseltine, 131; Hurd, 56. The assassin withdrew and John Major became prime minister. Aged 47, he was the youngest premier since the Earl of Rosebery in 1894.

The public did not have much of an image of Major when he suddenly became the Queen’s first minister. He had been in cabinet since 1987, but initially as chief secretary to the Treasury, the chancellor’s number two in charge of public spending. In July 1989, he had unexpectedly been elevated to one of the great offices of state, replacing Geoffrey Howe as foreign secretary, but three months later, Nigel Lawson had resigned from the Treasury, and Major had moved into his position as chancellor of the exchequer. It was a job he seemed well suited for. His background was as a banker, and his political ambition had been fired when he had watched his first debate in the House of Commons in April 1956, as Harold Macmillan had presented his only budget of his tenure as chancellor. From 1984 to 1985, he had been Treasury whip, and then served at Lawson’s right hand from 1987 to 1989 as chief secretary.

But what was he like? Who was he? In Conservative cabinets of the 1980s, he was an unusual figure. His father had been a musical hall performer before turning to selling garden ornaments. Bright and hard-working, he passed the 11+ examination and went to Rutlish School, a grammar school in Merton, but his father (63 when Major was born) began to suffer ill-health and his business declined. In 1955, the family was forced to move to a small top-floor flat in Brixton. He left school at 16 with only three O-levels and took a job as a clerk in an insurance brokerage firm. It was said when he rose to fame later that he had been the only child who had left the circus to run away and become an accountant: wildly inaccurate but with just enough truth to capture his unusual circumstances.

In social and educational terms, he stood out in Thatcher’s cabinet. A grammar school boy, he was one of only five cabinet ministers by 1990 (including the prime minister herself) who had not been privately educated (the others were Kenneth Baker, Cecil Parkinson and Michael Howard); lacking a university education, he mirrored only Callaghan and Churchill (who had been to Sandhurst) among post-War prime ministers. He was probably the only cabinet minister who had experienced genuine poverty, and, although he was friendly and assured, his childhood had marked him. However, in terms of political development, he was almost wholly a product of Thatcherism, having been elected to the House in 1979 in her first election victory.

Major won the leadership in 1990 because of two opposing factors: he was not Thatcher, of whom the parliamentary party, if not the ordinary membership, had tired; but he was regarded, not least through ignorance of his views, as a safe candidate to preserve the Thatcherite legacy. The Lady herself had endorsed him as her chosen successor, but, ominously, she had assured party workers that her influence would remain strong. “I shan’t be pulling the levers, but I shall be a very good backseat driver.”

It would have been the height of folly for Major to pretend that nothing had changed with Thatcher’s departure. When his new cabinet first met—impossible to imagine today, it contained no women—there was an air of relief. Major had set out to calm the Tory ship: the defeated Heseltine agreed to resume his old job of environment secretary (which he had held from 1979 to 1983) in order to dismantle and replace the hated Community Charge; Kenneth Baker, Thatcher’s close ally, was promoted to home secretary; and Norman Lamont, always regarded with suspicion by Thatcher but a key player in Major’s leadership campaign, became chancellor. Major’s friend and fellow 1979 intake Chris Patten took over as party chairman, with an election no more than 18 months away.

There were pressing issues. British military forces were building in the Gulf to contain and reverse Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait (coalition forces would go on the offensive in January 1991), pushing Major on to the international diplomatic stage with no time for preparation or reflection. The issue of local government finance had to be addressed without delay, as most MPs understood that the Community Charge would lose them the next general election. And, seemingly minor but capturing the public’s attention, there had been a series of maulings of people by dogs, in response to which the Home Office brought forward legislation which became the much-maligned Dangerous Dogs Act 1991.

But the new prime minister was not without vision, nor was he merely a continuity Margaret Thatcher. His big idea in the first months of his premiership was the transformation of public services to improve quality and choice for all. Thatcher’s Britain, hungry for privatisation, had come to see public services by default as a kind of safety net for those who could not afford the private sector. For Major, with his impoverished childhood, this was not good enough. He wanted the benefits of the private sector to be available to everyone, and so he sought to make public services efficient, responsive and, above all, accountable. They must, he felt, be focused on the experience of the consumer rather than hidebound and insular bureaucratic institutions.

Major’s instrument for achieving this massive cultural change was the Citizen’s Charter, unveiled in July 1991. This required all public services, from hospitals and schools to prisons and the police, to produce clear targets for levels of service. These would be benchmarks against which they could be judged, openly and measurably, allowing the public to see where the public sector was working and where it was not. Guaranteed time limits were introduced for NHS patients to receive consultations, and charters were unveiled for schools, housing tenants and motorists. Organisations which met their service targets would be granted Charter Marks.

The system was derided and dismissed by many. Some found it hubristically unambitious, dealing with the minutiae of everyday life, of which the Cones Hotline—a telephone line through which the public could check on the progress of roadworks—was touted as the most footling example. Other critics accused the government of focusing on metrics rather than consumer experience, and predicted that public sector bodies would devote their attentions to the achievement of these targets to the exclusion of everything else.

There was more to it than this. While the Charter system was not wholly successful, it did mark the first real attempt by government to make the public sector accountable to the individuals who used it, and to empower those individual consumers to challenge poor performance. It was not easy to classify it in Conservative taxonomy: its emphasis on efficiency and performance measurement had a strong whiff of Thatcherism, yet its attempt to extend choice and agency to the whole public seemed to fall more obviously within the “One Nation” tradition. That duality reflected Major himself, a self-made man from humble origins but one who had risen to prominence in a party led by Margaret Thatcher.

Today, in a political atmosphere of fierce debate and absolutism of ideas, there is something attractively gentle and inclusive about Major’s first significant initiative. It might even be considered characteristically British: it was modest and incremental, but it recognised that these areas—heathcare, law and order, local government, housing—were some of those which touched most immediately on everyday lives and the quality of life. In trying to make little things a little bit better for everyone, it was noble and caring, and certainly did not deserve the derision which later generations would pour on it. Moreover, though it would be dressed in much brighter finery, it would in many ways become the foundation of many of the reforms of Tony Blair’s government.

Major had spoken more widely of his vision for the country he governed. Almost as soon as he had moved into Downing Street, he had said “In the next ten years we will have to continue to make changes which will make the whole of this country a genuinely classless society.” This seemed a bold idea, given the Conservative Party he led. But it reflected both his own deep conviction and, in a way, the underlying attitude of Thatcher, who had risen from lower-middle-class beginnings and remained sceptical of the party’s well-born grandees. On the steps of Number 10, he had gone even further: “I want to see us build a country that is at ease with itself, a country that is confident and a country that is able and willing to build a better quality of life for all its citizens.”

This summed up Major and an incipient political philosophy that never fully blossomed, Majorism. It recognised the circumstances in which it was being born: the Thatcher revolution had been sharp and divisive but many of the great issues had been settled. Many industries and services had been privatised, though British Coal was still to finish that process, and two great targets of British Rail and the Post Office remained. The over-mighty unions had been challenged and their power to break governments shattered. The City of London had been deregulated and transformed by Big Bang. Shareholdership had been vastly extended. And the Keynesian past of full employment and government intervention had been banished. As New Labour’s guiding genius Peter Mandelson would go on to say in 2002, “we are all Thatcherites now”.

As the dust of those battles settled, Major could afford to follow his own instincts and provide a more conciliatory style of leadership, acting much more as primus inter pares with his cabinet than a domineering captain of the ship like his predecessor. He himself had remarked “Margaret had often introduced subjects in cabinet by setting out her favoured solution: shameless but effective. I, by contrast, preferred to let my views be known in private, see potential dissenters ahead of the meeting, encourage discussion and sum up after it… I chose consensus in policy-making, if not always in policy.” It was an eloquent and revealing comparison.

Thatcher, as we know, soon became disenchanted with her successor. Indeed, he seemed to disappoint her so greatly that she largely transferred her affections, subtly but incredibly, to Tony Blair, whom she admired for his dynamism and leadership. But Major had to be different. He could not simply be Thatcher in a suit. the country had gone through 11 years of extraordinary turmoil and reconstruction, necessary enough but hard pounding. Major’s ambition, mocked as mild-mannered and parochially, almost stereotypically, English, was to calm a nation and allow it to settle into its new landscape, to absorb what had happened and gather its thoughts for the future.

The Iron Lady remains widely misquoted as saying “There is no such thing as society”. In fact her remarks were more nuanced and more telling than that: in 1987 she said in an interview with Woman’s Own “they are casting their problems on society and who is society? There is no such thing! There are individual men and women and there are families and no government can do anything except through people and people look to themselves first.” That was a fairer and more accurate assessment of her ideology and what separated her from socialism.

Major would never have said the same. Though he was not vastly distanced from Thatcher, the idea of society, community and the nation was important to him, and he wanted it to be one made of up of empowered, well-served and active citizens. Of course, although he would serve six-and-a-half years as prime minister, his government was blown irretrievably off course by Black Wednesday in September 1992, by a dwindling parliamentary majority, by furious internal divisions over Europe and by a seemingly endless succession of scandals among his ministers. Perhaps his administration will come to be assessed more generously, and he will not forever be seen as the intermezzo between Thatcher and Blair, political titans.

Nevertheless, while the Conservative Party battles to stay afloat under its third leader in four months, and searches for its identity or at least its ideological fault lines, and the screech of partisan rancour grown more and more shrill and piercing, it is worth taking a few moments to look back to a turning point in the party’s history, not a U-turn or even a major divergence, but a shift in emphasis and tone as its leader sought to reimagine its essential ideology for new circumstances. I confess to having romantic notions of nationality, nationhood and identity, with which I will not delay the reader on this occasion, but even more hard-headed souls might see something quietly attractive in the sort of society John Major was trying to construct. He was a premier of ambition gently expressed, generous in scope and optimistic in origin. They are qualities which are never too abundant in political life, and they remind us that almost all politicians, whatever their creed or hue, are seeking to make a better society.