Читать книгу Back from the Brink: The Inside Story of the Tory Resurrection - Peter Snowdon - Страница 6

As the sun rose on a fine spring day, an exuberant Tony Blair left a rally on the South Bank of the River Thames and headed for his Islington home to catch a few hours’ sleep. Blair had spent much of the early morning soaking up the adulation of friends, colleagues and supporters. ‘A new dawn has broken, has it not?’ he exclaimed to a party that had not won a general election for twenty-three years. On 1 May 1997 the country had placed its faith in Labour after the party had spent almost two decades in the wilderness. Friday, 2 May would usher in a new regime in Downing Street and a new era for British politics.

There was not much left of the old regime. It had been swept from office in a landslide. ‘I remember driving back to London from Cornwall at 5 a.m. and realising that there were great swathes of the West Country that no longer had a Conservative MP. I didn’t drive through a single Conservative seat until Wiltshire.’¹ Sebastian Coe, the former double Olympic gold medallist, was one of 178 Tory MPs who lost their seats. From Lands End to John o’Groats, voters had purged themselves of a party that once dominated Britain’s electoral landscape. Half the parliamentary party had been wiped out overnight: only 165 were left standing by the morning. The party had polled just 31 per cent of the vote, its lowest showing since 1832, the year of the Great Reform Act. Middle England had deserted the party in droves. Leafy Birmingham Edgbaston, true blue since the Second World War, was the first of many seats to fall to New Labour’s advance as Tony Blair led his party to victory with an overall majority of 179, a post-war record. Not one Conservative MP was returned to Westminster from Scotland or Wales. The surviving rump represented the outskirts of London, the Home Counties and a retinue of rural shires and market towns. The Liberal Democrats, recording the best result for a third party since 1929, sliced into Tory heartlands, picking up votes that had been cast tactically to ensure total defeat of John Major’s government.

Seven Cabinet ministers lost their seats, including the Foreign Secretary, Malcolm Rifkind, and the charismatic Defence Secretary, Michael Portillo. Portillo’s defeat in Enfield Southgate, a plush suburban district of north London, was the biggest scalp of the night. His should have been a safe seat. Iain Duncan Smith, a backbench MP in nearby Chingford and Woodford Green, had realised that he and Portillo were in trouble. ‘Labour was all over seats like mine and Portillo’s. We spent the final week of the campaign working my seat as if it was a marginal. I held on but everywhere around me went.’²

For some time before the votes were cast, Michael Portillo had been contemplating life in opposition. Halfway through the campaign he summoned Andrew Cooper and Michael Simmonds, two bright young aides from Central Office, to his home, and gave them a piece of paper on which he had sketched out the themes for a leadership campaign in the aftermath of a Conservative defeat, asking them to finish it off.³ Portillo had passed up what might have been his best opportunity to lead the party only two years previously. When Major threw down the gauntlet in June 1995 by putting himself forward for re-election as party leader after three years of backbiting, the ‘darling of the Right’ refused to stand against him. It soon emerged that he was in fact planning to challenge Major if the contest went into a second round, after engineers were spotted installing telephone lines outside what was to be his campaign headquarters. ‘I appeared happy to wound but afraid to strike: a dishonourable position,’ he later confessed.⁴ Two years on, Portillo’s hopes of making a second attempt began to slip away when an opinion poll in the Observer just days before the election suggested that Enfield Southgate was too close to call. ‘Tell me why this is wrong,’ he asked Cooper, who oversaw the party’s private polling.⁵ Cooper was unable to reassure an increasingly worried Portillo, and from that moment onwards he began to come to terms with the possibility of defeat. This may explain his dignified reaction on the night, in contrast to the sourness of others who could not believe that the electorate could be so ungrateful.

As the campaign wore on, many Conservative MPs did however foresee the fate awaiting them. ‘I was seduced in the first week into thinking that this was much easier than last time,’ Seb Coe recalls. ‘But then I realised that people were actually being polite and just wanted us off their doorsteps.’⁶ It was the same for the legions of aspiring Conservative candidates hoping to make it to Westminster. Among them was David Cameron, a fresh-faced thirty-year-old corporate communications executive who was standing in the Midlands seat of Stafford. On paper, it was a seat that the Conservatives hoped to hold, despite recent boundary changes making it less secure. Initially he thought he would have a 50:50 chance, but as polling day neared his optimism drained away. Cameron was struck that during the last few days of the campaign many voters refused to look him in the eye, and braced himself for the worst.

Back at Conservative Central Office in Westminster’s Smith Square, a bunker atmosphere prevailed. Morale had been quite high in the early stages of the campaign, but the more seasoned party officials knew the game was up. ‘We were defending seats that were simply unwinnable. It might have been marginally better if we had fought a more defensive campaign,’ says one. ‘Everything was thrown into the campaign,’ recalls Archie Norman, the former boss of the supermarket chain Asda and one of the few new Tory MPs elected that night. ‘It was the most money ever spent in any election campaign in Britain, but also the least effective money that was ever spent.’⁷

The Prime Minister’s aides were encouraged by his confidence at the beginning of the campaign. The famous soapbox, which he had used during the election five years earlier to such good effect, was dusted off. But deep down, Major knew the cause was lost. For two years he had been coming to terms with the probability of defeat. ‘You can never be certain in politics, so you have to go on fighting,’ he says. ‘But we had been in government too long. Splits over Europe had made us unelectable. If the Tory Party had been composed of 330 Archangel Gabriels, we would have still come second.’⁸ The opinion polls spoke for themselves. Labour’s average rating had rarely dropped below 50 per cent since mid-1994, while the Conservatives had consistently languished at 30 per cent or below.⁹

Major hoped that a long six-week campaign would allow New Labour’s ‘hollowness’ to be exposed under the pressure of scrutiny. Yet the reverse happened. The Tory campaign unravelled when it emerged that many candidates, including David Cameron, wrote in their personal election addresses that they would not countenance Britain joining the European single currency. This contravened the government’s official policy, which was that neither the time nor the circumstances were right for entry, which the press labelled ‘wait and see’. ‘Like me or loathe me, do not bind my hands when I am negotiating on behalf of the British nation,’ Major appealed to his own party in one of the most surreal moments of the campaign. Britain’s uncertain relationship with Europe had plagued his premiership and was now engulfing the party’s campaign in the full glare of the public. ‘The destruction of John Major’s government was suicidal – it was manic,’ says Ken Clarke, Major’s Chancellor, who was one of the most pro-European ministers in the Cabinet. ‘There was an underlying assumption that because we won elections anyway people could behave in this extraordinary fashion, and with any luck we would be returned to office by getting rid of all the pro-Europeans and re-electing the Eurosceptics. The idea that we were all about to be buried in a self-inflicted landslide never crossed their minds.’¹⁰

The early indications at 5 p.m. on Thursday, 1 May were that the election result would be far worse than the Conservatives had imagined. Major had hoped that he could confine Labour’s majority to forty or fifty. Indeed, only a few days earlier party officials had predicted that the Conservatives might win 240 seats. Late in the afternoon Major, who had returned to his Huntingdon constituency in Cambridgeshire braced for defeat, received a phone call from Central Office confirming that the party was heading for catastrophe. As the evening wore one, his closest aides thought he looked as if he had been in a car crash.¹¹ At 10 p.m., the BBC and ITN broadcast exit polls predicting a Labour majority of between 160 and 180. By midnight, two hours after the polls had closed, the first results showed a massive 10 per cent swing right across the country. When Labour’s tally reached a hundred seats, the Conservatives had barely moved into double figures. By 2 a.m. the extent of the rout was becoming clear. Stafford was one of countless Tory seats to fall to Labour’s unrelenting advance. A defeated David Cameron and his wife, Samantha, left the count down but not out. He rang Michael Green, his boss at Carlton Communications, to ask for his job back as director of communications. As the result sank in they collapsed onto a sofa together, exhausted. Cameron thought to himself that he had better get on with life for a few more years, but knew that he would give politics another go. Although this was his first taste of defeat, being on the losing side was something that he was going to have to get used to for years to come.

In Conservative Central Office, a large downstairs meeting room had been prepared for a drinks party ahead of Major’s return to London. But the bottles were unopened and the shellfish lay untouched. ‘Everyone was just holding themselves together. It was utterly bleak,’ a senior party official recalls. William Hague, the thirty-six-year-old Welsh Secretary, cut a lonely figure as one of the few ministers on duty in party headquarters overnight. He would have the unenviable task of greeting defeated Cabinet colleagues as they returned to Central Office in the early hours. As dawn approached, a bank of camera lights lit the elegant and imposing façade of the building. Just as Tony Blair took to the stage across the river, a crowd of people including jubilant Labour supporters gathered in Smith Square. ‘Tories, Tories, Tories … Out, out, out!’ they chanted at full volume. ‘This was their night,’ said one official besieged in the building. ‘You really did feel as if the helicopters were coming to take us off the roof.’ By the early hours of Friday, 2 May, the Conservatives had well and truly been airlifted from government and dropped into the wilderness of opposition. It was far from clear how long it would take them to return, if indeed they would return at all.

From High-Water Mark to Downfall

Rewind the clock by a decade, and the scene in Smith Square could not have been more different. From a window in Central Office, a victorious Mrs Thatcher, her husband Denis and Party Chairman Norman Tebbit waved to supporters and party workers below in the early hours of Friday, 12 June 1987. It was a scene of jubilation. Mrs Thatcher had led the Conservative Party to its third successive victory since coming to power in 1979. No other Prime Minister had achieved such a feat in the twentieth century. A majority of 101 would ensure her a third full term in office.

Mrs Thatcher was at the apex of her powers as she embarked on her third term as Prime Minister, but she would be gone within three and a half years. Although an admiring party lay at her feet, all was not well at the heart of government. Her assertive style of leadership had already knocked noses out of joint, including that of Michael Heseltine. Ever since the flamboyant Defence Secretary resigned in 1986, at the height of the Westland Affair, there had been a king across the water. Heseltine would prime himself as a potential successor, around whom dissent could coalesce. Although he had served in her Cabinet and Shadow Cabinet, Heseltine was not ‘one of us’, as Mrs Thatcher liked to term her allies. He was from the ‘One Nation’ mould of Conservative politicians, who had dominated the party since the Second World War. They were more consensual and not so steadfastly wedded to the free-market principles that informed much of the Thatcher revolution. After the 1987 general election Heseltine had to bide his time on the backbenches. In the meantime, the ‘Iron Lady’ seemed unstoppable.

‘“Can’t be done” has given way to “What’s to stop us!”’ she declared to the party faithful at their annual conference after the election. If her second term had laid the foundations by curbing the power of trade unions and introducing a wave of privatisations, her third would extend the Thatcher revolution to the inner cities, which lay depressed amid industrial decline, and the unreformed public sector, particularly the National Health Service and education. The remaining dragons of ‘state socialism’ had to be slain with the help of market forces. It was an ambitious and bold programme that inspired a whole new generation of Conservatives. One of them was an impressionable David Cameron, who in 1987 was in his final year at Oxford University studying Politics, Philosophy and Economics. ‘David was a total fan of Mrs T but feels that a mythology has grown up around her that is not connected to reality,’ a friend recalls. ‘He understands that she was fortunate in having a divided and weak opposition, but that she was also quite tactical and smart in knowing when to withdraw. To him, she was a canny politician who knew how to duck and dive when she had to.’

By the beginning of 1988, however, she had become a command-and-control Prime Minister. With many of her internal critics dispatched, including Heseltine, she began to take her Cabinet for granted. William Whitelaw had been the rock of that Cabinet since 1979. He was a dependable deputy who tirelessly worked the corridors of power to ensure that the Prime Minister was kept out of danger and in touch with the party mood. ‘Every Prime Minister needs a Willie,’ she famously proclaimed. His retirement as Deputy Prime Minister in January 1988 meant that he was no longer around to act as ‘the one-person fire brigade for collective restraint’, as the Whitehall chronicler Peter Hennessy described him.¹² The powers of Mrs Thatcher’s well-honed political antennae, which encouraged caution when necessary, were beginning to diminish just as she became convinced of her own invincibility. ‘She lost her touch, and her feel for colleagues, which had been good, left her,’ recalls Ken Clarke, who sat in her Cabinet.¹³ This was never more apparent than in her deteriorating relations with her two principal lieutenants, Sir Geoffrey Howe and Nigel Lawson.

Howe, her Chancellor and then Foreign Secretary, and Lawson, his successor as Chancellor in 1983, believed that the government had to conquer inflation, the scourge of Britain’s post-war economy. The rising cost of living had been a dead weight on the British economy for years, particularly during the recessions of the 1970s and early 1980s, when inflation rarely fell below double figures. Although taming inflation had been central to the Thatcher revolution from its inception, it had yet to be achieved. Her lieutenants urged her to consider a Europe-wide solution. The European Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM) could provide stable exchange rates with other European currencies, helping to bring domestic inflation under control. This was not to Mrs Thatcher’s liking: she believed that it could be mastered by controlling the domestic money supply. But her Chancellor, emboldened by his tax-cutting budget in 1988 and a booming economy, pressed her to consider joining.

European solutions were not exactly to the Prime Minister’s tastes by 1988. Ever since she signed the Single European Act in 1986, which heralded closer cooperation within the European Community on a large range of policy areas, she had had her doubts. She had fought hard to win a rebate from Britain’s contribution to the EC budget earlier in her premiership, but had not taken much interest in the Community’s affairs since. ‘Europe hadn’t been on the political agenda much before the Single European Act. Ironically she was the architect for the EC’s revival [as a federalist project],’ Iain Duncan Smith reflects. ‘It was sold to her as a market mechanism, and because she was so adamant about markets, she agreed.’¹⁴ For the Prime Minister, a properly functioning common market did not mean ‘ever closer’ political and monetary union across the EC. ‘We have not successfully rolled back the frontiers of the state in Britain only to see them re-imposed at a European level,’ she declared to an audience in the Belgian town of Bruges on 20 September 1988. She called for cooperation between ‘independent sovereign states’, rather than integration which sought to create ‘some sort of identikit Euro-personality’. It was a warning shot fired straight across the bows of other European capitals, and indeed some of her most senior ministers at home. The British Prime Minister had declared that she was firmly on the ‘Eurosceptic’ side of the argument. It was for others to decide whether to be with her or to stand against her.

Four days after Mrs Thatcher delivered her landmark speech in Bruges, a twenty-year-old David Cameron walked through the doors of Central Office to join the Conservative Research Department. The CRD was a traditional recruiting ground for ambitious graduates eager to begin their political careers, and in many cases had been the first step on the ladder to high office: Michael Portillo was but one of its alumni. As the engine room of Central Office, it pumped out high-quality research briefings for senior Tory politicians. Cameron was handed the Trade and Industry, Energy and Privatisation brief with which to cut his political teeth.

More importantly, he would befriend a group of young men and women who would become his closest aides and colleagues for years to come. Among them were Rachel Whetstone, Edward Llewellyn and Ed Vaizey, all of whom became future political allies. The ‘Smith Square set’ joined the party when Thatcherism was at its high-water mark. ‘We were all convinced that we were on the right side of the argument in politics,’ says one. ‘We were pro-enterprise and hated state bureaucracy.’ The head of the CRD, Robin Harris, was a disciple of the Iron Lady. ‘Robin was a great Thatcherite footsoldier, so he wouldn’t have let anybody through the door who wasn’t committed to the revolution,’ says Guy Black, who was head of the Political Section. ‘We came to be known as the “brat pack” in the press – there was nothing other than loyalty to Mrs T.’¹⁵ For them, Mrs Thatcher was known simply as ‘Mother’.

Some noticed that while Cameron admired the Prime Minister as much as the others, he did not see everything in black and white ultra-Thatcherite terms. ‘I remember conversations with him when I would say that we should scrap child benefit, and he said, “You can’t just take away people’s benefits, because it creates huge problems,”’ recalls one of his closest friends from the time, Rachel Whetstone. ‘He was much more thoughtful about things than I was.’ Indeed, within a year of meeting him she felt that although Cameron could be ‘unbelievably pompous’, he had what it took to go a long way in politics. ‘People used to say, “What’s your dream job?” And I said, “It is to be Political Secretary to the Prime Minister, who will be David Cameron.” It wasn’t because he had a burning ambition,’ she adds, ‘it was because he had a charisma which was quite compelling.’¹⁶

As the new CRD recruits fawned over their seemingly invincible leader, senior ministers became increasingly worried about the direction of her government. Foreign Secretary Geoffrey Howe had been at her side from the beginning. Thoughtful and patient, he was one of her most loyal allies. Yet Howe’s pro-European views, which were shared by many Tories of his generation, were at odds with the Prime Minister’s deepening scepticism. He was deeply dismayed with the way in which she had seized control of foreign policy. According to Nigel Lawson, she treated Howe as ‘a cross between a doormat and a punchbag’.¹⁷

Matters came to a head when Howe and Lawson confronted the Prime Minister on the eve of an important EC summit in Madrid in June 1989. They urged her to make a commitment to join the ERM by the end of 1992 as the best way of influencing the future direction of the EC. Their advice, once again, was met with resistance. In what she regarded as an ‘ambush’, Howe threatened to resign if she refused to accede to their demands. ‘You should know, Prime Minister, that if Geoffrey goes, I must go too,’ Lawson warned her.¹⁸ In July she retaliated by demoting Howe from the Foreign Office to the Leadership of the House of Commons and Deputy Prime Minister, a nominal title in which he would take little consolation.

But Lawson would be the first to go. In October he resigned as Chancellor in protest at the growing influence of Mrs Thatcher’s economic adviser Alan Walters, who shared her hostility to the ERM. Lawson’s departure fatally weakened her grip on power, to the extent that the Cabinet presented her with little choice but to join the ERM the following year. ‘The truth is that she was in a tiny minority in the government always in opposing joining the ERM, and she fought off attempt after attempt to do it,’ her respected foreign affairs adviser, Charles Powell, pointed out.¹⁹

For Mrs Thatcher’s new Chancellor, John Major, membership of the ERM was a means to an end. ‘Like Nigel Lawson, I never saw it as a stepping stone to a single currency,’ he says. ‘Inflation for me was a week in which the week lasted longer than the money, as had been my life experience, and I knew that was the experience of many people. It wasn’t an abstract political theory, I hated it – and I saw the ERM as the only available way of bringing inflation down. We had tried everything else and it failed.’²⁰

By early 1990, the tension at the heart of government had begun to affect party morale from top to bottom. Mrs Thatcher had survived a leadership challenge from Sir Anthony Meyer, a stalking horse on the left of the parliamentary party, but speculation only intensified about Heseltine’s intentions. Shortly after winning her third victory, she angered some by promising to ‘go on and on’ when asked by an interviewer about when she might stand down. Aside from Europe, a major aspect of domestic policy had become a serious bone of contention. Hailed as one of the flagship policies of the third term, the Community Charge, or ‘poll tax’, was intended to make local councils more accountable for the services they provided, but it became instantly unpopular in the country. Mrs Thatcher was determined to push ahead with the plan to replace the local rates, despite warnings that it would be a political disaster. ‘How could a leader who was wise make thirteen million people pay a tax that they had never paid before? It showed she was no longer thinking in a rational way, and really created controversies where it was unnecessary,’ recalls one of her ministers, David Mellor.²¹ The costs of implementing the poll tax were spiralling, and when it was piloted in Scotland before being introduced in England, thousands refused to pay. Anger would soon spill out onto the streets, when a large demonstration in central London turned into a riot on 31 March 1990.

For the party’s footsoldiers in local government there would be a heavy price to pay in town hall elections later that spring. But it was the Prime Minister who had become the real electoral liability. By April 1990 Mrs Thatcher’s ‘satisfaction rating’ had fallen to 23 per cent, a post-war low, and many Tory MPs began to conclude that unless she stood down their seats would be in jeopardy. A series of disastrous European and by-election results in the summer reinforced their fears. ‘My trouble was that the believers had fallen away,’ she regretted in 1993.²² She could not believe that her troops had lost the fire in their bellies. However, after eleven years in office, the party was exhausted and desperate for a change of leadership style, if not a change in policy direction. ‘One of the mistakes that some ultra-Thatcherites made was that [they believed] you could have radicalism forever – a permanent revolution,’ says another former minister, Norman Lamont. ‘I don’t think the public would have ever accepted that and I think there’s always been this argument between those who wanted radicalism for ever and those who wanted to go back to a more traditional Conservative Party.’²³

‘Ten more years! Ten more years!’ was the evangelical chant from the party faithful during what was to be Mrs Thatcher’s last conference speech as leader in October 1990. The country, though, had lost its appetite for the Iron Lady’s revolutionary fervour. True, Britain was no longer considered the sick man of Europe after years of economic decline and industrial unrest, but the harsh edges of Thatcherism had begun to grate on the electorate. For every admirer there seemed to be a sworn enemy. Not only had the Prime Minister become dangerously estranged from most of her Cabinet and many Conservative MPs, she had polarised public opinion to such an extent that something would have to give.

The fatal blow came from her long-suffering ally Geoffrey Howe. ‘No! No! No!’ was how she reported her reaction to plans for a single European currency, Social Chapter and federal Europe when she returned from an EC summit in Rome on 28 October. For Howe, her open hostility to Europe was the final straw. On 1 November he resigned. Thirteen days later a packed House of Commons listened to his resignation statement in silence. Speaking from the backbenches for the first time in fifteen years, he delivered a withering critique of Mrs Thatcher’s increasingly abrasive style of leadership and ever more strident position on Europe. As he went on, the faces around him (including that of Lawson, who sat beside him) turned to ash. Uncharacteristically savage for a politician whom a Labour opponent once described as a ‘half-dead sheep’, Howe tore into the Prime Minister. He derided her ‘casual’ dismissal of the idea of a single currency, which he argued had undermined ministerial dealings in Europe. ‘It is rather like sending your opening batsmen to the crease only for them to find, the moment the first balls are bowled, that their bats have been broken before the game by the team captain,’ he declared to ecstatic laughter from the opposition benches. The Prime Minister sat on the frontbench visibly trying to restrain her anger. Proclaiming loyalty to the Prime Minister he had served for eleven and a half years in office, and as party leader for fifteen years, was no longer possible for Howe. ‘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.’²⁴

In one of the most dramatic scenes in the House of Commons for years, the Prime Minister’s longest-serving minister had fired the starting gun for a leadership election. Heseltine now declared his hand, arguing that he could take the party to a fourth term in office. As Mrs Thatcher left for an international conference in Paris with her entourage just before the first ballot, she was not even contemplating defeat. While she could hardly bring herself to court MPs in the Commons tearoom, her lacklustre campaign team led by her complacent Parliamentary Private Secretary Peter Morrison assumed it was in the bag.

Mrs Thatcher won the first ballot on 20 November, with 204 votes to Heseltine’s 152, but under the rules of the contest she fell short of outright victory by an agonising four votes. Her authority was shattered. Yet on hearing the result in Paris, Mrs Thatcher resolved to fight on. The BBC’s political correspondent John Sergeant was talking live on camera when the Prime Minister strode out of the British Embassy to address reporters. As Bernard Ingham, her press secretary, brushed Sergeant aside, she vowed to put her name forward for the second round of voting. The chaotic scene, watched by millions on television at home, caused widespread dismay among Tory MPs. On her return to London Mrs Thatcher held individual interviews with members of the Cabinet. Almost all of them warned that she would not win in a second ballot, despite pledging their support. ‘It was treachery,’ she said later, ‘with a smile on its face.’²⁵ The following morning, Thursday, 22 November, she tearfully told the Cabinet that she had decided to resign, and urged ministers to unite behind the figure most likely to defeat Michael Heseltine. ‘It’s a funny old world,’ she told them.

For the young team of researchers in Central Office, the defenestration of their idolised leader was an act of total betrayal. How could their political masters have done such a thing? Cameron feels that Mrs Thatcher had every right to be aggrieved, and friends remember his sadness on the day she fell. ‘We were all as upset and horrified as anybody else was about her departure. But we soon adapted to the new regime,’ Guy Black recalls.²⁶ Life had to go on: a new Prime Minister had to be found midway through the Parliament.

In the three-horse race that ensued in the week after Mrs Thatcher’s announcement, John Major, the Chancellor, emerged as the winner. The outgoing Prime Minister had worked tirelessly to advance his interests, phoning newspaper editors and friends to tell them that the revolution would be more secure with him than with the other two candidates, Michael Heseltine and the Foreign Secretary, Douglas Hurd. Yet Major was hardly in need of her assistance: he already had 160 Tory MPs signed up on the day he declared his intention to stand. Heseltine admitted that ‘He who wields the knife rarely wears the crown,’ while the affable Douglas Hurd was considered to be too much of a patrician to have widespread appeal in the country. In the second ballot on 27 November, Major won 185 votes to Heseltine’s 131 and Hurd’s fifty-seven. Heseltine and Hurd graciously conceded, handing the leadership and the premiership to Major. The following morning a tearful Mrs Thatcher and her husband Denis left Downing Street after eleven and half years.

The rise of John Major was meteoric. His father, Tom, had a burgeoning career as a variety performer, including a brief spell as a trapeze artist, before settling down with his second wife, Gwen (Major’s mother), in Worcester Park, south-west London. Born in 1943, during the Second World War, Major rose from humble origins in Brixton to scale the heights of the Conservative Party. He left school at sixteen, with few qualifications, because his family needed the money he could earn, but continued to study at home first thing in the morning and late at night. After periods of temporary unemployment he eventually found his feet as a banker with Standard Chartered Bank. He also became an active member of Brixton Young Conservatives. Inspired to enter political life, he was elected as a local councillor in Lambeth and eventually as MP for Huntingdon 1979, after a long search for a safe seat. Mrs Thatcher thought highly of Major as an able and loyal minister, promoting him to Chief Secretary to the Treasury in 1987. To his surprise he replaced Geoffrey Howe as Foreign Secretary in July 1989, and succeeded Lawson as Chancellor three months later. On 28 November 1990 the forty-seven-year-old from Brixton entered 10 Downing Street as Prime Minister.

Major Tonic

‘I want to see us build a country that is at ease with itself,’ Major declared on the steps of Number 10. It was a sentiment that resonated throughout the country, after over a decade of Thatcherite medicine. Major’s disarming smile and emollient manner were the antidote to troubled times. He had made few enemies in the party; a huge political asset that others like Heseltine could not claim. He appointed a ‘Cabinet of friends’, welcoming back Heseltine from the cold to become Environment Secretary, as well as promoting his campaign manager, Norman Lamont, to the Chancellorship and appointing Chris Patten as Party Chairman. Major’s consensual approach to decision-making endeared him to Cabinet colleagues, who felt bruised and battered by Mrs Thatcher’s handbag. A party that had been reduced to despair in the dying days before her downfall, and guilt-ridden shock in the immediate aftermath, soon recovered its poise. Major reassured her supporters by being the anointed heir, and enthused her detractors by offering an inclusive style of leadership.

Most importantly for the party, John Major’s incredible rise led to a dramatic reversal in public opinion. A fortnight before Mrs Thatcher resigned, Labour enjoyed a 16 per cent lead in the opinion polls. Within days of her leaving Downing Street, the Conservatives had leapt to a 12 per cent lead.²⁷ Focusing the minds of Tory MPs was the reality that they would have to go to the country within eighteen months. They believed that Major represented their best hope of uniting the party after the trauma of deposing the Iron Lady. Even after more than eleven years in office, and despite the ever-widening differences of opinion on Europe, the hunger for power was still there.

The new Prime Minister’s in-tray was distinctly uninviting. He had to deal with the unpopular Community Charge, complex European negotiations and a conflict in the Middle East. But by far the hardest situation facing the country was the deteriorating state of the economy. Major inherited a dire political and economic situation. ‘Interest rates were at 14 per cent, inflation was going up to double figures, growth had fallen through the floor and the recession had started with a vengeance and was going to take unemployment up very high indeed.’²⁸ Within twelve months the Community Charge had been replaced, British troops had played a key role in expelling Iraqi forces from Kuwait, and public spending was increased to assuage concerns that the party would desert the public services during the downturn.

The future shape of the EC was one of the most immediate concerns for Major. European leaders were about to negotiate a treaty that would strengthen the institutional bonds of the European project, forging closer cooperation in a wide range of policy areas that had hitherto been the domain of individual nation states. The Single European Act, which Mrs Thatcher had signed (and then regretted) in 1986, paved the way for further integration, particularly on the creation of a single European currency and social policy (known as the Social Chapter) which the former Prime Minister had railed against since her Bruges Speech. Major headed for the Dutch town of Maastricht in December 1991 with the intention of securing ‘opt-outs’ from both the single currency and the Social Chapter. Unlike his predecessor, he consulted the parliamentary party and the Cabinet widely before and during the negotiations. Yet his hand was weakened when his European counterparts reminded him that Mrs Thatcher had signed up to an ‘ever closer union’ in Europe.

The fact that the majority of the 376-strong parliamentary party were largely pragmatic towards Europe, if not pro-European, should have been in Major’s favour. Many were from a generation that came of age after the war and believed strongly that peace and prosperity would endure through closer cooperation (which involved pooling sovereignty) with Britain’s Continental neighbours. However, a significant minority of Tory MPs had become deeply suspicious of what they saw as a perpetual loss of British sovereignty as unelected European institutions accrued more powers. Major feared that a growing rift at the heart of the party could very easily turn into something more dangerous. ‘I was very conscious of the two historic precedents – the Corn Laws and Tariff Reform,’ he recalls. ‘The danger of the party splitting in November 1990 seemed to me to be very real. The proximity of an election eighteen months later actually quite helped us in the short term, because people tend to pull together, but I felt the party was near to splitting – even then.’²⁹

Following some deft negotiations at Maastricht, Major returned to Westminster having secured the opt-outs from the European Social Chapter and the single currency. In the Commons, Tory MPs waved their order papers in appreciation of his achievement. He had considered ratifying the new treaty by taking it through the Commons as soon as he returned to London, but the impending general election, which was planned for the following spring, curtailed the parliamentary timetable. It was a decision he would soon come to regret.

Despite his renewed confidence after Maastricht, Major was acutely aware that his predecessor was watching his every move. His appointment of Heseltine and scrapping of the poll tax, and the government’s position on Europe, particularly alarmed Mrs Thatcher, who remained in the Commons on the backbenches until the election. Soon after leaving office she had promised to be a ‘good back-seat driver’, words which infuriated Major. He had scrupulously consulted his predecessor in the months after her departure, but that was now becoming increasingly difficult. ‘The Labour Party were very keen to play on the fact, “Oh well, she’s still running the government, yet she wouldn’t have won the election,”’ said one senior figure within the government. ‘It wasn’t a credible position. Had she not said that, we could have consulted her and brought her in much more than we did.’

The former Prime Minister struggled to come to terms with the loss of power after being in office so long, particularly during the conclusion of the Gulf War, that began just before she left Number 10. Her court of former aides and advisers let it be known to a number of Tory MPs and sympathisers in the press that she was disappointed with Major’s performance and questioned his judgement. She gave him her support in public, particularly as the general election approached, but as one of his aides remarked, ‘The evil was in the drip feed, the constant gnawing away at him.’³⁰ One of the senior figures in the party still sympathetic to her admits, ‘She had become her own worst enemy by blocking off anyone who could replace her – Major was the only person in Cabinet who could claim to be her heir.’

Major himself was exasperated by the influence she still commanded in the party. A low point in their relationship came in June 1991 when the press reported comments allegedly from her that he was a ‘grey man’ who had ‘no ideas’. She had also delivered a speech in New York in which she made an implicit attack on the government’s ERM policy. According to one of his closest advisers in Number 10, Judith Chaplin, the Prime Minister was exasperated, labelling Mrs Thatcher’s behaviour ‘emotional’ and her views ‘loopy’. Chaplin, who later became a Tory MP before her untimely death in 1993, recorded Major’s frustration in her diaries. ‘I want her isolated,’ Chaplin recorded Major saying. ‘I want her destroyed.’³¹ Major’s supporters deny that he ever said this, but Chaplin’s account reveals how difficult things had become for the new Prime Minister.

Despite the bitterness and resentment behind the scenes, in March 1992 the Conservative Party went into the general election campaign with steady determination. Major’s allies believed that his down-to-earth style would contrast favourably with the Labour leader, Neil Kinnock. Kinnock had led the party since its landslide defeat in 1983, when the party gained a mere 27 per cent of the vote. Originally from the left of the party, he had toiled to overturn Labour’s divided image, shedding some of its most unpopular policies such as unilateral nuclear disarmament, withdrawal from the European Community and nationalisation of the high street banks. He had dealt with the militant tendency on the left of the party and helped to heal wounds after a breakaway group of MPs formed the Social Democratic Party (SDP) as a rival on the centre-left, in 1981. Kinnock’s hope was that a deepening recession in 1991 and early 1992 would ruin the Conservatives’ chances of a fourth election victory. He also hoped to capitalise on the Tories’ huge unpopularity leading up to Mrs Thatcher’s downfall. Yet he had a credibility problem: many voters regarded him as a Welsh windbag, and not a Prime Minister-in-waiting. The contrast with Major could not have been starker as the election drew closer. The Prime Minister noticed as he toured the country that the eyes of voters were not sliding away, and that people wanted to talk to him rather than walk away. The connection was still there, just.

The battle lines of the 1992 general election were shaped well before Major decided to go to the country in March. Even before he became Prime Minister the Conservative strategy had been to ruthlessly exploit Labour’s weaknesses, particularly on tax and spending. The young guns at the CRD had prepared an offensive which culminated in the ‘Labour’s Tax Bombshell’ poster campaign in January 1992. David Cameron now headed the department’s Political Section, where he had been responsible for devising the earlier ‘Summer Heat on Labour’ campaign against the opposition’s tax plans. Cameron’s briefings were now being regularly fed into Major’s preparations for Prime Minister’s Questions. ‘He was an extraordinarily able and bright young man,’ recalls Major. ‘I didn’t know him well, but I was impressed with him – his coolness and his capacity to think under pressure.’³²

As Cameron made an impression on the Prime Minister, he was making friends with someone who would become an important influence on his career. Steve Hilton had taken over Cameron’s Trade and Industry brief the previous year. The son of Hungarian parents who moved to Britain in the mid-1960s to pursue their education, Hilton was not a conventional CRD recruit. Although he and Cameron shared a public school education (Hilton at Christ’s Hospital and Cameron at Eton) and both went to Oxford (where they did not meet), their upbringing could not have been more different. After Hilton’s parents’ marriage broke down, his mother and stepfather, a builder, raised him in modest circumstances in Brighton. Cameron was the son of a stockbroker and a justice of the peace, brought up in the comfortable surroundings of an old rectory in the Berkshire village of Peasemore. Hilton’s hatred of Communism deeply informed his politics, and he found a soulmate in Cameron, who had travelled to East Germany shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall. ‘Steve had clear views about the Cold War and freedom, as did David, whose trip had left a big impression on him,’ recalls a mutual friend. Learning their trade together at the CRD, they formed an enduring friendship and a shared political outlook.

They were handed a gift when Kinnock and his Shadow Chancellor, John Smith, unveiled their ‘shadow budget’ on 17 March, just six days after the start of the election campaign. Laid out in detail, Labour’s tax and spend plans became a hostage to fortune which the CRD ruthlessly exploited. The CRD, under the direction of Andrew Lansley, primed the media with briefings about how Labour’s tax increases would hit the average voter by an extra £1,000 a year. For Lansley’s protégés, the 1992 campaign would leave an indelible mark. ‘We could not afford to make mistakes,’ recalls Lansley. ‘It was a learning experience for all of them. David, in particular, learnt that an election campaign is relentless and based on rigorous research.’³³ When the party launched a highly effective poster campaign, which featured a boxer under the slogan ‘Labour’s Double Whammy’, his gloves labelled ‘1. More Taxes’ and ‘2. Higher Prices’, it was clear that this was going to be a hard-hitting campaign. Designed by the party’s advertising agency, Saatchi & Saatchi, it was one of the most successful political advertisements in modern times, and would haunt Labour for years to come. However, 1992 would be the last general election campaign for many years in which the Tory electoral machine would outshine its opponents’. On 1 April, eight days before the election date, with Labour seeming to hold a decisive lead in the polls as Major crisscrossed the country with his soapbox, Neil Kinnock took the stage at a glitzy rally in Sheffield. ‘We’re all right!’ he shouted three times, overcome by emotion. His party assumed victory; the voters had not.

The Pyrrhic Victory

In the last few days of the campaign most pundits predicted either a hung Parliament or a narrow Labour victory, but on 9 April 1992 the country returned the Conservative Party to office for an unprecedented fourth term. It was a remarkable turnaround in fortunes since November 1990. Over fourteen million people had voted Tory, the largest popular vote for any party before or since. Many Conservative MPs were surprised and relieved to have held on to their seats. Major’s overall majority of twenty-one was a modest reward for the 8 per cent lead his party achieved over Labour in the share of the vote. If the small swing to Labour had been uniform across the country, the Conservatives would have won a majority of seventy-one, and the history of the next five years would have been very different indeed.

The next day Major consoled one of his closest political friends, Chris Patten. The voters of Bath had ousted the Party Chairman who had masterminded the Conservative victory. ‘He would have had a much bigger job had he been elected,’ regrets Major. ‘We sat together in the White Room of Downing Street. We were very conscious that we had won four elections in a row, which was unprecedented in modern politics, and that winning a fifth would require the Labour Party to continue to implode, or us to have a remarkable run of success.’³⁴ Although not impossible, they knew this would be extra ordinarily difficult, especially with such a shrunken majority. Major rewarded Patten with the last governorship of Hong Kong. As he left for the Far East, Patten knew the omens for his party were not good. ‘The electorate didn’t really want us to win,’ he recalls. ‘We won by default, but they didn’t really think we deserved it. From the moment we won, the press and people at large were looking for things to criticise us for: we gave them plenty of opportunity to do just that.’³⁵

The 1992 general election had delivered the Conservative Party a Pyrrhic victory. Within five months, on Wednesday, 16 September, Britain’s ejection from the ERM dealt a devastating blow to the party’s reputation for economic competence. On ‘Black Wednesday’ the cornerstone of the government’s economic policy was knocked out of place as interest rates soared by 5 per cent within a matter of hours. At one point they reached 15 per cent, before falling to 12 per cent. For a Prime Minister who regarded ERM entry as one of his finest achievements as Chancellor, it was particularly damaging. In fact Major had been seeking an exit point for months beforehand, aware that the government faced the prospect of a sudden hike in interest rates during a recession, and a falling exchange rate which would have rekindled inflation.

As a reserve currency in the mechanism, the pound could not be sustained at the rate at which it had originally entered, principally because of the demands of a re-unified Germany, whose domestic economic concerns had begun to dictate the whole system. Sterling became easy prey for speculators on the currency markets, while the Bank of England spent several billion pounds of its reserves trying to prop it up. The markets went into turmoil, and as the Bank of England tried and failed to stabilise the currency that morning, Major agreed with Lamont to raise interest rates to stem the run on the pound.³⁶ He called an emergency meeting of senior ministers at Admiralty House on Whitehall, where he had decamped because of refurbishments to Number 10.

Lamont was aghast to find that Heseltine, Hurd and Clarke had been invited to discuss the crisis – in his collegial style, Major was anxious that they should be bound into the decision-making process – and was furious when they urged Major to intervene further to keep sterling in the ERM. ‘They all sat around umming and hawing and saying, “Should we put interest rates up?”’ he recalls. ‘Well, of course it offended me hugely, because I felt it was my decision and the recommendation of the Governor of the Bank of England was that our membership of the ERM was over and we should recognise it.’³⁷ At 7.30 p.m. Lamont made a brief statement in the central courtyard of the Treasury. ‘Today has been an extremely difficult and turbulent day … The government has concluded that Britain’s best interests can be served by suspending our membership of the exchange rate mechanism.’

Lamont had lost confidence in Major. ‘I don’t know why the Prime Minister didn’t attempt to defend himself more,’ he says. ‘We never attempted to get across to people that this was a crisis that began in Germany and spread to every country in Europe. In the same week that we spent nearly all our reserves, every other European central bank did the same. They all devalued, like us.’³⁸ Major concedes that not enough emphasis was given to the presentation of the government’s position. His terse exchanges with the German Chancellor, Helmut Kohl, were lost in the reports of the events, but this does not excuse the fact that Major failed to make his case sufficiently. The government did not look as if it was in control of events. The damage to the Conservatives’ credibility in managing the economy was immense, but the political ramifications were even greater. Black Wednesday had a shattering effect on John Major’s confidence, and the confidence of the party in him.

The crisis had been highly instructive for the new special adviser at the Treasury. After the election, Cameron had left the CRD to help write speeches for the second most senior minister in the government. As Lamont made his brief statement outside the Treasury that evening, Cameron looked on in the full glare of the cameras. He had witnessed the day’s chaotic events from a front-row seat. ‘He would be conscious of how rough politics can get, but he would have also seen what the opportunities are that are sometimes thrown up by great setbacks,’ recalls Lamont. ‘We had a great political setback, but it presented us with an economic opportunity; I think he understood that very well.’³⁹ Indeed, Cameron did not believe that that day spelled the end of the government. ‘He didn’t think at the time, “Well that’s it, the Tories would be out of power for twelve years – it’s all over,”’ recalls a friend. Instead he came away with a heightened awareness of the dangers of a fixed rate mechanism and all that that would entail for a single European currency. Black Wednesday was a formative day for the future Conservative leader, not least in shaping a sceptical outlook towards closer European integration.

Major did not ask for Lamont’s resignation as Chancellor, but he did come very close to tendering his own in the week that followed. ‘I was ready to resign,’ he says. ‘I had written a resignation letter and a broadcast, and I thought that it was probably right to resign.’⁴⁰ He told Ken Clarke, his preferred successor, to prepare for an imminent leadership election. Only after a senior Downing Street official, Stephen Wall, spent two hours talking him out of it did he resolve to carry on.⁴¹ ‘I thought it was my mess, I ought to clear it up,’ Major recalls. Neil Kinnock had resigned after the election, and Labour’s new leader, John Smith, accused Major of being ‘a devalued Prime Minister of a devalued government’. The government would never apologise for the ERM débâcle, believing that it had been right to enter it in 1990, as all political parties had agreed at the time (with the exception of Mrs Thatcher and her closest advisers).

Despite the myth that the Conservatives’ opinion poll ratings dropped overnight on Black Wednesday, it took a while for the public to register their full dissatisfaction with the government. The party’s average rating fell by a mere two percentage points, from 38 to 36, between September and October 1992.⁴² It was the following year that was in fact the annus horribilis. The public finances were in a parlous state, as the budget deficit grew. The Conservatives had promised during the election that they would ‘continue to reduce taxes as fast as we prudently can’, and had promised specifically that there were ‘no plans and no need for an extension of VAT’.⁴³ But now Major and Lamont realised that they would have to raise taxes and cut spending. In March 1993 Lamont’s budget included tax rises, including the imposition of VAT on fuel. It pushed public support for the government over the edge. By May the party’s average poll rating dropped below 30 per cent, and it would stubbornly remain there for the next four years.⁴⁴ Major’s personal ratings as Prime Minister went into even steeper decline than the popularity of his party.

Lamont’s 1993 budget came to be seen as a necessary evil, restoring confidence in the City by placing the country’s finances on a more even keel without endangering the recovery. However, there would be a price to pay for the broken promises. A string of by-election defeats, beginning with Newbury in May 1993, began to erode the government’s perilously small majority. During the Newbury campaign, Lamont uttered the infamous words ‘Je ne regrette rien’ when asked by a reporter whether he regretted making comments about ‘green shoots’ of economic recovery. Having taken account of the views of the City and other senior ministers, Major realised that he had to appoint a new Chancellor, and on 27 May Lamont resigned from the government, after having been offered the position of Environment Secretary. Embittered, he felt that he had been made the fall guy. Yet it was Major who carried the responsibility for holding on to his Chancellor for too long after Black Wednesday.

The Poison Begins to Flow

As the public’s confidence in the Major government declined, the unity and discipline of the parliamentary party began to fragment. Inside the precincts of Westminster, the party became transfixed by Britain’s relationship with Europe. Having soured relations within the higher ranks of the Thatcher administration, the European question infiltrated the veins of the parliamentary party like poison. The Maastricht Treaty, which Major had signed three months before the election, now had to be ratified by Parliament, and a growing number of Conservative MPs were implacably opposed to the Treaty, despite the negotiated opt-outs on the Social Chapter and the single currency. A battle royal was in the making.

The 1992 general election had vastly changed the complexion of the Conservative parliamentary party, which had shifted in a more Eurosceptic direction. There were fifty-four newly elected Tory MPs, many of whom could be described as ‘Thatcher’s Children’ rather than ‘Major’s Friends’. Some of his closest allies, such as Chris Patten, had lost their seats, and Major now had to contend with a new generation of MPs who had come into politics inspired by the Euroscepticism of Mrs Thatcher’s Bruges Speech. For them, opposing a federal Europe was just as important as, if not more important than, party unity. The newly ennobled Baroness Thatcher gave them succour, as did a number of other former ministers now residing on the backbenches. No sooner had the first Queen’s Speech of the new Parliament been delivered, containing a Bill to ratify Maastricht, than the former Prime Minister gave her most important speech since leaving office. Speaking in The Hague, she set out her vision for a radically different Europe from that envisaged by Major’s government, calling for powers to be removed from Brussels and returned to nation states.

For senior ministers who represented an earlier generation of pro-European thinking, like Douglas Hurd, the Foreign Secretary, and Ken Clarke, who succeeded Lamont as Chancellor, the omens were not good. The question of Europe had now become inextricably linked with Mrs Thatcher’s downfall. ‘It stemmed from the bitterness after Margaret’s removal from office,’ says Ken Clarke. ‘She became very bitter when she lost power, and her immediate entourage persuaded her that there had been a plot and revenge had to be taken. She lurched to the right and became even more Eurosceptic than she had been in government. This was all taken up by faithful young acolytes who hadn’t served in her government but took up bizarre views which they thought were Thatcherite.’⁴⁵ To Thatcher’s loyal supporters, Clarke was one of those who had betrayed her in November 1990 by telling her that she had no hope of winning in the second ballot. The resentment would flow both ways.

The Eurosceptics opposing the Maastricht Bill were emboldened by the result of a referendum in Denmark in June 1992, when a narrow majority voted against ratifying the Treaty. Rebellion had become respectable, and as the Bill made its way through the Commons the rebels grew in number and confidence, encouraged by the tacit support of senior figures from the heyday of the Thatcher revolution. Iain Duncan Smith, one of the leading Eurosceptics elected in 1992, recalls: ‘I think the Whips got used to thundering things through because they could beat rebellions with large majorities. They believed they could ram Maastricht through, but they couldn’t. It was the key to the whole thing unravelling.’⁴⁶ Major could not escape the fact that the ‘fundamental unreconstructed anti-Europeans’ outnumbered the government’s diminishing majority. ‘We were a minority government from the start,’ he asserts. He was incensed by the behaviour of the Maastricht rebels. ‘They wanted me to renege on a treaty I had negotiated on behalf of the British people. Worse, they wanted me to renege on a deal on which I had absolutely cast-iron parliamentary approval before I negotiated. If I had done that, no one would ever have trusted a British Prime Minister in negotiating in Europe today. The same people who talk about honour and sanction were the people that were asking me to break our word. That was why I was prepared, if necessary, to take it to the country.’⁴⁷ On 22 July 1993 the Bill failed to pass one of its last parliamentary hurdles (three Cabinet meetings having been held in one day in an attempt to carry the government), and the next day the government held a vote of confidence, which it won by thirty-eight votes.

Hours after the government survived, an exhausted Prime Minister sat down to be interviewed by Michael Brunson, ITN’s political editor. Believing he was having a private conversation while the cameras were not rolling, he vented his frustration. ‘The real problem is one of a tiny majority. Don’t overlook that. I could have done all these clever, decisive things which people wanted me to do but I would have split the Conservative Party into smithereens. And you would have said I had acted like a ham-fisted leader … Just think it through from my perspective. You are the Prime Minister, with a majority of eighteen, a party that is still harking back to a golden age that never was, and is now invented. You have three right-wing members of the Cabinet who actually resign. What happens in the parliamentary party?’ Brunson suggested he could easily find replacements. Major replied: ‘I could bring in other people. But where do you think most of this poison is coming from? From the dispossessed and the never-possessed. You can think of ex-ministers who are going around causing all sorts of trouble. We don’t want another three more of the bastards out there.’ The tape of the conversation was leaked to the Observer.

Major’s remark about ‘bastards’ was taken to refer to Michael Portillo, the Defence Secretary, Peter Lilley, the Social Security Secretary, and John Redwood, the Welsh Secretary, all prominent Eurosceptics, although he insists he did not have anyone in particular in mind. But his words brought into full public view the animosity that was absorbing the highest reaches of government. The fact that commentators swiftly identified the three Cabinet members in question revealed how much briefing was occurring. ‘Tory MPs asked themselves what they were in power for during the Maastricht debates, while John Major struggled to keep discipline,’ says one former aide. ‘It reinforced an impression of division in the public’s eyes. Here was a party that had become dogmatically obsessed, like a bickering, neurotic couple on a train – everyone just wanted them to shut up.’

There was a genuine ideological rift occurring within the Conservative Party in the early 1990s. Closer European integration created a powerful tension between a belief in the nation and the desire to spread commerce and trade. The struggle to reconcile these forces was tearing the party apart, from the Cabinet table to the grassroots in the country. The party’s presence in local government had shrunk since 1979, when it had over twelve thousand councillors, to a point where it controlled just thirteen councils in 1995. Party membership had also been in decline since the 1970s, and that decline became even sharper in the 1990s.⁴⁸ ‘Our associations on the ground were left with the more politically interested members, and they attracted too many zealots,’ one Cabinet minister observed. The increasingly polarised views of activists and members reinforced the divisions in Westminster.

What turned the crisis into a deeper malaise was the fact that the bitterness associated with Mrs Thatcher’s departure had become entangled with the disputes about Maastricht. Eurosceptics disappointed with Major’s premiership after Black Wednesday despaired that, as they saw it, a great leader had been unceremoniously dumped and her inheritance was being betrayed. By the end of 1993, the trauma of the events of November 1990 had come to haunt the party. To the most ardent Thatcherite MPs, turning the tide of European integration was far more important than loyalty to the Prime Minister, who they believed was weak and indecisive, while Thatcherism had never suffered an electoral failure. Every day the Whips’ Office battled to keep the government afloat, as the party’s overall majority dwindled after successive by-election defeats. The malcontents had to be kept on board. ‘It always irritated me, because people said Mrs Thatcher was much stronger than John Major, but he had a majority of twenty-one, which was reduced by two every time we lost a by-election, all the way down to zero at the end,’ says one former whip, Andrew MacKay. ‘It’s easy to be strong with a big majority, but it’s very difficult to be strong when you’re held to ransom by the venal, the cranky or the issue-obsessive.’⁴⁹

What made matters worse was that the pro-European members of Major’s government – Ken Clarke, Douglas Hurd and Michael Heseltine – underestimated the depth and breadth of feeling in the parliamentary party about Maastricht. Indeed the ‘bastards’ in Cabinet were just as vexed about Europe as the backbench rebels. Hurd contends that it was not so much complacency among the senior ranks as a ‘mixture of exhaustion and fatalism’ within the government. ‘It was more a case of a rabbit stuck in the headlights; so much energy was taken up by the Maastricht votes.’⁵⁰ Major removed the whip from eight of the rebels in November 1994: it was a move that did him more harm than good. As the government’s majority almost completely disappeared, a sense of paralysis in office pervaded. Its room for manoeuvre was now extremely limited. Senior ministers were exasperated. ‘The rebels thought all you had to do was take an anti-European position, be beastly to foreigners and the world would flock to your side,’ said one. ‘It was never true. It was a fantasy.’

‘Put Up or Shut Up’

‘I am not prepared to see the party I care for laid out on the rack like this any longer … It is time to put up or shut up.’ With those words, Major stunned his party on 22 June 1995. His last throw of the dice was to resign as party leader, prompting a leadership election to resolve differences, restore discipline and reassert his authority after three years of infighting. It was an extraordinary move for a sitting Prime Minister. When the Whip had been restored to the eight rebels in April on the promise of loyalty, they had circulated the television studios boasting of their success. Major felt he could never trust their word again, and realised that a leadership challenge in the autumn was highly likely. He feared that the party conference would descend into farce, undermining everything the government was trying to accomplish. ‘The only way to exorcise that was to resign and determine where parliamentary opinion really rested,’ he recalls.⁵¹

Once it was clear that Michael Portillo was not going to stand for the leadership, only one Eurosceptic member of the Cabinet challenged Major: John Redwood. The Welsh Secretary believed that if there was ‘no change’ in leadership there was ‘no chance’ at the next general election. Redwood launched his campaign surrounded by the leading rebels, many of whom were held in contempt by Major and loyal members of the Cabinet. The effect was unfortunate: ‘You can practically hear the flapping of white coats,’ one of Major’s campaign team remarked. But Redwood attracted the support of eighty-nine MPs, mainly from the right of the party, while twenty more abstained. Two hundred and eighteen voted for Major. He prevailed, but it was not an overwhelming vote of confidence. If it is assumed that almost all of the hundred or so ministers backed the Prime Minister, then up to half of backbench MPs had failed to vote for him. ‘The message that I would give to every Conservative … is that the time for division is over,’ Major declared on the steps of Number 10 after the result had been announced. ‘It made him seem weaker to the public,’ one leading rebel recalled. ‘It may have bought him some parliamentary time, but the worst thing was that it left us with more stories about a Prime Minister whose party was not behind him.’ Major’s allies were unrepentant. ‘You cannot deal with unreason, and on Europe there was no middle ground, no meeting point with them – they were utterly intransigent and intractable,’ recalls one. ‘Whatever they may have said, most of them wanted us out of the EU, but they didn’t say that because that was beyond the pale.’

It was soon apparent that Major’s victory had not put an end to the government’s problems. A string of further by-election defeats, and the defection of three Tory MPs to Labour or the Liberal Democrats, undermined the Prime Minister’s attempts to show that he was back in command. Fatal for a government struggling to hold itself together was the accumulation of crises outside its control. An uneasy truce in Northern Ireland which Major strove to achieve in 1994 came to an end in February 1996 when the IRA exploded a massive bomb in London’s docklands. Suggestions the following month of a link between BSE, or ‘mad cow disease’, and a form of human brain disease led to a catastrophic decline in the sales of British beef at home and a worldwide ban on its export by the European Commission. The government’s policy of ‘non-cooperation’ with the EU in retaliation became the subject of ridicule.

As the party gathered in Bournemouth in October 1996 for its last annual conference before the election, Major and his Cabinet tried to put on a brave face. Speaking up against Europe and defending the Thatcherite inheritance would almost certainly be a crowd-pleaser. ‘We should be proud of the Tory tax record but [not forget] that people needed reminding of its achievements … It’s time to return to our tax-cutting agenda,’ the new prospective parlia mentary candidate for Stafford, David Cameron, declared in his first speech from a conference platform. Playing to the gallery, he set his sights on the Labour leader, Tony Blair. ‘The socialist Prime Ministers of Europe have endorsed Tony Blair because they want a federalist pussycat and not a British lion. It is up to us in this party, in this country, to make sure that lion roars, because when it does no one can beat us.’⁵² The audience lapped it up, although Ken Clarke, who was sitting behind Cameron, did not look amused.

After finding himself out of a job when Norman Lamont resigned in May 1993, Cameron had been snapped up by the new Home Secretary, Michael Howard, who appointed him one of his special advisers. If Cameron’s experience at the Treasury had toughened him up, the Home Office under Howard was no place for shrinking violets either. It was one of the few areas of government where a minister was actively driving an agenda, often against the grain of civil servants and commentators – Howard was unapologetic about tightening penal policy, famously saying that ‘Prison works.’ Cameron enjoyed working for Howard, although he considered himself much more of a liberal than his boss. Even so, his fifteen-month spell under Howard’s wing at the Home Office had given him a flavour of politics at the sharp end of Whitehall. Cameron’s eye for detail and flair for words were put to use by his new boss, but more importantly Howard valued his capacity for hard work. Working for Howard also provided an insight into the rapid rise of the Shadow Home Secretary, Tony Blair. In the late summer of 1994 Cameron left the service of a beleaguered government for the private sector, joining Carlton Communications, a media company which owned London’s weekday ITV station, Carlton Television. Under the watchful eye of the charismatic chairman Michael Green, Cameron was soon promoted to be the company’s director of corporate affairs. However, his heart was really set on becoming a Tory MP. In January 1996, when two shortlisted contenders for what seemed to be a reasonably safe Tory seat dropped out, Cameron was called to interview at the last moment. ‘I must admit that my first thought was that, at twenty-nine, he was too young. But then he spoke and it was obvious that he was the best candidate,’ recalled one of the stalwarts of the Stafford Conservative Association.⁵³

While Cameron’s star rose, it seemed that anything that could go wrong did go wrong for the party in power. Major had seriously considered calling an election in autumn 1996, but decided to hold off until March or May 1997, the last date at which it could take place. While the competence of the government had long been called into question, the misdemeanours of a handful of Conservative MPs further damaged the party’s reputation in office. In a speech primarily about education, Major declared that it was time to go ‘back to basics’ by restoring values of decency and respect in communities across the country. Unauthorised briefings from junior staff in Central Office claimed that he was actually talking about personal morality rather than education. Major was incensed. When several ministers were exposed in the press for having extramarital affairs, ‘back to basics’ suddenly blew up in the government’s face. Allegations of ‘sleaze’ also came to haunt the party. Investigations by the Guardian revealed that two Conservative MPs, Tim Smith and Neil Hamilton, had taken cash in brown paper envelopes from the owner of Harrods, Mohamed Fayed, for asking parliamentary questions, while Jonathan Aitken, like Hamilton a minister in the government, became embroiled in damaging allegations about receiving hospitality at the expense of associates of the Saudi royal family. To the public, these matters tarred the whole party with the same brush. There was a firm impression that the Conservative Party was synonymous with a culture of greed and arrogance that had taken root during the Thatcherite heyday of the 1980s.

Outmanoeuvred and Outclassed

While the Major government headed for the rocks, the Labour Party was undergoing a revolution of its own. Neil Kinnock’s resignation following the 1992 election defeat prompted a period of soul-searching for the party. Kinnock’s successor, John Smith, was a capable parliamentary performer, but his strategy was largely to ride the wave of growing discontent with the government. He believed that ‘one more heave’ would be enough to deliver victory at the next election. A small group of Labour politicians were not so convinced. They realised that the party had to change even more drastically than it had under Kinnock. Among them were Gordon Brown, the Shadow Chancellor, Tony Blair, the Shadow Home Secretary, and Peter Mandelson, the party’s former Director of Communications, who had become an MP in 1992. Their ambition to modernise the Labour Party would come a step closer on 12 May 1994.

Cameron was enjoying a pint of beer outside the Two Chairmen pub in Westminster when he heard about John Smith’s death earlier that day. In shock, he turned to a colleague: ‘This means Tony Blair will be leader of the Labour Party,’ he declared. ‘He’ll move it onto the centre ground and we’ll be stuffed.’ It was a sound prediction. The path was clear for the Shadow Home Secretary to emerge as the front-runner to replace Smith, after his friend and colleague Gordon Brown stepped aside (a decision that would haunt Brown for the rest of his career). Blair possessed immense skills as a communicator, and he also had youth and charisma on his side. He, Brown, Mandelson and Alastair Campbell, the former tabloid journalist who became Blair’s press secretary, formed a powerful clique at the top of the party.

‘New Labour’ would extend its appeal across the political spectrum, unlike the old party of the left. It sought to blend the modern economic agenda that had been entrenched by the Thatcher–Major governments with a passion for social justice, redressing the inequalities that had arisen during the 1980s and 1990s. New Labour would position itself as the ‘One Nation’ party of British politics. Rewriting Clause IV of the party’s constitution, stripping it of the commitment to public ownership of industry, was a clear signal to the electorate that the party had changed. Presentation was crucial. While Kinnock had done the heavy lifting in abandoning unpopular policies, it was now for a new generation to take a symbol like Clause IV and rebrand Labour for the wider electorate. By accepting aspects of the Thatcher revolution, including the sweeping reforms of the trade unions, restructuring of the economy and a tough stance on law and order, the party manoeuvred itself onto fertile electoral territory. Learning the lessons of the disastrous ‘shadow budget’ in 1992, Labour pledged not to increase income tax and committed itself to Tory spending targets for two years if elected. The leadership took absolutely nothing for granted: there would be no room for ideological purity or reckless dissent in the New Labour project. Hungry for power after eighteen years in opposition, the party loyally followed its new leadership.

For an embattled government, the advent of New Labour presented considerable practical and philosophical challenges. ‘I attended many meetings with John Major in Number 10, and while we were sitting there four or five major governmental decisions had to be made while we were having a discussion about the next manifesto,’ recalls Daniel Finkelstein, who joined Central Office in 1995. ‘There comes a point when you’re holding a coalition together with a tiny majority that the wider political picture becomes secondary.’⁵⁴ Central Office was reorganised, but it could not match New Labour’s state-of-the-art war room at the heart of its Westminster headquarters in Millbank Tower. The Conservative election machine, which had been so formidable in previous campaigns, was completely outclassed.

New Labour presented a far more fundamental problem to the Conservatives. ‘We knew Tony Blair would be a formidable opponent,’ recalls William Hague, who was promoted to the Cabinet in 1995. ‘He had the right appearance and attitude at the right time. It made our political strategy that much harder. The Cabinet found it very hard to decide how to attack New Labour.’ It was a dilemma that caused many of the Tories’ brightest brains to falter: they could not find a convincing response to being outmanoeuvred. ‘It was clear Blair was giving us a political nervous breakdown because we weren’t sure what we stood for, and trying to define ourselves in contrast to him was extremely difficult,’ recalls George Bridges, the youthful Assistant Political Secretary in Number 10 between 1994 and 1997. ‘He was picking up Tory principles that he felt were appealing to middle England and playing them for all they were worth.’⁵⁵

Central Office strategists and election planners went through contortions trying to decide how to attack New Labour. Guided by research showing that the public believed that Labour had indeed changed, they argued that it was a change that heralded new dangers. ‘New Labour, New Danger’ became the catchy slogan inspired by the party’s advertising agency, M&C Saatchi, accompanied by a poster showing Tony Blair’s ‘demon eyes’ lurking behind red curtains. It was partly inspired by Steve Hilton, who had left Central Office after the 1992 general election to become an apprentice of the advertising guru Maurice Saatchi. But the attack on the opposition had a flaw, as Finkelstein admits: ‘It showed that we didn’t actually know what we thought was wrong with New Labour, and that the only way we could fight them was by pretending in our own heads that they were dangerous.’⁵⁶ There was confusion about the approach throughout the party. Central Office staff became frustrated that Major would veer from one line of attack to another. ‘He followed what we used to call the Coca-Cola strategy, which argued that Labour was copying us, as Cola Light, and that we were the real thing. We repeatedly tried and failed to get him to understand that you couldn’t say they were dangerous and copying you at the same time.’⁵⁷ Yet Major was convinced that the public would see through the ‘froth’ of Blair, which contrasted with the late John Smith, who he believed was a politician of substance.

The fact was that the party was in total disarray about how to attack the resurgent opposition. Some senior figures believed that Blair was a left-winger in disguise, while others tried to portray him either as a puppet of the old left or as believing in nothing at all. ‘Of all the iterations we went through, the one thing that never occurred to anybody was that Tony Blair might actually mean it,’ Andrew Cooper admits. ‘We completely underestimated him and the New Labour project.’⁵⁸ Very few on the Tory side understood what they were up against. ‘Tony Blair was an extremely accomplished, protean, shape-shifting politician who managed brilliantly to appeal to old Labour voters and simultaneously to huge number of middle-ground Tory voters in 1997,’ Boris Johnson reflects.⁵⁹

When an exhausted John Major finally called the general election on 17 March, his party had long lost the will to govern. It lay tired, divided and discredited. ‘I love my party in the country, but I do not love my parliamentary party,’ Major later admitted.⁶⁰ ‘For much of the time I didn’t feel able to say exactly what I thought because I needed to keep the party together. It was my continuing nightmare that the party would split. It always felt like two horses pulling in opposite directions, and you were pulling back on both sets of reins at the same time, which was very uncomfortable.’⁶¹ Indeed, by placating the demands of the ‘oddballs who came out of the woodwork’ after 1992, as one former whip put it, Major found himself in an intolerably weak position.

As Prime Minister for six and a half years, John Major had survived longer than most of his predecessors in Number 10 Downing Street. In many ways he was given a ‘hospital pass’ in November 1990. The economy was deteriorating and the government was struggling to find its poise after the political disaster of the poll tax. Major cannot escape culpability as a senior member of Mrs Thatcher’s administration, sharing in the collective responsibility for the failures of its later years, but he was determined to draw a line under a period of huge upheaval. By promising to create ‘a country at ease with itself’ and attempting to reconcile the increasingly polarised positions within his party, he steered the Conservative Party to calmer waters for a time. His decency and straightforwardness endeared him to the wider party, and indeed to many in the country. His mandate in 1992, which was built on the highest ever popular vote (admittedly on a high turnout), was testament to his skilled management of a party in office that was seriously fraying at the edges.

Winning the 1992 general election was in fact a Pyrrhic victory for John Major and the Conservatives. Faced with such a small majority and an increasingly hostile press climate, the Prime Minister would inevitably find it harder to ride the ‘two horses’ of European opinion within the party. While his purpose was to govern the country, others recklessly indulged themselves in a civil war the wounds of which would take years to heal. After 1992, longevity would be his government’s greatest enemy, as the public tired of some in the parliamentary party, whose arrogance and obsession with Europe became abhorrent to them. Lesser men would have buckled under the strain of leading a party seemingly intent on destroying itself.

But even allowing for his scant room for manoeuvre, Major could have taken a firmer and more decisive line with those who sought to cause so much trouble, and have been less thin-skinned about what others, particularly virulent critics in the press, thought of him. By restating the more harmonious vision of Britain he espoused on becoming Prime Minister, he might have been able to create some light amid the darkening clouds after 1992. Despite his achievements in forging the Northern Ireland peace process, conquering inflation and passing on a secure economy in May 1997, he could have been more forceful in articulating a positive vision for the party.

Whatever John Major could and might have said or done, the public wanted change, and voted for it. New Labour was ready to assume the reins of power, while for the Conservative Party a journey into the unknown was about to begin.