1.1 Introduction and Book Outline
This book assesses the political leadership of John Major, Conservative Prime Minister between 27 November 1990 and 2 May 1997, using the six criteria for political leadership devised by Princeton University Professor Fred Greenstein in his seminal work on Presidential leadership: The Presidential Difference (Greenstein 2000, 2004, 2009a).
This is the so-called Greenstein model, an analytical framework which seeks to assess Presidential leadership under six headings—public communicator, political skill, public policy vision, organisational capacity, and, finally, cognitive style and emotional intelligence. The final two of the criteria are the psychological elements of political leadership, a specialism of Professor Greenstein dating back to his first work on politics and psychology in the 1960s: Personality and Politics: Problems of Evidence, Inference, and Conceptualization (Greenstein 1987).
It is through these six criteria for political leadership within Presidential Studies that this book will seek to re-assess the premiership of Major, some twenty years after his government fell, adding to earlier comparative studies which have assessed Prime Ministerial performance using the Greenstein model (Honeyman 2007; Theakston 2007, 2011, 2012).
1.2 Book Rationale
The rationale for this book, specifically the use of the Greenstein model1 to re-assess the political leadership of Major, can be justified for two principal reasons. First, the arguable reputational improvement of Major (Seldon and Davies 2017, 325), witnessed in his appearance recently in significant campaigns such as the Scottish independence referendum (2014) and In/Out referendum on Britain’s relationship with the European Union (EU) (2016), as well as his rise in the Prime Ministerial ‘league table’ since 1997 (Theakston and Gill 2006, 2011). Second, the overlooking and seemingly somewhat undervaluing of Major in the academic literature in comparison with his predecessor, Margaret Thatcher (Conservative, 1979–1990), and successor, Tony Blair (Labour, 1997–2007), and, latterly, the literature on David Cameron (Conservative, 2010–2016). Such undervaluing within the literature provides a significant opportunity for further research.
The Reputation of John Major
The political leadership of Conservative Prime Minister John Major has been subject to criticism, ridicule and, at times, open abuse which took place to a large extent during his time in office between November 1990 and May 1997. The most damning attacks came from Major’s own backbenches, perhaps most famously Norman Lamont telling the House of Commons in June 1993:
There is something wrong with the way in which we make our decisions. The Government listen too much to the pollsters and the party managers. The problem is that they are not even very good at politics, and they are entering too much into policy decisions. As a result there is too much short-termism, too much reacting to events, and not enough shaping of events. We give the impression of being in office but not in power. (HC Deb June 9 1993 Col. 285)
Blair was even more damning, telling Major “I lead my party, he follows his” (HC Deb 25 April 1995 Col. 656), and shouting “weak, weak, weak” at the Prime Minister (HC Deb 30 January 1997 Col. 503) during two famous occasions at Prime Minister’s Questions (PMQs).
Major’s own predecessor was equally disparaging, Thatcher telling a newspaper after Major’s very personal triumph at the 1992 election:
I don’t accept the idea that all of a sudden Major is his own man. He has been prime minister for seventeen months and he inherited all these great achievements of the past eleven-and-a-half years which have fundamentally changed Britain. (Newsweek, April 27, 1992)
Major’s political leadership was equally at times subject to outright ridicule. Major was the ‘grey man’ of British politics in the television show Spitting Image, regularly lampooned by cartoonists as wearing his underpants outside his trousers, as was depicted in the Guardian (Baker 1995, 186).
For Major, this was all part of a regular pattern of daily attacks he was to suffer in the media:
Fantasies all too often took the place of facts. Under the heading “Can Major take the strain?” the Times reported in October 1992 that I was losing weight, giving up alcohol and turning my hair grey – all of which was as false as it was silly. “If I really were tinting my hair”, I said to Alex Allan, “would I have chosen this colour?” Such daily opposition ripped into my premiership, damaged the Conservative Party and came close to destroying the government. (Major 1999, 360)
The attacks on the Major premiership therefore went beyond the political: they were deeply personal.
Alongside the criticism of political elites and journalists between 1990 and 1997 which Major was subjected to, there was also what can almost be described as an atmosphere of permanent crisis within the government during the 1992 Parliament. Indeed, within months of his 1992 election victory Major’s government was to suffer the humiliation of Black Wednesday, 16 September 1992, the day the pound plunged out of the Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM), with concomitant effects on both Major’s and the government’s popularity, which plunged dramatically and would never recover (Crewe 1996, 421). From that point onwards Major’s legitimacy as leader of the Conservative Party was openly questioned, which was only resolved in the Prime Minister’s favour in June 1995 after a divisive leadership contest (Heppell 2007a, b).
Throughout much of the 1992 Parliament, the Parliamentary Conservative Party (PCP) was convulsed by some of the worst infighting since the Corn Laws in the 1840 s, over the issue of further European integration, and a potential split was seen as likely (Baker et al. 1993b, 428). This was even before John Major opened up the question of standards in public life and sleaze in high office after his infa...