Sir John Major

6 Key excerpts on "Sir John Major"

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  The imperial premiership

  The role of the modern Prime Minister in foreign policy making, 1964–2015

  • Sam Goodman(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Manchester University Press

    (Publisher)

  6John Major, 1990–97

  The sudden and unexpected demise of Margaret Thatcher's premiership created the conditions under which for the first time since Churchill, a Prime Minister ascended to the office in the middle of preparations for war. On the day John Major entered No. 10 on 28 November 1990, there were 29,000 British troops stationed in Saudi Arabia. Faced with a foreign policy baptism of fire, Major had to weigh up both domestic political concerns and international concerns coming from Britain's allies.

  The Prime Minister's main focus was on uniting a deeply divided Conservative Party that had just removed one of their most popular leaders. As her successor, his position was less stable. He was more reliant on figures in the Cabinet with their own bases of power within the party. With this in mind, he chose to keep Thatcher's Cabinet intact, only firing two junior ministers from their positions.1 Lord Michael Heseltine, Deputy Prime Minister under Major believes he wanted a break from the past: ‘John wanted to avoid any repetition of the tensions of the Thatcher years; he was himself a much more consensual character’.2

  Preparations for the Gulf War were in their final stages and members of the European Community were in the middle of negotiations for a new treaty to create a common currency. These two pressing foreign policy challenges meant that Douglas Hurd as Foreign Secretary and a rival in the leadership challenge to succeed Margaret Thatcher would be indispensable. Major knew from the outset that he would need him. Hurd had significant influence over Major, as Sir Stephen Wall, Major's Private Secretary at the time recalls: ‘Hurd had huge authority, having been in the Foreign Office before. He had been a senior minister before Major, was the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland and Home Secretary. That made their relationship much more equal’.3

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  Conservative orators

  From Baldwin to Cameron

  • Hayton Richard, Andrew S. Crines(Authors)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Manchester University Press

    (Publisher)

  9

  The oratory of John Major

  Timothy Heppell , and Thomas McMeeking

  John Major served as prime minister between November 1990 and May 1997. For a Conservative his journey to Downing Street was unconventional. After leaving school with limited qualifications he experienced unemployment in his youth, before working for the Standard Chartered Bank, joining the Young Conservatives and being elected as a member of Lambeth London Borough Council (1968–71). He would enter Parliament at the age of thirty-six in 1979. Of his fellow entrants from that year he was the first to reach Cabinet in 1987, having worked in the Whips’ Office (1983–85) and within the junior ministerial ranks of the Department of Health and Social Security (1985–87). After two years as Chief Secretary to the Treasury (1987–89), he was briefly (and surprisingly) Foreign Secretary in 1989 (May to October) before being appointed Chancellor of the Exchequer in October 1989. He was then dramatically elected as leader of the Conservative Party in November after the removal of Margaret Thatcher.

  However, despite the human interest of his humble beginnings and the length of his prime ministerial tenure, he has been overshadowed by his predecessor, Thatcher, and his successor, Tony Blair. Both of them were able to win three successive general elections and govern for over a decade. Both of them challenged traditional assumptions about their parties through Thatcherism and New Labour. Without their electoral records, or a narrative or governing approach to associate with his name, Major has seemed inconsequential by comparison.

  Although Major did win the general election of April 1992, a perception developed thereafter that he was an ineffective prime minister. It stemmed from the following factors. First, his reputation for competence was fatally undermined by the humiliating ejection from the Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM) in September 1992. Second, a series of sexual and financial scandals engulfed the Conservatives, reinforcing doubts about their integrity and commitment to public service. Finally, the Parliamentary Conservative Party (PCP) lost its reputation for internal discipline and unity. Major seemed powerless as the party went into convulsions tactically over the ratification of the Maastricht Treaty and strategically over the single European currency. The cumulative effect of these factors was that the Conservatives under Major no longer possessed the characteristics of a party of government (Norton, 1998

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  The Prime Ministers

  Reflections on Leadership from Wilson to Johnson

  • Steve Richards(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Atlantic Books

    (Publisher)

  5

  JOHN MAJOR

  John Major became prime minister in November 1990 in arguably the most politically traumatic circumstances of any modern prime minister, with the exception of Theresa May. Jim Callaghan, another contender for this title, had faced an economic nightmare, but his transition to leadership was smooth. Major’s was far from smooth, even if it seemed so at the time.

  Major became prime minister after the act of regicide by Conservative MPs, when ministers and backbenchers contrived the sensational removal of Margaret Thatcher, the three-times election winner, against her will. It was an insurrectionary move that many MPs could hardly believe they had carried out.

  As part of the challenging context, Major was not well prepared. Like Theresa May, he was ambitious. He had wanted the top job, but had not expected a vacancy to appear so suddenly in the autumn of 1990, just as Theresa May had not anticipated it in the summer of 2016. No one knew that the act of regicide was going to happen until it did. A few weeks earlier the Conservative party conference had been singing ‘Happy Birthday’ to Thatcher, and she had responded with exuberant waves from the conference platform. Major was her chancellor at the time, having been a short-serving Foreign Secretary. He had held the two top jobs in the Cabinet, but only very briefly.

  Less experienced than the candidates he defeated in the 1990 leadership contest, Major faced some titanic challenges as a new prime minister. The Conservatives had been well behind in the opinion polls and had lost a by-election in the theoretically safe seat of Eastbourne a short time before his victory. This was one of the reasons why Tory MPs turned against Margaret Thatcher. They feared they would lose their seats. The government of which Major had been a part had introduced its flagship policy, the poll tax. Major also faced a negotiation with the rest of the European Union over the forthcoming Maastricht Treaty. Some of his MPs opposed Maastricht, as did Margaret Thatcher herself. And the economy was sluggish.

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  John Major: An Unsuccessful Prime Minister?

  Reappraising John Major

  • Kevin Hickson, Ben Williams, Kevin Hickson, Ben Williams(Authors)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Biteback Publishing

    (Publisher)

  1 Party management and the very survival of the government became all-absorbing and exhausting enterprises as the Conservatives, surprisingly re-elected in 1992, limped through a deeply unhappy period of crisis and electoral unpopularity until the general election of 1997 consigned them to opposition for thirteen years.

  Major’s premiership remains of interest for the understanding of how the Conservatives came to tread a path of self-destructive preoccupation with European issues, despite the evidence that the general public did not share the obsession. In the process, that fixation transformed a massively successful political party into one which needed substantial reform and reconstruction before it could again be an effective challenger for office. Ultimately, of course, although the Conservative Party survived, the UK’s membership of the European Union did not. The period of Major’s premiership thus also remains pertinent for those seeking to understand the ambiguous character of the UK’s relationship with the European Union and the attitudes and values which eventually led to the referendum of 2016 and the vote to leave. To what extent was John Major personally responsible for the difficulties which he encountered? Could he have done anything which would have made a significant difference to the course of events or was he already boxed in by political events and the circumstances of his succession? Was his leadership style too weak and indecisive to handle the intra-party factionalism which emerged in Conservative ranks? Or was his consensual approach the only plausible one which a leader at that time could adopt? How should we now evaluate his premiership – especially in relation to Europe – and does the failure of subsequent leaders to prevent the party ‘banging on about Europe’ let us see his efforts from a different perspective?

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  The Political Leadership of Prime Minister John Major

  A Reassessment Using the Greenstein Model

  • Thomas McMeeking(Author)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  1995 , 37–48).

  The historical political context which Major inherited in 1990 therefore ensured that he was bequeathed an unfavourable leadership environment by Thatcher (Theakston 2002 , 300–306), made even more problematic in the 1992 Parliament by the government being returned at the 1992 election with a much-reduced majority of only twenty-one seats (Butler and Kavanagh 1992 ).

  Arguably the most poisonous legacy, at an intra-party level, of the Thatcher era was the issue of Europe and further integration into the EU . As a former MP recalled:

  We were seized by a kind of a suicide-mania, with Euroscepticism as the Mission Statement. (Maitland 2017 )

  It was Europe which ultimately destroyed the Conservative Party’s successful use of statecraft (Bulpitt 1986 ), which had been deployed by Mrs Thatcher since 1979 and which had contributed to her electoral success in the 1983 and 1987 elections (Stevens 2002 , 144). Under Major however Conservative Party statecraft was seemingly now in jeopardy, thus increasing the risk of government defeat at a general election in, which occurred in 1997 (King 1998 ).

  Major was self-aware of his constraints and predicament, even on the night of April 9 1992, accepting that the electoral elastic had been stretched to its limit for the Conservative Party , and victory was unlikely to be repeated at the next election (Seldon 1997 , 287). Therefore Major had seemingly correctly deduced the new political environment his victory in 1992 had created, the prospect of facing a small majority, the legacy of his predecessor Thatcher and the divisive issue of Europe soon be added to by the presence of a modernised opposition led by Tony Blair (McAnulla 1999

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  Leadership and Uncertainty Management in Politics

  Leaders, Followers and Constraints in Western Democracies

  • François Vergniolle De Chantal, Agnès Alexandre-Collier, Agnès Alexandre-Collier(Authors)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  As already stated, John Major’s accession to power was followed by a significant improvement of the relationships between the UK and the EC. However, it was more a change of style than a change of substance, as demonstrated by the opt-outs negotiated by Major at Maastricht – on the single currency but also on the social chapter. Yet, the ratification process of the Maastricht Treaty brought about deep divisions within the Conservative Party and put an end to John Major’s constructive approach to the European Union (EU) – not only in his discourse as discussed above, but also in his actions on the European stage. The British leader went from conciliation to confrontation, echoing his predecessor’s attitude. There are many examples of this: in March 1994, he opposed the raising of the blocking minority required by the enlargement of the EU to new member-states. Major was adamant and decided to turn this into a test of strength, until eventually he was forced to retreat. He had taken political risks in order to reassert his leadership over his deeply divided party but the situation had backfired and he was left humiliated, vulnerable to leadership speculation once again. A few months later, in June 1994, the British Prime Minister opposed his veto to the election of Jean-Luc Dehaene at the head of the European Commission, not only to protest against the ‘French–German diktat’ (Major, 1999: 594) but also because the candidate was too federalist for the British government. Lastly, in 1996, during the BSE (‘mad cow disease’) crisis, the Major government opted for an obstruction policy, blocking all EU decisions requiring unanimity, in protest against the ban on British beef. In fact, despite John Major’s initial attempt to distance himself from his predecessor on the European issue, his premiership was characterised by continuity with the Thatcher years.

  The radical change in John Major’s approach to Europe was accompanied by an instrumentalisation of the European issue for partisan political purposes (Tournier-Sol, 2009: 85–99). Indeed, the eurosceptic turn taken by the Conservative leader aimed at rallying the very support of those in the party which the Maastricht ratification process had alienated. John Major thereby strove to contain the internal splits which were threatening to tear his party apart. Accordingly, he was blamed for subordinating the relationship between Britain and the EU to party management and for putting party unity before the national interest – he was a ‘Chief whip manqué ’ (Kavanagh and Seldon, 1994: 48), ‘a managerial leader and political tactician for whom holding the party together was virtually an end in itself’ (Dorey, 1999: xv). This is quite symptomatic of John Major’s political leadership: the Conservative leader acted as an agent of his followers in his own party for the sake of its – and his – own survival. Party cohesion was his utmost priority, with leadership a major factor.

  However, conflicts were not limited to the European stage and also arose within the party and government during the end of the Thatcher era and the whole of Major’s premiership. Those internal conflicts affected their respective leaderships to which they were also inextricably linked, albeit differently – thereby shedding an instructive light on the role of political leadership.

  The Maastricht ratification severely damaged the leadership of John Major, who had to face a rebellion in his party ranks. The Conservative majority in the House of Commons had been reduced to 21 after the 1992 general election, thereby making the Major government very vulnerable to the euro-rebels by giving them disproportionate influence during the ratification process (Baker et al., 1993; Alexandre-Collier, 2009). Although this episode undoubtedly undermined Major’s leadership, the success of the ratification can also be considered as a considerable achievement in itself given the internal rifts in the Conservative Party – an achievement which John Major can take full credit for and which rests on his tactical skills as a political leader (Bogdanor, 2010: 174–5). The ratification process showed the Conservative leader taking political risks, which were to have lasting consequences on his leadership. This episode was all the more decisive in his premiership that it was also the founding element of his European policy after that.

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