POLITICS
John Major tried to persuade the lunatics not to pull down the asylum but he failed
BRUCE ANDERSON
No prime minister was ever treated so shabbily by his own party. For most of his six and a half years in Downing Street, John Major was subjected to hysterical vili- fication, most of it from fellow Conserva- tives. That explains one melancholy record which Mr Major set; no prime minister has enjoyed his time of office less.
Help is at hand, however. John Major has nothing to fear from the verdict of pos- terity. The Gulf war, counter-inflation, Maastricht, Ulster: his was a premiership of substantial and enduring achievement which historians are bound to acknowledge, while wondering why his own colleagues had been incapable of doing so. But Mr Major has concluded that history helps those who help themselves. The new Tory hierarchy, themselves blameless of crimes against their former leader, would rather that the publication of his memoirs had been postponed. They fear that their party is destined to spend the next couple of months oscillating between Jeffrey Archer's indiscretions and a memoir war, with John Major, Norman Lamont — and, no doubt, Margaret Thatcher's friends — ensuring that William Hague is drowned out, while the next election draws closer.
Such anxieties are justified, but anyone who had to put up with such inhuman treatment as John Major received is enti- tled to their say. Mr Major is also right; his premiership was a tragedy, and Margaret Thatcher bears a heavy responsibility for making it so.
At the very beginning, it had all seemed so hopeful. Those who were in No. 11 Downing Street when Margaret Thatcher swept in to congratulate the new leader will never forget the scene. Everything we worked for is safe, she assured Mr Major; the future is assured. She behaved with such dignity, even gaiety, that many observers could not contain their tears. She drew aside Robin Butler, the then Cabinet Secretary, to discuss timings. From the matter of fact, light-hearted way that she talked about popping along to the Palace, no one would have guessed that she was referring to the final journey of her eleven- and-a-half year premiership. 'So foul and fair a day' was Alastair Goodlad's com- ment, and the reference to the opening scenes of Macbeth was appropriate. Even after so many years and such a plenitude of achievement, it appeared that nothing in her premiership became her like the leaving it; as if she, too, had the grace to throw away the dearest thing she owed as 'twere a careless trifle.
For almost five minutes; then the bitch- ing began. There are some excuses. Mar- garet Thatcher had relished her great office as much as she had adorned it, and after the brutal suddenness of her ejection from power, she could be forgiven the need for a period of adjustment. She was bound to go on producing more adrenalin than she could consume; she probably still does. But she should have behaved better. She had spent 15 years observing Ted Heath wallowing in bile and spite; surely she would never take him as a role model?
Well, she did. Like the Grocer, she began by rewriting history. She, the great counter-inflationist, left John Major with inflation at almost 11 per cent. He had to take the corrective measures and the politi- cal risks; she then blamed the cure for the disease. She had forced through the Single European Act, an enormous transfer of sovereignty from Britain to Brussels. But she tried to sabotage John Major's efforts to enact the Maastricht Treaty, which had much less constitutional significance; a treaty, moreover, which Charles Powell believes that she herself would have accepted had she still been in power and had she been able to negotiate it. But once John Major took over, Margaret Thatcher ceased to be capable of rational calcula- tion. Surrounded by sycophants, she came to believe in the myths of her own premier- ship and forgot the realities.
In office, she had owed much of her genius to a volatile equilibrium, an unre- solved schizophrenia. Most premiers are both matured and ground down by the relentless complexity of the governing pro- cess, the intractability of events, the impos- sibility of translating ideals into action; by the ever-active law of unintended conse- quences and the constant need for compro- mises. As they age in office, there is a sense of 'After such knowledge, what for- giveness?'
But that did not happen to Margaret Thatcher. She made many compromises, some of which appeared to violate her deepest political instincts. They became government policy, they passed into law; all her doing — but she never really accepted them. It was as if someone else had acted on her behalf. Anyone who examines her actual record Rhodesia/ Zimbabwe, the Anglo-Irish Agreement, the Single European Act, public spending, European Monetary Union (which she never rejected on principle) — would con- clude that she was only a Thatcherite for about 10 per cent of her time. In her soul, however, she was always a Thatcherite, and once she was freed from the constraints of office she was determined to judge her suc- cessor by criteria which bore no relation to her own years in power. If John Major had committed breaches of Thatcherite ortho- doxy, she had committed far graver breach- es; if he was guilty, she was guiltier. But she could not see that; nor could half the Tory party. They applauded her loss of bal- ance; they cheered on her efforts to become the real leader of the opposition.
Unfortunately for future historians, there is already a book called The Tribe that Lost its Head; that would have been the perfect title for a history of the Tory party from 1989 to 1997. Poor John Major spent a wretched and heroic six and a half years imploring the lunatics to stop trying to pull down the asylum on their own heads, and eventually failed. The Tory party's behaviour was an unprecedented exercise in political self-destruction, and as my col- league Matthew Parris was the first to observe, it is only explicable in psycho- dramatic terms.
By overthrowing Margaret Thatcher, the Tory parliamentary party became guilty of matricide. Like Orestes, it was then pur- sued by the Eumenides, but there was no Athene to free the Tories from their Furies. The Tories were tried by the electorate, not the Areopagus, and the verdict was not a healing expiation but a harsh sentence: banishment from power, for an unlimited duration. It could indeed be argued that Mr Major was wrong to describe his premier- ship as a Greek tragedy; the Orestes cycle had a happier ending.
Eddie Bell, the chairman of Harper- Collins, Mr Major's publisher, says that the former prime minister has written a mag- nificent and moving book. The passages about his early upbringing brought tears to Mr Bell's eyes. The later passages may well bring tears to many Tory eyes, but those who ought to be weeping will no doubt re- emphasise their own littleness by renewed attempts at scorn.
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