CITY AND SUBURBAN
A straight man goes to No 10 a Tory without a green welly
CHRISTOPHER FILDES
John Major's City career seems to me a clue to his character. Just as in politics he is a Conservative who has not come up by the familiar smooth paths of his party, so he is a City man — but not at all the golden boy whose wits and connections might take him from Balliol to a merchant bank and from its parlours to Parliament. He started as a City clerk, aged 16, with an insurance broker. He went to Standard Chartered, the British overseas bank, which tradi- tionally staffed itself by leaving out bowls of porridge at street corners and giving the job to the hungriest boy. Mr Major had never been abroad and thought that this was his chance. When he was invalided home from West Africa with his leg smashed, Standard Chartered's managing director, Sir Peter Graham, thought that this bright and engaging young manager with political ambitions might be the man for the press office, and could go further. He was right about that. Today that character and background baffle those who do not recognise it. A revealing moment from the week's cam- paign was the jarring clash of temperament between John Major and Jonathan Dimb- leby. Something about the candidate riled the interviewer — who, scion of his patri- cian liberal dynasty, could not make out this man who did not fit his stereotype. Not rich, not squirearchical, not vulgar, not greedy, not even wearing green wellies, talking in terms of a classless society, how could this man claim to be a Conservative, let alone to lead the party and, from that power-base, the country?
When Mr Major calls himself, as he does, economically dry and socially wet, it Is worth remembering that he was the first Chancellor of the Exchequer who had learned for himself what it was like to register as unemployed and live on benefit. To him, unemployment could not simply be a co-ordinate in an economist's charted curve. He learned the frailty of small businesses and what happens when they go down — when that happened to his father's attempts to make and sell garden orna- ments, the Majors moved to Brixton and their son had to leave school and earn his living.
The public so far has had to judge him in the Treasury, where lie had his first Cabinet post, as Chief Secretary — con- trolling public spending, and dealing with the spending departments. That unconven- tional Treasury mandarin Sir Leo Pliatsky likened it to keeping elephants away from a water-hole: 'You drive them off, and drive them off, and in the evening, back they come.' Politely determined, Mr Major drove them off without rousing their anger. He won high praises, and was reckoned a certainty for advancement in last year's reshuffle. He told me afterwards that he had taken particular care in wording his letters to the spending departments, sus- pecting that when the letters arrived he might be on the receiving end — but he could not even remember what he had written to the Foreign Office. That was where he went, until his former patron left a sudden hole at the Treasury — and left Mr Major in his increasingly familiar role as the right man for the right place at the right time.
In Washington this year for the Interna- tional Monetary Fund meeting, I listened to Mr Major's down-the-middle speech, sitting near a shrewd judge who, as it happened, was to distinguish himself in Michael Heseltine's campaign. His verdict was memorable. R.A. Butler, he said, had told him that the most difficult thing for a Chancellor to do, and often the right thing, was nothing. Mr Major had done this sticking to the policies he found, giving them time to work, not panicked into swinging the wheel in either direction, keeping his nerve.
To the public he has appeared as the nation's bank manager — disappointing us by refusing an overdraft but contriving to make us feel he was right. To the Treasury he has been the brisk despatcher of busi- ness, happy to be shown a problem and give a decision, surprising his senior advis- ers by keeping time clear for politics (Friday was constituency day), worrying them a little by his sensitivity to scribblers, but rated, without hesitation, a good egg. To Whitehall, in the leadership election, he was the Treasury candidate. Mr Hesel- tine stood for an ad hoc coalition of the Treasury's rivals and enemies, all the way from the Bank of England, via the spend- ing departments, to an enhanced Depart- ment of Trade and Industry which was going to prove that Conservative interven- tion worked. The Treasury itself in the 1970s had flirted with an industrial strategy, but by Mr Major's time was back on Gladstonian form — trying to save candle-ends and balance its budget. What Mr Major did and does want to change are had structures, which surcharge the poor (like the Composite Rate Tax) or penalise personal ownership, suck resources into the least productive investment of all houses — and reward borrowing rather than saving.
In office, he has been a master of one trade rather than a jack of many. That can be a disadvantage in the highest office witness the Foreign Office's specialist candidate, Anthony Eden. If all goes wrong, Mr Major could rank with him as an exemplar of the Peter Principle, which says that people are promoted until they reach the level of their own incompetence. A superlative Chief Secretary, a good Chancellor, and then . • . .
I, though, trust that we shall see John
Major as a Prime Minister in the mould of Attlee or of Baldwin. Attlee, the crisp despatcher of business and, when neces- sary, of ministers, the politician marked by early knowledge of hardship in London, the modest and upright man. Baldwin, the little-known Chancellor with short experi- ence of office who came suddenly to the leadership, and there by his natural sym- pathy and good feeling — and guile, too made himself a national, not a factional, leader. When Baldwin left office, Punch drew him as the Worcestershire plough- boy, with John Bull thanking him: 'Well done — a long day. and a rare straight furrow.'
Previous page
