AND ANOTHER THING
Not enough apples left to carry on the Number Ten picnic
PAUL JOHNSON Well: how long can he last? That is the question everybody is asking about John Major. Even his last media supporters, excluding the Independent and the Guardian, have now sold their shares in his tottering enterprise, and the consensus now is that it is only a matter of time. On this point, however, opinions vary a great deal. I took soundings at an enormous party given by Rupert Murdoch last week in the Victoria and Albert Museum, to celebrate Andrew Neil's vertiginous decade at the Sunday Times. Politicians, pundits and dolly-birds agreed it was not a case of whether but when and how — as one gor- geous blonde said, 'I don't feel Major's ree51 in charge, do you?' — but some gave him weeks, others months. It's true that Alan Clark and Peter Walker said he'd sur- vive till the next election, but both were laughing uproariously as they answered, and I know Walker said it purely to annoy me. A lot of wiseacres thought he might survive the winter but would be out imme- diately after the Tories are massacred in the European and local elections.
I do not think he will get that far for the simple reason that a prime minister needs authority and Major has none. With two exceptions, all his principal colleagues feel sorry for him, some even like him, but none respects him. In this way and others he con- tinues to remind me of Disraeli's 'phantom' prime minister, Lord Goderich, who even- tually grew so weak he was unable to meet parliament and simply slipped away. Major lacks authority for many reasons but pri- marily because he does not stand for any- thing other than charters and similar bits of political cardboard. So it was with Goderich. 'His political convictions,' said one of his colleagues, Lord Crewe, 'were limited to those announced by the diverse governments of which he was a member.' Another, J.C. Herries, said, `Ld. Goderich was laughed at & despised by everybody, never of any opinion, changing from one side to the other, thinking of nothing but jobs and patronage.'
One of Goderich's last acts, indeed, was to create an enormous number of baronet- cies and this may seem rather remote in an age when some holders are renouncing them. But Major, too, spends a good deal of time closeted with the whips and Central Office narks discussing the Honours List, dangling knighthoods and other baubles before the Tory mob, in the hope of keep- ing his parliamentary majority workable and the constituencies from open revolt. It was so in the last days of Harold Wilson's government: 'He has only his patronage left,' as a sour colleague put it.
Major again resembles Goderich in his curious impermanence. The Slubberee, as he was known, was always changing his name: first he was Robinson, then Goderich and later Ripon, and I'm not so sure he wasn't Grantham for a time. When he was serving under Canning, he got the latter so confused that he minuted to his secretary: 'Send [this paper] to Goderich and Robinson.' Major's father was an acro- bat and an illusionist, who could make him- self invisible. When the son was a whip, I'm told he too developed a habit of slipping in and out of rooms without being seen. He remains in some ways just a blur of grey mist: 'As I was going up the stair/I met a man who wasn't there./He wasn't there again today./I wish, I wish he'd stay away.'
Then there is another point about Major I find disturbing. He seems to speak a dif- ferent language, or rather uses ours in a way I can't always recognise. I'm told that when he was a guest of honour at the annu- al Trotlope Dinner he said in his speech, 'It's well known that I'm a Trollope fan, but less well known why I enjoy him so much. It's because of his gift for creating charac- ters — they're so two-dimensional.' Slowly it dawned on those listening that no joke was intended. Again, there are the metaphors, the strange figures of speech. He has a disconcerting habit of getting the wrong end of linguistic sticks. 'How many apples short of a picnic?' he asked the other day. I have puzzled over this ques- 'It's becoming an endangered species, I believe.' tion, read it backwards and looked at it sideways, and there is no way in which I can make it mean anything at all. That, signifi- cantly enough, reminds one of Neil Kin- nock, who has a similar gift for coming up with a mysterious piece of popular argot, usually connected with small moving vehi- cles: 'He's off his trolley.' It's enough to make you climb out of your pram.'
Of course, if John Major is Neil Kin- nock's alter ego, that would explain things. God works in mysterious ways His wonders to perform. The nation twice rejected Kin- nock but we got him all the same in the Tory trappings of the Grey Man. The Deity was determined to play His joke. Kinnock was turned down because, in addition to any rational objections, we intuitively felt he just didn't seem right in Number Ten — as Clem Attlee said crisply to Douglas Houghton, dismissing him, 'Not up to it!' Now we have, by the workings of an inscrutable providence, actually got in Number Ten a man who doesn't seem right, isn't up to it. When I was in America a fortnight ago, a Washington pundit told me that what most disturbed him about Bill Clinton was his answer to the question: 'Mr President, what gives you most satisfaction about being in the White House?' He replied, 'I can get to meet anyone I want.' I have an uneasy feeling Major would give the same answer, or anyway think it. There is something a bit goggle-eyed about him: he is in power, looking out, instead of being where he belongs, outside, looking in.
The Tories must put him out of his mis- ery. It's all very well saying loyalty is the Tories' secret weapon but few believe that any more, and even if they do there are higher loyalties than to a man, especially a grey one. We have to think of the country. Because of Major's hopelessness, there are counties all over England now groaning under the Politically Correct jackboots of Lib-Dem councils. We are heading straight for a catastrophe in the European Parlia- ment elections: if Major remains we will send Jacques Delors just the representa- tives he wants to give the green light to his socialist Utopia. And, in due course, we will certainly lose Westminster, getting, I fear, not even a Labour government but the pro- gressive anarchy of a Lib-Lab-Green-Nat coalition, with the Irish cracking the whip to boot. What a prospect! The invisible man on the Downing Street stairs will just have to vanish for good — pronto.
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