POLITICS
The diary of a nobody tells us nothing about John Major
BRUCE ANDERSON
Until her premature death, Judith Chaplin had been a lucky politician. She had the knack of attaching herself to rising men's coat tails which then carried her to interesting places, without her ever doing much to justify her role. A mediocre speech-writer with inflexible political views and at best a second-rate intelligence, she was never a serious political adviser.
When John Major became Chancellor, he inherited Mrs Chaplin from Nigel Law- son. Little over a year later she was in No. 10, where she was hopelessly outgunned by Mr Major's other close advisers such as Sarah Hogg, Gus O'Donnell and Nicholas True. Long before she left to fight the 1992 election, her role had become minimal.
Given the shortage of female Tory MPs, she would undoubtedly have become a min- ister if she had lived. As it is, she had no time to make any contribution in the Com- mons, apart from one or two squeaks of dissent which irritated the whips.
John Major has always liked to have women around him, and until she became unhappy at being marginalised in No. 10, Judith Chaplin was a comforting, mousey figure, happy to organise the PM's favourite takeaway meals. But mice can creep into important rooms, and this was a mouse with a notebook. With the Major memoirs and the Lamont memoirs both now imminent — the launch-parties are on the same evening — the Tory party is going to spend the rest of the autumn tearing off the bandages from the unhealed wounds of its recent history. Mrs Chaplin has now provided the anti-Major camp with fresh material.
Her charges are familiar: that John Major was indecisive, had no principles or fixed views, and was solely concerned with his own advancement while being beastly about Margaret Thatcher. She also accus- es him of being hopelessly thin-skinned and absurdly vulnerable to hostile press comment, and, on that point, her criti- cisms are justified: John Major is guilty as charged.
When he became prime minister, he had a weakness in his background which put him at a disadvantage to all his recent pre- decessors. Before arriving in Downing Street, they had been through the furnace. They knew what it was like to deal with a hostile press, personal attacks, parliamen- tary back-stabbing and enemies out to get them. But when he became premier after a smooth ride to high office, John Major had hardly an enemy in the world. Apart from his interlude as foreign secretary, he had had a respectful press. That changed within days of his kissing hands, and he never learned to cope.
Throughout his premiership, his reaction to press criticism was the despair of his friends. He regularly promised to amend his ways and never did. 'I have taken your advice,' he would say. 'I'm not going to pay any more attention to what the papers write about, me.' Five minutes later, it would be a case of 'What possessed x to write y?' — when x was often a piddling scribbler of manifest inconsequence. By draining him of political energy and deny- ing him peace of mind, John Major's fail- ure to toughen up against the press blight- ed his premiership.
But Mrs Chaplin's graver accusations are much less well-founded. There is indeed a basic problem with her narrative: a simple- minded person is trying to come to terms with an exceptionally subtle one. Mrs Chap- lin had worked with Nigel Lawson, and had grown used to his method of conducting Treasury meetings. Chancellor Lawson liked grandstanding, displaying his com- mand of economics, jousting with his Trea- sury knights, proving that he was the clever- est person in the room (he usually was).
There was none of that under Chancel- lor Major, but this was not due to a defi- ciency of either intellect or principle — though of course he had none of Nigel Lawson's technical mastery. By the time Mr Major became chancellor, the political and economic climate had entirely changed. With inflation rocketing towards double-digit level and a recession looming, the brio and braggadocio of the earlier Lawson years would no longer have been appropriate.
Mrs Chaplin concluded that Mr Major had 'no overall framework of economic views'. She was wrong. He had one rigid economic view, which ought to have com- mended him to the stern and unbending Thatcherites. He hated inflation, and had done so long before he knew what the word meant. The schoolboy John Major was sometimes sent to do the family shopping, with a strictly limited amount of cash. If prices had increased, he found himself with insufficient money. By 1990, he was under no illusiong about the necessary cure for inflation: a prolonged and painful regime of high interest rates.
Mrs Chaplin also wrote: 'I think [John Major] doesn't mind higher taxation.' As a general statement, that is nonsense: Mr Major always wanted to cut taxes, if possi- ble. But, unlike his political adviser, he lived in the real world. By 1989/90, it was certain that government revenues would fall; they always do in a recession, while the pressure on public spending increases. The combina- tion of recession and inflation was hardly likely to reassure the gilt markets, so no responsible chancellor could have ruled out tax increases a priori.
By 1990, and unlike Mrs Chaplin, John Major realised that the short-term econom- ic prospects were grim. He also knew that as chancellor — and even more as PM he had two almost incompatible responsi- bilities: to impose a rigorous counter-infla- tionary regime and to win a general elec- tion. From the outset, he was aware that gaining the Tory leadership in 1990 could easily turn into a hospital pass, with a polit- ical career of immense promise ending in a wretchedly brief premiership. Hence his hurt and angry response to sniping from Margaret Thatcher. She had left him with a mess to clear up: 10.9 per cent inflation, a recession which hit Tory supporters hardest of all, and a party deeply divided over Europe. Yet as soon as she departed from Downing Street, she seemed to lose contact with reality.
Judith Chaplin records that on 3 January 1991, Margaret Thatcher went to see John Major and called for 'early and large cuts in interest rates'. If she had still been in power, she would have refused to listen to such counsels of fantasy. It is hardly sur- prising that John Major became frustrated. Neither can he be blamed for making some savage comments about Margaret Thatch- er, when she regarded no dinner-party as complete until she had denounced his inad- equacies and poured scorn on his efforts to deal with the difficulties which she had bequeathed him. Mrs Chaplin was never an intellectual confidante of John Major, for reasons which will become apparent to anyone who reads her journals. Mice can observe great events, but, only with a mouse's-eye view• She may have had a somebody's job, but this is a diary of a nobody.
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