John Major: The Autobiography

I had joined the Whips’ Office in the run-up to the general election which Margaret Thatcher called for 9 June 1983. The result never seemed in doubt. Margaret’s success in regaining the Falklands made her as unbeatable as the Labour Party were unelectable, with their preposterously left-wing manifesto. Gerald Kaufman, the cynical spirit of Labour’s front bench, called it the longest suicide note in history, but it was worse than that. Moreover, the defection of a number of senior Labour figures to the Social Democratic Party produced an organic split in the left of politics that almost guaranteed an overwhelming Conservative victory. In the event the election was a walkover and Margaret increased her parliamentary majority from forty-four to 144. In Huntingdon (as the constituency was now called) I had no difficulty and was comfortably re-elected by 20,348 votes – over 62 per cent of those cast.

After the election my vague hopes that I might be appointed a parliamentary under-secretary (a junior, junior minister) came to naught. I remained an assistant whip in a Whips’ Office changed by the appointment of John Wakeham as Chief Whip and John Cope as his deputy. The Office took on a different style. John Wakeham was subtle, reflective, a persuader, a fixer, fascinated by why something happened rather than simply what had happened. He was laid back, adept at delegation, and he played Mrs Thatcher like a master fisherman landing a prized salmon. He began, as a matter of policy, to bring some of the brightest young talents of the parliamentary party into the Office. He was ideal for the role.

The next two years as a whip taught me so much about how Parliament really worked, as I saw its dramas from the inside track. I learned about our colleagues and our opponents: their strengths, their weaknesses, their interests and sometimes their secrets. I came to know the team players and the loners; the able and the dotty.

The whips met daily in the House of Commons at 2.30 p.m., except on Wednesdays, when we gathered at 12 Downing Street, the Chief Whip’s domain, for a longer meeting that usually began at 10.30 a.m. and ended at lunchtime. We planned parliamentary business, bullied and cajoled where necessary, and shared every piece of intelligence that came our way. We discussed the opportunities and pitfalls of the week ahead and made our dispositions. John Wakeham received all the Cabinet papers and made them available to any whip who wished to read them: I devoured everything of interest.

An awful incident occurred in the House one snowy night when I was sitting on the bench beside Michael Roberts, a junior Welsh minister, in a late-night debate. The Chamber was almost deserted. Suddenly, Michael stumbled over a phrase, repeated it haltingly, groaned, then collapsed to the floor beside me. I was with him in moments, but he was beyond all help. He had suffered a massive coronary and must have died before he hit the floor. The sitting was suspended, and Michael Jopling, the Chief Whip, pleaded with the Press and the Public Galleries for privacy ‘at this difficult moment’. They left quietly and unprotesting, as shocked as we were. Gently, in an air of disbelief, Michael was taken out of the Chamber.

I remember driving home in the snow in the early hours of the morning and thinking of the tragedy of his death. Above all, it brought home to me the transitory nature of life and politics. Michael Roberts was not an old man – he was in his mid-fifties – but I knew that soon people would be talking about who would stand for his Cardiff seat in the by-election.

As I was given responsibility for managing the parliamentary business of first the Department of the Environment then the Northern Ireland Office, I became familiar with their policies and with the task of steering debates on the floor of the Chamber. I sat for weeks upon end, many hours at a time, on committees at which by tradition I was unable to speak, but was responsible for ensuring that the legislation progressed. I did deals with the opposition about when the committee sat, for how long, and when votes would be taken, and I sanctioned absence from the government side if the numbers present assured me that our majority was secure.

As an Environment whip I became involved in the abolition of the GLC, and in the annual fights over central government support for local authorities. These were often very bloody, as Members fought for cash for their political backyards. It was good preparation for the future. I also had a general responsibility for delivering the votes – and seeking the views – of Conservative MPs from East Anglia. They were a mixed bunch who were generally biddable and responsive to persuasion, but rarely to threats. Many of us coalesced into a group dubbed the ‘East Anglian Mafia’; it would come to my aid in the very different circumstances of November 1990.

With our huge parliamentary majority it was easier to send a colleague home early than to persuade him to change his mind over an issue about which he felt strongly. One evening a Conservative backbencher, the maverick right-winger Peter Bruinvels, droned on for far too long in an almost empty Chamber. He ignored my pointed expressions to sit down. Fed up, I sent him a note: ‘Do you have any children?’ Puzzled, Bruinvels shook his head and carried on speaking. I sent a second note: ‘Then why don’t you go home and do something useful?’

He sat down.

In Huntingdon, Norma and I were looking for a larger house. For months it had been a fruitless search, but one Saturday she came home and told me she had seen a house that might be possible, although it was too big and too expensive. We decided to look at it together. It was called Finings. We drove through the gate and up a gravelled drive fringed with mature lime trees which ended in a turning circle, in the centre of which was a fifty-foot cedar. Built in 1938, the house, with wisteria climbing up its back wall, stood in two and a half acres of garden with a large lawn and a wide variety of trees and shrubs. Much of it was heavily overgrown, with an old orchard of trees long past fruiting. The garden was open to farmland on two sides and undeveloped land on the third. Although it was ringed with trees there was no fence and it was a haven for whole families of rabbits, which we thought picturesque until we saw the damage they could do. In the winter, when they were hungry, they would literally tear the bark off the trees. As we made our presence felt they retreated, but our battle to expel them was to be a long one.

The house had potential. It felt right. It had charm and grace and gave an impression of being much older than it was. We couldn’t afford it, but we bought it. Selling the house in Hemingford Grey proved difficult, and for six months we took out a bridging loan which nearly crippled us financially. I’ve never regretted it.

On 3 October 1984, our fourteenth wedding anniversary, I became a senior whip with the grand title of ‘Lord Commissioner of the Treasury’. This simply arose through Buggins’s turn as whips left the Office and their juniors were automatically promoted, but I was delighted. I learned of my promotion as I returned from Latin America where, in the absence of a Foreign Office minister, I had been sent on a tour of Peru, Venezuela and Colombia. This was a fascinating visit with two highlights. The first was a visit to Machu Picchu, the lost city of the Incas, which had been stumbled on by an American professor in 1911. I was riveted by it. The second was one morning when I was asked to have coffee with a Roman Catholic priest in a shanty town outside Lima. As the clock struck eight, out of the miserable hovels, young children emerged clean and scrubbed and carrying satchels or bags. I stopped one and talked to him, with the priest as interpreter. The boy told me he wanted to be a brain surgeon. That, I thought, is ambition: I only wanted to be Chancellor of the Exchequer.

On the evening of 11 October 1984 I left the Grand Hotel in Brighton, where I had been staying for the Conservative Party Conference, to return early to Huntingdon. Five hours later, at 2.45 a.m., an IRA bomb ripped through the hotel. It was a calculated plan to murder the Prime Minister and her Cabinet, and five people were killed, including Tony Berry, and John Wakeham’s wife Roberta. John Wakeham and Norman Tebbit and his wife Margaret were severely injured. It was a miracle that the carnage was not far worse.

The first I heard of the tragedy was at 5 a.m., when my brother Terry telephoned me to see if I was at Finings or still in Brighton. I turned on the television and, like most of the country, saw the awful pictures of Norman Tebbit, in agony, being lifted out of the rubble. John Wakeham’s legs had been badly crushed, and during his long absence from Parliament his deputy John Cope took temporary charge of the Whips’ Office. I offered, as a fellow East Anglian MP, to care for John Wakeham’s Maldon constituency, which I did for many months until he was recovered.

As Treasury Whip, I was that bit closer to the chancellorship. The appointment turned out to be crucial to my future career – and, for reasons I will set out later, to Margaret Thatcher’s. I began to see at close quarters the immense influence of the Treasury on every aspect of government. I enjoyed working for Nigel Lawson, a radical chancellor, confident in his intellect and one of the main architects of the government’s policy.

Nigel’s morning meetings, known as ‘Prayer Meetings’, generally held in his study at Number 11, were a mixture of monologue and philosophical debate, but as a former whip he retained a fascination for Commons gossip. I was happy to keep him up to date. I rarely commented on his policies unless invited, although I had my views. Nigel would have listened, but done nothing. He knew what he wished to do, and his mind could not be changed.

My role as Treasury Whip led me into a serious row with the Prime Minister. Each summer, by tradition, the Whips’ Office entertained her to dinner, and in June 1985 we met at Number 10. Unusually, House of Lords whips were invited too. Margaret Thatcher was never noted for her small-talk with colleagues, and the first two courses passed with only desultory exchanges. It was evident that she wished to turn to some serious political discussion, and John Wakeham said, ‘The Treasury is at the heart of policy. I’ll ask the Treasury Whip to begin.’

I regarded it as my role to tell the Prime Minister what the backbenchers were saying, and I did so. ‘They don’t like some of our policies,’ I told her. ‘They’re worried that capital expenditure is being sacrificed to current spending.’ I set out in detail the grumbles that every whip present knew were the views of the vast majority of our backbench colleagues.

Margaret did not like the message at all, and began to chew up the messenger. I thought her behaviour was utterly unreasonable, and repeated the message. She became more shrill in her criticisms. ‘I’m astonished at what you’re saying,’ she snapped. I made it clear again that I was merely reporting the views of many Members, but she continued to attack me. I became increasingly annoyed, and said: ‘That’s what colleagues are saying, whether you like it or not – it’s my job to tell you, and that’s what I’m doing.’ Her tirade continued. By now I was past caring about tact, shaking with anger, and nearly walked out. I repeated the message once more. It made no impression at all, and as she raged on the whips around me became very uncomfortable. I was almost beside myself with fury, and made no attempt to hide it. Even as I spoke, I thought I might be wrecking my career, but I was too angry to backtrack – which, in any event, would have been craven. I may not be promoted, I thought, but I’m not going to be humiliated.

Carol Mather intervened to support me. Margaret turned on him with an angry word. Bob Boscawen hastened to support Carol. He was met with a glare. I had no intention of backing down, and pitched in again. The meeting was dangerously close to collapsing in mutual recrimination. Jean Trumpington, one of the Lords whips, attempted to lower the temperature and had her head bitten off for her pains. It was an extraordinary performance by the Prime Minister, and I have never forgotten it. As we rose from the table for post-dinner drinks her husband Denis came up to me. ‘She’ll have enjoyed that,’ he remarked, and drifted off happily, clutching a gin and tonic. John Cope sidled up and suggested I might make my peace with Margaret. ‘I think,’ I told him, ‘that it’s up to her. You’d better tell her that.’

The next day, to my astonishment, this extraordinary woman did just that. Since phrases like ‘wets’ and ‘dries’, ‘one of them’ or ‘one of us’, were already part of the Thatcher folklore, I assumed that after our argument I would be cast into outer darkness at the first opportunity. My career, I was sure, would be on hold if not on stop. But I was wrong.

In the late afternoon I was sitting as the Whip on Duty on the Treasury Bench in the Commons. Margaret swept in from behind the Speaker’s Chair and sat beside me. She could not have been more charming. She mentioned some ideas I had previously put to her, so inconsequential I cannot now remember them, and said she wished to discuss them. Another whip was summoned to the bench, and an ad hoc discussion commenced in the Whips’ Office, with the Prime Minister and me seated in armchairs. Without the fracas of the previous night being mentioned, peace was declared.

A few weeks later, in the autumn reshuffle, I was promoted to my first ministerial post in a department. Not for the first or the last time, Margaret Thatcher had surprised me.

CHAPTER FOUR Climbing the Ladder (#ulink_e3ce87da-44a7-513d-8869-05a4f6f99067)

IN THE LATE SUMMER OF 1985 I was at home at Finings watching the death throes of the England – Australia Test at The Oval on television. I had hoped to be at the match, but the probability of a reshuffle, and whispers that I would be promoted, kept me by the phone. England’s pace bowler Richard Ellison was mopping up the Australians as I awaited events. Norma was out, and James and Elizabeth were at school, so I was alone. And I had a dilemma.

I was horrified that I might be offered the job of Minister of Sport. I loved sport and politics, but they were separate parts of my life, and I had no wish to mix them. This was the first of two occasions in my career when I was to wonder whether or not to accept a promotion. I paced the room, and decided that I wanted a job in the mainstream of politics, or no job at all. If the Prime Minister offered me Sport I would say no, and ask to stay in the Whips’ Office. I marshalled my arguments, knowing that she would not welcome such a response.

The telephone rang. It was Number 10. The Prime Minister wished to speak to me later – would I be around? ‘Yes,’ I said. And waited. And paced. England won the Test match. I continued to wait.

Finally the phone rang again. It was the Prime Minister. ‘I’d like you to leave the Whips’ Office and go to Social Security,’ she said. ‘It’s where I started. It’s a good place to be. Norman Fowler will be your Secretary of State – get in touch with him straight away. Good luck.’ And that was it. I breathed a sigh of relief. I was a minister, and with a mainstream brief.

I did not know Norman Fowler well, but he was very welcoming at the department; although much later, when we knew each other far better, he admitted that he had had reservations about my appointment. He feared I was a ‘Whips’ nark’ – put in place to keep tabs on the plans of the biggest-spending department of all. He had good grounds for this suspicion. I learned from officials that not long before I arrived, a garrulous junior minister had passed details of the ministry’s plans for social security reform to Nigel Lawson.

No reservations were evident in Norman’s welcome to me. From the start, he brought me into the core of the ministry’s work, and we came to be firm friends. I enjoyed the department from the moment I set foot in it. My work as Parliamentary Under Secretary for Social Security was detailed and gruelling, and often very boring, with masses of routine letter-signing. Six or seven red boxes accompanied me home every weekend, and sometimes it took me until Sunday night to get through them all. But it gave me an insight into an area of policy that few people ever master. There was nothing abstract about the portfolio – since it embraced pensions, housing and social security benefits, every policy decision we took directly affected the quality of life of many very vulnerable people.

Norman Fowler headed the social security side of the department, with Tony Newton immediately below him as the Minister of State, responsible in particular for disabled people. I was junior to Tony. Jean Trumpington, one of the redoubtable characters of Parliament, was our Minister in the House of Lords, covering all aspects of the department’s business.

I once asked Jean why she had chosen the title ‘Trumpington’. ‘Well, dear,’ she said, ‘as you know, people take a title from places they know well. I knew two villages very well: one was called Trumpington, and the other was Six Mile Bottom. Which one would you have chosen?’ Jean’s humour knew no bounds. The House of Lords loved her. So did we.

Norman Fowler had the great political gift of worrying away at a complex problem for days on end, to the total exclusion of all else, until the problem was solved. Making few mistakes, he was the epitome of ‘a safe pair of hands’ – although while he was avoiding one catastrophe, other decisions and problems piled up elsewhere that could have officials and junior ministers tearing their hair in frustration. But Norman proved his point. No other secretary of state successfully mastered this massive department – ultimately it was split in two – but he ran it with distinction for over five years. He was a far more formidable operator than many with higher public profiles, and he rarely lost an argument in Cabinet – or outside it.

Tony Newton, the Minister of State, was a fully-fledged human being with no sense of self at all; his thought was always for others. I once said that if a tramp stole his suit Tony would rush after him with a matching shirt. He saw every problem first from the human angle, although – if persuaded change was necessary – he would take through the most controversial legislation. He was the ultimate team player, trusted on all sides and a specialist in social security, whose knowledge matched that of many of the department’s officials. Tony was later to be one of the most reliable and trusted ministers in my government.

We all worked in Alexander Fleming House, an appalling concrete-and-plate-glass building, full of airless corridors. Since it was two miles south of the Thames, at the Elephant and Castle, it was something of an outpost of Margaret Thatcher’s empire. It was close by the London Electricity Board building where, more than twenty years earlier, I had been so pleased to find a job. That memory was a reminder to me of the hidden difficulties faced by the people affected by the department’s decisions.

The eighties was a decade that gloried in thrusting self-reliance. Success was envied and aped. This stand-on-your-own-two-feet mentality drove Britain towards better things. It helped the nation regain its respect. But self-reliance can be taken too far, and a proper balance must be kept. Some people simply do not have the capacity to succeed, and others are trapped by circumstances. Many of these people were our clients in Social Security, and our policy was to target help to those most in need, and to enable as many as possible to cope on their own.

The department, when I arrived, was on the threshold of complex and (in the end) effective reforms to pension and social security benefits. The aim was to simplify the system and to ensure that benefits went to the people who actually needed them. A Bill had already been drafted before my promotion, but when Tony and I began to take the legislation through the Commons we very quickly realised that its later clauses, which dealt with social security, were deficient, and would not achieve their objectives. They could not be passed as they stood.

We hit on a solution. I would take the first twenty clauses, on pensions, through Commons committee stage on my own, while Tony and Norman rewrote the latter half of the Bill. The pension clauses were ferociously complex, and on Tuesdays and Thursdays, when the committee met, I was up by five in the morning to brief myself properly. The Bill undertook the liberalisation of the private pension market. This would make it easier for people to take their pension with them from one job to another without being penalised, and it also offered help to people to build up a personal pension plan of their own. Millions of individuals were to benefit, with the help of government support and generous tax relief. Over six million people were to take out personal pensions, with well over £200 billion held in them. The Bill was a tough baptism for a junior minister, but it enabled me to form an excellent working relationship with Tony and Norman, and speedily settled me into the department.

On social security, the Conservative government was viewed with suspicion by a Labour Party confident in its attacks on us. This confidence was not always matched by the ability of the party’s front bench team, but nonetheless, the political battleground gave me a lot of experience at the dispatch box.

After late-night votes Tony Newton and I would often linger to chat over a drink. Like me, he was a politics addict who had learned his trade in the Whips’ Office, and from the outset our relationship was easy. Tony was a habitual smoker – something of an embarrassment when he became Health Minister – and was forever harassed, because he took on more commitments than any mortal could easily handle. He offered help to others, but rarely asked for it himself, even when his need was evident. Once he lost two front teeth in an accident shortly before he was due to appear both in committee and on television. I offered to do the television interview for him. ‘Really?’ he said. ‘Are you sure? I could do it.’ But his gap-toothed grin suggested he knew it would not be wise.

Norman Fowler believed in giving his junior ministers every opportunity to improve their profile in the media, especially if the interviews were very early in the morning or very late at night, and he was unfailingly supportive if things went wrong. Each Monday all the department’s ministers were expected to join him for lunch at a nearby pizza restaurant where, free of the office and officials, we could discuss the pure politics of what we were about. Since I saw a good deal of Norman and Tony I knew how their conversations would go, and since I loathe pizza I usually found a reason to miss the meal. It was some weeks before Norman realised why I was a permanent absentee, and the pizzas were replaced by salad lunches in the office. The lack of ministerial garlic in the afternoon was much welcomed by civil servants.

I was well served by my officials, in particular by my Private Secretary Norman Cockett. Norman was bespectacled, with a full beard and a gentle good humour that took the sting out of every difficulty. He was never ruffled, the first of the many civil servants with whom I worked who were dedicated to public service. He put in the same killing hours as me. At his desk to brief me when I came into the office before breakfast, he was often still on hand when the House voted at 10 p.m., and sometimes did not leave for home until 2 a.m.

It was Norman Cockett who showed me the effects of our decisions at the sharp end. Our first visit was to a benefits office in my constituency, a gentle introduction. Our next trip was shocking. We arrived at an inner-London social security centre just before midday, and did not leave until 3.30. For all of that time there were never fewer than a hundred unhappy people queuing to see the handful of stressed clerks dealing with their enquiries, and there were only thirty seats in the room. The office, I learned, had a staff turnover of more than 100 per cent a year. It was a grim place.

The experience sowed some of the seeds in my mind of what would become the Citizen’s Charter. I saw no reason why people should suffer such scandalously poor service, and the following afternoon I sat down with Norman Cockett and produced a note on my visit for Norman Fowler, proposing that we sorted out the London benefits system. It led to a scheme which greatly improved the distribution of benefits in the capital.

The post of parliamentary under secretary is really an apprenticeship: more senior positions beckon if the test is not flunked. Parliamentary under secretaries have the influence of access to more senior ministers, and take day-to-day decisions on how things are done, but policy is the prerogative of their more elevated colleagues. I was lucky at Social Security because very early on I appeared a lot in the Commons and helped to take through a significant piece of legislation. This gave me a profile I would not otherwise have received so early on, and is perhaps one reason my political career accelerated.

I began to receive invitations to political events all over the country. One in particular sticks in my mind. In spring 1986 Robert Cranborne, a fellow Blue Chip and the Member for Dorset South, asked me to join a handful of other MPs on a panel of speakers at a Conservative Party event in a small village in his constituency. With me were Tristan Garel-Jones, still in the Whips’ Office; Virginia Bottomley, recently elected to the Commons and already Chris Patten’s Parliamentary Private Secretary; and Matthew Parris, who at an impending by-election would leave politics for journalism. We drove down to Dorset, and to pass the journey talked about the issues that might come up that night. Our conversation became light-hearted, and someone – I don’t remember which of us – suggested that we each write down a ‘frivolous fact’, and attempt to introduce it in our replies later that evening. The idea began as a joke, but by the time we arrived at the village hall we had dared each other to go ahead.

Matthew spoke first, and crisply dropped his point – that Upper Volta had recently been renamed Burkina Faso, ‘the country of wise men’, into his reply to a question on women’s rights. Virginia was convincing in bringing out the fact that ‘frogs swallow with their eyes shut’ into her answer. My turn came next – and, suppressing my mirth, I succeeded in including the point that Anne Boleyn had six fingers on one hand in my piece. But Tristan failed dismally. Almost in stitches, he just about managed to keep a straight face, but dared not bring in his silly fact – I think it was that 18 per cent of the British population regularly share a bath. The following morning at breakfast, we put a white feather on his plate.

Peter Bottomley, Virginia’s husband, also an MP, and a Transport minister, joined us for dinner at Cranborne Lodge. We told him what we had been up to, and he was sorry to have missed the fun. He made up for it when answering Transport questions in the Commons a few days later. One MP raised the matter of traffic congestion in Mayfair. ‘I have been down Park Lane on a bus,’ Peter informed the House. ‘I took a sandwich with me, and it was unfinished when I reached the other end. Unlike frogs, which eat with their eyes closed, I had mine open. Neither the bus nor the traffic was held up.’

He was asked another question. ‘Like the first inhabitants of Burkina Faso,’ he began his reply, ‘the land of the wise men, otherwise known as Upper Volta, I might wonder whether it is right to take all those powers into my department’s hands.’