John Major: The Autobiography

His answer to a third question completed the set. ‘We can do many things with statistics. We can say that Anne Boleyn had six fingers or that 18 per cent of people share their baths. However, it is more important to consider each bus lane to see whether it is worthwhile.’

Impressed by Peter’s bravura performance, when I bumped into Tristan I teased him, ‘Go and tell the Prime Minister.’ He did, though he was concerned that she might not see the joke. We need not have worried. ‘It’s the only good thing I’ve ever heard about Peter,’ she replied.

As the summer of 1986 advanced, rumour hinted that I might be promoted again in the forthcoming reshuffle. I realised this was a possibility, but thought it unlikely, given my slender experience and the usual prime ministerial practice of leaving beginners in their jobs a little longer than a year. Although I was ambitious, I did not wish to leave Social Security until I had learned all I could in my role there.

The fates, however, were generous. When the reshuffle came in September, Tony Newton was moved sideways within the department, becoming Minister of State for Health, and at Norman Fowler’s request I was promoted to Tony’s place as Minister of State for Social Security.

Responsibility for the disabled now fell to me. Since the late 1970s, Norma had been involved with the charity Mencap, and for my part I vividly remembered the difficulties my father had faced when he lost his sight. So this was a job I relished on both these counts, and in addition because it has engendered its own fraternity. My predecessors in the role, on both sides of the House, treated me as one of their own. I was fortunate too that my new deputy as parliamentary secretary was an old friend, Nick Lyell, who as a lawyer had a gift for detail, and with whom I worked very easily. My new Private Secretary, Colin Phillips, soon introduced me to the delights of a steak lunch at the nearby Horse and Groom pub, where we spent many a jolly hour and took quite a few decisions. I was not to know that such pleasures would soon be curtailed as my anonymity fell away.

The jump from parliamentary under secretary to full minister of state is a big one; it means you have entered the pool of ministers from which the Cabinet is chosen. I now attended far more of the Cabinet sub-committees that are the machinery of policy-making, and began to see government and its characters from the inside: who carried weight, who knew his or her brief, who was politically astute, and who had an overblown reputation. It soon became clear to me why rumours of reshuffle casualties were often so accurate – the Cabinet committees mercilessly exposed ministers who were not on top of their jobs or were out of sympathy with policy. Broad-brush answers or flip comments might suffice in the debating atmosphere of the Commons, but you had to be master of the detail to win your way in the committees.

Within days of my appointment I realised that I would be responsible for replying to a debate at the Conservative Party Conference the following month. Despite years of attendance, and many attempts to speak from the floor, I had never been called to do so. Now, though unknown nationally, I was to speak from the platform. In retrospect I can see now that the Social Security debate that year was not of great importance, and in any event, the only speeches that really mattered were those of Cabinet ministers. But it did not feel that way at the time, and I was extremely nervous.

I sat in my garden in the September sun composing a speech. Never had I found one so hard to write. I had little experience of big rallies, and social security does not readily lend itself to conference oratory. Soon the ground at my feet was littered with discarded texts. The speech passed off well enough on the day, however, and I earned a crouching ovation from the audience, many of whom were wondering who was on next, and whether the subject to follow would be more politically exciting. No conference speech ever gave me so much trouble as my debut, and I was mightily relieved when it was over without disaster.

When Parliament reassembled in November I began to get to know the many disabled lobby groups who worked with such dedication for their special interests. In most cases they were not the left-wing warriors I had expected to find, and although not many were obvious Tories, I enjoyed the relationships that were soon built up. I would have liked to have become closer to them, but their institutional role of lobbying the government made that more difficult than I had imagined.

Soon after I had been appointed the McColl Report landed on my desk. Ian McColl, a distinguished professor of surgery, had chaired a Committee of Inquiry into the service provided by the artificial limb and appliance centres. It was a high-powered committee including Brian Griffiths, soon to be appointed head of the Prime Minister’s Policy Unit at Number 10, and Marmaduke (‘Duke’) Hussey, who had lost a leg at the Anzio beach-head in 1943 but had gone on to a distinguished career and was a former Chief Executive and Managing Director of Times Newspapers.

The report was fiercely critical of the services available to disabled people: wheelchair design was out of date; artificial limbs were poorly fitted; and the contract arrangements between the department and the near-monopoly suppliers were inadequate. As I had nearly lost a leg myself in Nigeria I was instinctively sympathetic to the disabled. I knew I was fortunate not to be in need of an artificial limb myself.

The department was disenchanted with the McColl Report, but I decided to implement it in full, and called in Professor McColl to discuss the way forward. I had not previously met the author of this rip-roaring critique of current policy, but he turned out to be a slender, sandy-haired individual of gentle disposition who was courteously but firmly determined to ensure his report was not shelved – as, he told me, he had been threatened it would be by an angry civil servant. His good nature soon overcame any residual resentment among the department’s officials, and a Special Health Authority was set up with a wide-ranging brief to improve services for disabled people. I invited Lord Holderness – formerly Richard Wood, a Conservative MP and government minister who had lost both his legs to a bomb in Libya in 1943 – to chair the new authority, and he and his colleagues worked to such effect that services greatly improved.

Ian McColl, however, was not to drift out of my life. In 1989 Margaret Thatcher sent him to the House of Lords, and in the 1990s he became my Parliamentary Private Secretary in the Lords. He spent his early mornings operating at Guy’s or St Thomas’s Hospitals and then came on to Number 10, where he had become the doctor-in-residence as well as a political adviser, and one of the most popular figures in Downing Street.

My higher profile as a minister of state made me a bigger target for criticism, and on one issue, although for a few days only, I became Public Enemy Number One. January 1987 was bitterly cold. Heavy falls of snow covered the whole country, and there was genuine concern about how vulnerable people would keep warm. The previous summer the department had prepared a new scheme of cold weather payments to help the vulnerable when the temperature fell below a certain level, but with Arctic blizzards sweeping Britain, the system looked hopelessly bureaucratic. I was even accused of having personally devised a scheme that would never be triggered (although why anyone would have done that the critics never explained).

As I drove from Huntingdon to the Commons on icy roads and in grim weather, the radio news made it clear that the cold weather payments were the issue of the moment, and that the opposition’s attack on what it called our ‘heartless system’ would be fierce. I had not realised, until I listened to Labour spokesmen, that by introducing a new scheme to help the old pay for their heating in cold weather we had been deliberately trying to freeze them to death. Labour, however, assured everyone that that was our intention. And they pinned the blame on me.

I had no authority to change the scheme and make early payments under it without both Treasury approval and extra funding – neither of which was forthcoming. The Treasury refused to yield, and an alarmed Margaret Thatcher – no doubt with an eye to Prime Minister’s Questions, where uproar was guaranteed – summoned John MacGregor, the Chief Secretary to the Treasury, and myself to see her at Number 10 and thrash out our solution to this winter crisis. I pleaded for money, and John resisted. We were in the first-floor study, in which Margaret liked to work, and I looked through the window at the deep snow covering Horse Guards Parade. ‘It must be very cold in a two-up, two-down semi with no heating,’ I said. Mrs Thatcher turned to me sharply, then looked out, and I knew I had won.

The Treasury approved the expenditure, and I announced that one and a half million vulnerable people would receive a £5 payment towards their heating bills. The vulnerable were reassured, the Labour fox was shot, the Tories were delighted, and I ended my brief stint as a hate figure.

It was a timely introduction to the sort of political flash-fire that can so often cause trouble. The Treasury was not always all-powerful, and Margaret Thatcher was a good deal more alert to popular concerns than her detractors liked to suggest. I moved from villain to hero in a matter of hours, and within a short time revised the system of cold weather payments to make it a good deal more effective. That done, the weather improved, and the new system remained untested.

I enjoyed my two years at Social Security, and did not anticipate that they would soon come to an end. In early 1987, however, the Conservatives returned to the lead in the opinion polls, and all parties began to prepare themselves for a general election. After two successive election defeats Labour still looked unelectable, and we were generally confident of another win. As the election approached speculation grew, and I was tipped for all manner of jobs in the new Parliament.

I had a modest role in the preparations for the June election by helping the Treasury to ‘cost’ Labour’s social security policies. The bulk of this work was done by Andrew Tyrie, then Nigel Lawson’s special adviser, and after 1997 the Tory Member for Chichester. It was a brilliant success in undermining Labour’s claim to be able to afford their programme without massive tax increases.

When the election was called, Peter Brown, my constituency agent in Huntingdon, had prepared yet again for me to fight the seat as though it was a marginal. I was committed to a busy programme, including three speeches each evening at different villages, as well as a string of question-and-answer sessions with special-interest groups. This was our normal practice. We expected to win the election in Huntingdon, but we never took it for granted and left nothing to chance, working hard for the biggest possible majority.

Our plans were complicated when I was invited to join a number of Central Office press conferences during the campaign. As these took place early in the morning, I would drive to London after my evening speeches and return to the constituency mid-morning. It was exhausting, and sleep was at a premium. But it was exhilarating to see the campaign from the centre. I was at the morning conference a week before polling day on 4 June, ‘wobbly Thursday’, when Margaret – tired and in pain from a tooth infection – was snappy and irritable, and everyone walked on eggshells to avoid provoking an explosion.

It was evident from the underlying atmosphere at Central Office that morning that the relationship between Norman Tebbit, as Party Chairman, and David Young, the Secretary of State for Employment and a leading figure in planning the campaign, was one of mutual distrust. But our private rolling daily opinion poll never blinked, and the election was won comfortably. Division of the anti-Conservative forces gave Mrs Thatcher a reduced, but still substantial majority of 102, although she received only 42 per cent of the poll. It was a stunning third election victory for her.

At Huntingdon I won with a record majority of over twenty-seven thousand, and more than two-thirds of the vote. It was now one of the safest Tory seats in the country. Norma and I returned to Finings to celebrate and ponder the next five years. Neither of us would then have believed that when the party was to defend its majority at the next general election, it would be doing so with me as prime minister.

CHAPTER FIVE Into Cabinet (#ulink_c8eec154-24aa-507f-9fb3-30a814c74da0)

THE DAY AFTER the 1987 election came the startling news that Norman Tebbit was stepping down as party chairman. Although our campaign had been criticised as inept, and rumours abounded that Norman’s relationship with the Prime Minister had deteriorated, this was still a shock. We had just won an election – albeit against an unelectable opposition – and Norman was popular in the party for his robust Conservatism and for the courage with which he had returned to front-line politics after the dreadful injuries he and his wife Margaret had suffered in the bombing of the Grand Hotel in Brighton. He and I were to have our differences in later years, but he was a loss to the government, and I was sorry to see him go. So, despite their reported disagreements, was the Prime Minister, who tried in vain to persuade him to stay.

I was asked to call on Margaret at Downing Street on the Saturday afternoon following the election. My days at Social Security were at an end. Another year, another job. But where next? A sideways move as a minister of state seemed unlikely, since a telephone call from Number 10 would have sufficed to tell me that. I considered the possibilities. I was sure that John Wakeham would be promoted to the Cabinet, leaving a vacancy as chief whip. John MacGregor, too, the Chief Secretary to the Treasury, was bound to be offered his own department. Either of those two vacancies seemed possible for me. As I drove to London, the lunchtime news listed the ministers believed to be leaving the Cabinet. It seemed the reshuffle was going to be a big one.

When I arrived at Number 10 I was shown into the small waiting room on the ground floor near the Cabinet Room. To my surprise the Transport Secretary John Moore was already waiting there, and within a few minutes we were joined by Norman Fowler, the Paymaster General Kenneth Clarke and John MacGregor. Then the Industry Secretary Paul Channon arrived.

One by one we were summoned to learn our fates. As John MacGregor preceded me, I guessed that I was to join the Cabinet as Chief Secretary to the Treasury. This proved to be right. When I was called in to see her the Prime Minister was warm and friendly. She spoke of the importance of the job, adding almost as an afterthought, ‘The Queen is expecting you at the Palace this afternoon so you can join the Privy Council.’ Although membership of the Privy Council is automatic upon joining the Cabinet it is a preferment of some significance. It is coveted more than any other recognition in the Commons, and I was delighted. As I left Number 10 with Norman Fowler (the new Employment Secretary) for the Privy Council the skies opened and the rain pelted down as we huddled under an umbrella. But nothing could have dampened our spirits that day, and the meeting of the Privy Council was a very jolly affair.

Later I learned that I had been right in my guesses about the two jobs that might have been offered to me. The Prime Minister’s original intention, backed by William Whitelaw, was for me to become chief whip; but Nigel Lawson asked for me as chief secretary, and after a tussle he gained Willie’s support and had his way. This meant that I would now join the Cabinet, whereas the chief whip attends Cabinet but is not a member of it.

It is tempting to reflect on how events might have turned out if I had become chief whip. An appointment to that post usually lasts for a whole Parliament. If that had been so in my case, I might never have been foreign secretary, chancellor or prime minister. Instead I would have been chief whip during Margaret’s leadership contest against Michael Heseltine in 1990. I have often wondered if I would have been able to obtain for her the few extra votes that would have enabled her to win on the first ballot. She would then have remained prime minister until the next general election, when the electorate as a whole would have had the chance to judge the government. I believe we would probably have lost that election – but it would have been a more fitting end for a long-serving prime minister than removal by her own colleagues. Moreover, it would never have given rise to the bitterness that has scarred the Conservative Party ever since. Nor would Europe have become such a divisive issue.

But all that lay far ahead, and I was pleased at the job I had been given. The Treasury is the most powerful department in the government, since it not only determines macro-economic policy but controls the purse strings. Macro-economic policy was the prerogative of the Chancellor, Nigel Lawson, but public spending was to be my responsibility as chief secretary.

The chief secretary has one of the lowest profiles of any Cabinet minister, but this is deceptive. For he is the most influential minister in determining the division of the total of public spending – who gets what. This gives him the power, if he wishes, to facilitate new policies or to hold them back. Thus, although the most junior member of the Cabinet, the chief secretary has an authority far greater than the casual observer ever realises. As prime minister I was always very careful who I appointed to the role, and watched very carefully what they did with it.

The Treasury had many of the best officials in Whitehall. My Private Secretary, which in Whitehall parlance means the head of my Private Office, was Jill Rutter, a Treasury high-flyer. She had an extremely sharp brain and an acid sense of humour that spared no one. She had a proper respect for ability at all levels – but none for seniority alone. Jill was fearless, and had a healthy disregard for conventional wisdom. She was a fierce protector of her turf and her minister. An added bonus for me was her love of cricket, for she was a long-standing member of Surrey County Cricket Club. Sometimes we would relax between meetings by catching up with a Test match on television or, since long hours were normal, watching the late-night highlights with other members of my Private Office before leaving the Treasury building.

The most important part of the chief secretary’s year is the public expenditure survey, which begins in the summer when each secretary of state puts in a ‘bid’ for his department’s financing for the next three years. These bids set out the ambitions of the department for the years ahead. Rather as the black widow spider dances an odd quadrille with its partner before finally mating, the public spending round has its own rituals. The bids often contain an unrealistic wish list, and are invariably padded so that the minister can be seen to make ‘concessions’ in head-to-head negotiation with the Treasury.

I arrived at the Treasury to find that the bids for the forthcoming years were very high: for the first year alone they amounted to £6 billion more than the sum previously allocated, which was quite unaffordable. In response – the first part of the ritual – I prepared a paper for Cabinet in late July that set maximum spending levels for the next three years. For the first year, over which the greatest battles are always fought, I recommended that we should hold spending to the level agreed by Cabinet the year before – although I proposed spending increases after that. The paper had three purposes: to gain the collective approval of the Cabinet for the sum total of expenditure that was affordable; to convince the markets that we had a sensible policy; and to emphasise that the Treasury was not an Aladdin’s cave to be ransacked. I was firmly backed by the Prime Minister and the Chancellor, and – as I had done some private canvassing – I received support from other ministers.

More surprising was that some of the ministers who had asked me for the largest increases for their departments were strongly supportive of restricting total expenditure: that stern monetarist Nick Ridley, for one, clearly saw scope for cuts elsewhere, whilst being confident that his own budget at Environment required a great deal more money. Nick was not alone; he was merely the colleague whose bid was most obviously at odds with his own philosophy.

Throughout August, the Treasury raked through each department’s bid, enabling me to identify the weak points to attack when I wrote to ministers challenging their assumptions and costings. All this is ritual foreplay to prepare the ground for the detailed one-to-one negotiations between the chief secretary and the spending ministers at which the expenditure levels are agreed. Every subheading of expenditure is pored over at these bilateral meetings, which drag on for many hours. Several meetings are usually necessary before a conclusion is reached. The bilaterals are revealing. They expose vividly the ability of ministers and their personal commitment to their programmes.

The process represents a sharp learning curve for the chief secretary, who has to be able to challenge not only the expenditure figures but also the policy of every department. This is gruelling, but it offers an insight into Whitehall that is unavailable to any other minister. Years later, as prime minister, the bank of knowledge I built up as chief secretary was immensely useful in giving me an understanding of what lay behind ministerial proposals. I often found that the most important point of policy-making was not what was proposed, but why.

Although my first few months as chief secretary were tough, I felt at home at the Treasury, and my two years in the job were amongst my most enjoyable in government. The amount of detail to be absorbed is formidable, but since I believe that every pound of taxpayers’ money which is spent has to be justified I did not mind that at all. I found that I was easily able to absorb and recall at will a huge amount of detail about public spending, which gave me a tremendous advantage in negotiations with ministers. Nor did I find it difficult to predict accurately how colleagues would couch their arguments: I simply put myself inside their minds and considered what I would do in their place. The volume of work meant that I did not contribute much to macro-economic policy-making, but since Nigel Lawson listened to others only as a prelude to announcing what he had intended to do anyway, this did not much matter. I had no ideological baggage on economic and financial policy, and I admired Nigel’s skills.

Nigel carried the role of chancellor with great self-assurance. He had reached the peak of his authority in government, and no trace of self-doubt ever crossed his mind. He often worked in his study at Number 11 Downing Street rather than at the Treasury, summoning officials and ministers when he needed them. When he did appear at the Treasury it was often for large meetings of all his ministers and senior officials. These he conducted like a professorial seminar. Nigel would pronounce. Comment would be invited. Nigel would adjudicate. Policy was decided. Government was made to seem very simple.

Nigel was supported by an impressive team of officials and ministers. Sir Peter Middleton, the Permanent Secretary, was a sharp Yorkshireman, level-headed and pugnacious to the extent of provoking an argument simply for the intellectual joy of having one. An intensely private man, he was a close friend of Nigel, and was very perceptive about events and people. Robin Butler, the Second Permanent Secretary in charge of public spending, had been Margaret Thatcher’s Principal Private Secretary at Number 10, and knew the Whitehall machine and all its ways. No one was surprised when he leapfrogged over more senior colleagues to become Secretary to the Cabinet and Head of the Civil Service. He was easy-going, helpful and efficient – and one of the most competitive men I have ever met, a fine sportsman who excelled at rugby and cricket. The third of the main figures was Terry Burns, the Economic Adviser. Tousle-haired, youthful, genial and without pomposity or malice, Terry was a man of passionate interests. Life was never boring to him, and he never seemed downcast (except momentarily when his beloved Queen’s Park Rangers were having a string of bad results). He had made his reputation as an economic forecaster for the London Business School.

Amongst the other ministers at the department, I had an amiable but wary relationship with Norman Lamont, the Financial Secretary to the Treasury. The Financial Secretary is number three at the Treasury, and after the election Norman must have hoped for promotion to chief secretary. If my appointment was a setback to him, he gave no outward sign of it, although our conversations were usually guarded. We did not share cheery confidences. The erudite Peter Brooke was the minister of state responsible for VAT and Europe. I had first met him in my days as parliamentary candidate for St Pancras North, and he was always ready with a good-humoured story. The final Commons minister, the Economic Secretary, was Peter Lilley. Previously Nigel’s PPS, Peter was rather shy and withdrawn for a politician, but was highly intelligent, with a fine analytical mind, and sometimes surprisingly waspish. It was a talented team, all of whom were to reach the Cabinet. In the Lords, the able Simon Glenarthur had the difficult task, which he performed admirably, of speaking for all Treasury ministers. I often wished that he too had been in the Commons to supplement the talent available there.

In early September I began the detailed bilateral discussions with ministerial colleagues. The toughest negotiator of them all was Peter Walker, the Secretary of State for Wales. Peter believed in the virtues of public spending, and was determined to use it to the full in the Principality. His general air was of a man who did not care whether he remained in the Cabinet or not, and was not remotely interested in being a team player if that meant making concessions to an economic policy he distrusted.

As a negotiating tactic this was devastating. Peter simply asserted that his bids were the minimum necessary; he could not manage with less; the Prime Minister had promised him the money when she gave him a job he had not asked for; he did not much like the Treasury, because it got in the way of good policy; and so, like it or lump it, he expected us to cough up. Since (apart from his opinion of the Treasury) much of this was true, there was not much that could be done with Peter. It was perhaps fortunate for me that most of the Welsh budget was a fixed proportion of the sums available to English departments for the same responsibilities. Peter’s bids, therefore, were only for small amounts – which made his approach even more infuriating, since in the midst of discussions for much larger sums, they were not worth the argument. He knew this, and his stubbornness was a deliberate tactic. His approach to the Treasury was best summed up by an annotation in my appointments diary which simply read: ‘3.30 Public Expenditure Settlement – Wales (Secretary of State, Dick Turpin).’ Highway robbery was his forte.

Kenneth Baker, the Education Secretary, was the polar opposite of Peter. He would bound in full of enthusiasm, with lots of new ideas, all of which, he assured me, would be hugely popular with the electorate and would guarantee yet another election victory. Ken cared a lot about education, and in Cabinet committees he handled the Prime Minister on the subject better than anyone else I ever saw. As a former Education minister herself, she enjoyed picking holes in his plans, particularly when he was devising changes to the curriculum. It was a game they both enjoyed. ‘That’s absurd,’ she would say. ‘I know which official suggested that.’ Ken would demur, deny that it was that official, make a joke of it, deflect her criticism, and gradually manoeuvre the Prime Minister into a position where he made tiny concessions to her, and she would have appeared graceless to seek more.

It was good spectator sport for the rest of the committee, and I admired the way he performed, but his technique was less effective where the issue was money and not ideas. When detailed questions on cost were put to Ken, he was often poorly briefed. His spending plans were grossly inflated, and it never took long to remove the padding. At the end of our negotiations Ken bounded out as cheerfully as he had come in, but with much less money than he had sought.

Kenneth Clarke, the Health Secretary, simply enjoyed a good argument. It was evident to me why Ken had chosen the law and then politics as a profession. Our meetings always took a long time as we argued points of detail, agreeing the facts but disagreeing about the conclusion. It was good-natured but very time-consuming. Eventually, when we had reached stalemate, I suggested we throw the officials out and do a deal between ourselves. Behind closed doors I told Ken that his bids were outrageous. Rather disarmingly he agreed, but added that if he had frankly admitted it, I would have asked for even more reductions. This, of course, was true. Having agreed that he was asking for too much and I was offering too little, we soon reached an acceptable compromise. We then sat chatting over a drink before re-admitting the officials and announcing the outcome.

The Home Secretary Douglas Hurd was a subtle negotiator who began his meeting with a rather discursive statement setting out all the desirable expenditure he had himself excluded from the bids before he submitted them. ‘All very necessary,’ he would say, ‘and we’ll have to do it one day, but’ – and here he would shake his head sadly – ‘I know there are many demands to be met.’ It was a clever technique, designed to cut off many of the Treasury’s traditional arguments. Douglas was reasonable in manner but tough on substance. He would lean back in his chair, his right ankle across his left knee and an agonised expression on his face if any reduction to his bids was suggested. All this talk of money was obviously distasteful to him. If the Treasury case was good enough he would gradually concede, but eventually he would begin jingling a large bunch of keys in an agitated fashion. The key-jingling was a sign that he had reached his bottom line. Jill Rutter once said to me that Douglas and I would never have finished a negotiation if he had left his keys at home.

The Scottish Secretary Malcolm Rifkind was always difficult, and usually threatened to resign unless he got a better settlement. I once asked him at the beginning of a meeting whether he wanted to threaten to resign now, or to wait until we had finished. ‘I think I’ll wait,’ he grinned, knowing even then he would only settle at the last moment. Scotland was well served by a series of Scottish secretaries who turned public expenditure negotiations into an art form.