I admire him, but with these rancid attacks on Brexit, John Major has stooped lower than any former PM

THOUGH it may be a cliche to say revenge is a dish best served cold, no modern politician has taken this maxim to heart more closely than John Major.

For more than 20 years, he has brooded obsessively on the insults heaped upon him by opponents within his own party when he was Tory prime minister in succession to Margaret Thatcher in the Nineties.

In fact, Major is known to blame the disloyalty of the Conservative Right-wing, and in particular Eurosceptics opposed to his support for the 1992 Maastricht Treaty — which created the modern EU — for wrecking his entire premiership.

For well over a decade after leaving office following Tony Blair’s landslide election victory of 1997, Major kept his resentment largely to himself.

Only his intimate circle of friends were fully aware of his private bitterness.

Venomous

Last weekend, he finally chose to share this bitterness with the world. He went on The Andrew Marr Show to launch a poisonous, apparently unprovoked, and deeply demeaning personal attack on Boris Johnson and other leading members of the Vote Leave campaign.

Major defined their tactics as deceitful, depressing, awful and ‘verging on the squalid’.

He told viewers that Michael Gove wanted to sell off the NHS, that Boris Johnson had plans to charge for health services, while Iain Duncan Smith wanted to dump the British system of social welfare. (Major has a special loathing for Mr Duncan Smith, who led the Maastricht rebels.)

The NHS is about as safe with them, he told Andrew Marr, as a pet hamster would be with a hungry python.

He reserved some of his most venomous criticisms for Boris Johnson, whom he dismissed as a mere ‘court jester’, before accusing him of disloyalty.

This was surprising as many, including me, had come to view Sir John Major with fondness, and to know that in private he can be a kind and decent person.

That is why it is so disappointing that he did not engage with Johnson, Gove and other opponents on issues of policy when he went on Marr. Major went for the man and not the ball. Instead of reasoned argument, he resorted to abuse and denigration. It may be harsh, but no former prime minister has stooped as low as Major did last weekend.

It was especially noticeable that Johnson, who was in the BBC studio at the same time, refused to descend to Major’s level. On the contrary, Boris was generous and gracious, and stuck to the issues.

I am in no doubt that John Major’s attack on Johnson is part of a deliberate strategy. For the Remainers know very well that they are losing ground.

Yesterday, it emerged bookmakers are cutting the odds on a referendum win for Brexit. And as was reported yesterday, three new polls all put the Vote Leave campaign ahead.

So, in increasing desperation, the Remain side is descending to rancid abuse. It is well known inside Westminster that John Major never says anything without clearing his words first with 10 Downing Street. In short, he was acting under instructions from David Cameron and George Osborne to conduct himself as an attack dog.

As someone who has often praised Major in the past, and publicly stood up for him in the face of unfair criticism, this pains me. He has done significant damage to his reputation. His remarks were cheap, and not befitting a former leader of a great political party.

So why was Major ready to risk his reputation in this way? The answer, I have learned, is that this was not a one- off attack but part of a broader strategy. For he shares with David Cameron and George Osborne a determination to reshape the Conservative Party.

I have heard it said in private conversations that they want to marginalise the traditional Conservative Right-wing.

And those who they cannot drive to the margins they want to destroy outright.

The overriding objective is the creation of a new, politically sanitised pro-European Tory Party. If that disenfranchises millions of traditional Conservative supporters, well, the attitude of Cameron and Osborne is so much the better.

In the bitter mind of John Major, it appears there is no room in such a party for opponents of the EU. This is part of the reason why he seems to want to see the destruction of Johnson’s career.

But there is more personal business to be attended to. When he was prime minister, Major notoriously raged against those ministers described by him as anti-Europe ‘bastards’, who he believed were undermining his premiership.

It is no coincidence that three out of the four ‘ bastards’ — Michael Howard, John Redwood and Peter Lilley — are all senior members of the Vote Leave campaign. (The fourth, Michael Portillo, is no longer in politics and has instead become a TV personality.)

Even though neither Johnson nor Gove were MPs in the Nineties, Major sees them as the modern equivalents of bastards and gives the impression he wants them to be destroyed, too. So Major’s unwarranted attack on Johnson, Gove and others last weekend was, in fact, unfinished business.

If it is revenge he wants, he may well get it. If Britain votes to stay in the EU in two weeks’ time, there will be political bloodshed at Westminster on a scale not seen for many years.

Reprisals

If that scenario comes to pass, then these vicious attacks will come to be seen as the start of a wave of reprisals and recriminations being plotted by Tory pro-Europeans.

I have some sympathy with John Major’s view that he was let down by senior colleagues during his premiership. I also believe that he had more achievements as prime minister than his critics ever admitted.

He did, after all, eventually pass on a booming economy to his successor in Downing Street, Tony Blair. He handled the first Gulf War with aplomb.

He won the 1992 election with more votes than any other prime minister before or since.

And most important of all, the Northern Ireland peace process — which led to the end of the Troubles — began on his watch.

Yet he will surely not go down in history as a great statesman, and such successes must be measured against the failures, not least of which was his inability to secure the Tory legacy in government.

Critics are also entitled to say that Major has a nerve to come out fighting now over Europe.

After all, he was the man who, against the better judgment of Mrs Thatcher, took Britain into the ERM — a fixed exchange rate system which was a forerunner to the euro.

This led to a deep recession and the eventual national shame of Black Wednesday in September 1992, when sterling was evicted from the ERM.

Disaster

Although this was a bitter humiliation for Major — one from which his premiership never truly recovered — it led, with the lower pound, to a remarkably sustained recovery in the British economy.

As an assiduous student of political history, John Major should be the first to realise that the Tory Party has always been a grand coalition between rival interests: town and country, Right and Left, North and South, traditional and modern.

No Tory leader in his or her right mind would seek to eliminate one or another faction, which is why this policy of vengeance Major appears to be pursuing is utterly mistaken.

Indeed, he is old enough to know that the task of any party grandee is to strike a balance between the rival elements of the party.

Yes, Gove and Johnson have ranged themselves against Cameron on the issue of British membership of the EU.

But, crucially, they have also made it clear that if Britain votes for Remain, they will loyally and unconditionally support Mr Cameron. This position is not merely brave, it is also patriotic.

Without Gove and Johnson, no front-rank politician would be available to express the clear views held by probably half the population, who feel deep reservations about the EU.

Without them — whatever John Major might say — these voters would effectively be unrepresented in the most senior reaches of the political class, and that would be a disaster for democracy. It would also be a disaster for Britain.