A HIGH-MINDED MORALISER WHO FAILED TO LIVE BY THE STANDARDS HE SET OF OTHERS — SO WHO IS HE TO PREACH TO ANYONE?
DELIvERING his grand address yesterday on the importance of ethics in public affairs, John Major adopted a sternly moralistic tone. Referring to the Partygate shenanigans, he said: ‘Brazen excuses were dreamed up ... Day after day, the public was asked to believe the unbelievable. Ministers were sent out to defend the indefensible – making themselves look gullible or foolish.’
He added with a magisterial flourish: ‘Where governments fall short, candour is the best means of binding up support.’
I’m sorry: what? Who precisely is John Major to lecture anyone about governments ‘falling short’?
His own unlamented premership fell short in virtually every way.
As Lord (Zac) Goldsmith acidly put it yesterday: ‘A stale old corporatist who delivered seven years of autopilot government and a thumping defeat at the polls... and is still struggling to come to terms with the country’s decision to leave the EU. John Major’s intervention has zero to do with Covid rules (or democracy!)’
Quite. So to use Sir John’s own language, let’s remind ourselves just how ‘brazen’ and ‘foolish’ his administration was.
Among the least distinguished prime ministers of the last century, Major presided over a regime beset by scandal, sleaze and hypocrisy.
He combined high-minded moralising – as yesterday’s speech reminded us – with a total failure to live by the standards he demanded of everyone else.
In October 1993, desperate to restart his stuttering administration, he used his speech at Tory conference to launch a campaign based on the traditional Conservative values of family, personal morality and individual responsibility. Within weeks, ‘Back to Basics’ had become a joke: a byword for ministerial corruption and sex-scandals.
Let me remind you how bad it was. By December 1993, just two months after Major’s speech, his environment minister Tim Yeo was exposed for having fathered a child out of wedlock.
Inevitably, Yeo had previously pontificated about the need to cut the number of single parents in society. He was forced to resign.
In February 1994, Stephen Milligan MP was tragically found dead on his kitchen table, having apparently suffocated himself by accident.
Milligan was wearing only a pair of women’s stockings and suspenders; his head was covered and a segment of orange was in his mouth. His friend, the broadcaster Gyles Brandreth, suggested that this was how he had chosen to ‘celebrate’ being promoted to minister in Major’s government.
Days later, married father-ofthree and Methodist lay preacher Hartley Booth MP was forced to resign over his relationship with a young woman barely half his age. Rather ungallantly, he insisted that she had ‘seduced [him] into kissing and cuddling’. Piers Merchant MP was exposed for having an affair with a teenage nightclub hostess. A married man, he too was forced to resign after it emerged he had also had an affair with his parliamentary researcher.
Then there was David Mellor MP, who enjoyed some extra-marital ministerial romps with actress Antonia de Sancha – who had played a one-legged prostitute in a film called The Pieman.
Few were as priapic as Major’s transport minister Steven Norris, who conducted affairs with three different women at the same time, in addition to having had two previous mistresses. This led to the infamous newspaper headline: ‘YES, YES, YES, YES, YES, MINISTER!!’
There was, too, a succession of married MPs in Major’s government caught by the Press in gay ‘sting’ operations.
In at least two cases, owing to the fact that the homosexual age of consent was 21 back then, these MPs were breaking the law by conducting these relationships.
But the biggest back-to-basics hypocrite of all, of course, was Sir John himself, who it eventually emerged had conducted a steamy affair between 1984 and 1988 with his comely ministerial colleague Edwina Currie (both were married at the time).
If this affair had come to light when he was Prime Minister, Major the Moraliser would surely have had to resign. As it was, it took until 2002 for the details to come to light, when Currie published a bonk-busting memoir.
He was an ‘experienced lover’, she breathed of her spectacled paramour, who was often sketched by political cartoonists with his shirt tucked into his underpants.
It was a cruel betrayal of Major’s devoted wife Norma, the mother of his two children, who he had married in 1970 and who has, to this day, never spoken about her hurt.
As Major lectured the public yesterday on the need for ‘selfrestraint by the powerful’ and ‘truth’ in politics, did he think we that were all suffering from collective amnesia?
But put these tawdry sex scandals aside – and consider his frankly abysmal record as Prime Minister.
The numbers speak for themselves. Major inherited a majority of 102 seats from Mrs Thatcher when she handed him the reins in 1990. Two years later, when the voters were first asked what they thought of him, he saw this tally slashed to 21. And in 1997, Major lost in a landslide to Labour’s Tony Blair – who thundered into Downing Street with a majority of 179.
The most shameful stain on his record was surely the cash-forquestions scandal, in which Tory MPs were exposed pocketing retainers from lobbyists to ask favourable questions in Parliament. The ‘brown envelope stuffed with cash’ became the metaphor that encapsulated his government.
Tim Smith MP was deselected after trousering £25,000 for asking questions on behalf of then-Harrods boss Mohamed Al-Fayed. Junior minister Neil Hamilton was bankrupted after unsuccessfully fighting off allegations – which he still denies – that he too took Fayed’s money.
Jonathan Aitken quit Major’s Cabinet in 1995 to fight a court battle against a newspaper that had alleged he had links with foreign arms dealers.
Aitken lost – and went to prison for perjury. Westminster had not seen such political disintegration since Lord North and the loss of the American colonies.
But Major’s record was also characterised by serious economic mismanagement. In 1992, just months after he had scraped back into Downing Street, Britain was humiliatingly bundled out of the Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM), in what became known as ‘Black Wednesday’.
The madness of yoking the currencies of vastly different European countries together had been clear to many economists – and Mrs Thatcher understandably had reservations about it (although Major, as her chancellor, helped convince her to sign Britain up to the ERM in 1990).
In the carnage of Black Wednesday, interest rates soared by 5 per cent in a single day to 15 per cent, hammering millions with mortgages and other debts.
Major’s privatisation of British Rail, meanwhile, was a botched sell-off for which customers are still paying today. Our Edwardian train network was once the envy of the world. Today we have some of the most overcrowded and expensive trains in Europe, and labour under a Byzantine ticketing and franchise system.
Even Major’s smaller legislative efforts often descended into farce. Do you remember the ludicrous ‘Cones Hotline’, set up in 1992 in a calamitous effort to tackle motorway congestion?
This was meant to be part of a grand – if woolly – ‘citizens’ charter’ to establish better public services. But it became an unwieldy telephone-answering machine set up at public expense, at which any
Back to Basics was a byword for ministerial corruption
His affair with his married colleague was a cruel betrayal of his devoted wife Norma
The national embarrassment of the Cones Hotline
number of cranks and moaners would rant.
The true scale of this national embarrassment became clear when it emerged that out of 17,000 calls to the service, only five resulted in any cones actually being removed from the motorway.
Yes, Mrs Thatcher was always going to be a hard act to follow. And as Tony Blair knows, it’s easier to sweep to power when voters have had enough of incumbent rulers than it is to keep a jaded electorate on side.
But Major nevertheless bears a weight of blame for what succeeded him: 13 long years of Labour rule, and a reshaping of the country along high-tax, statist lines that continues to this day.
Nor did he behave in a remotely statesmanlike fashion after leaving office. Instead, he showed how little he truly cared for the party he once led by joining forces with Blair himself to try to overturn Brexit. Brexiteers, Major notoriously said, ‘will never be forgotten nor forgiven’.
Little wonder that he chose to deliver his pompous address yesterday at the Institute for Government: the think-tank chaired by millionaire Labour donor Lord Sainsbury of Turville, a noted Europhile himself.
It is a truly sorry record. And it prompts one obvious question: why on earth would anyone listen to a word John Major has to say?