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And he has had influential helpers. A few years ago in his Sunday Times column Michael Portillo stated that Gordon Brown ‘has single-handedly delivered the longest period of economic growth in Britain’s industrial history’. At the time Portillo was writing there had been 50 consecutive quarters of growth. This was indeed a record, but 20 of those quarters (and a further eight under inherited Tory spending plans) had occurred under John Major’s government — of which Michael Portillo had been a member. Furthermore, John Major’s growth was solid, whereas we now know that Brown’s was an illusion, fuelled by borrowed money and imported labour.
Nor is John Major given credit for stopping the euro. It is reasonable to praise Gordon Brown for keeping Britain out of the single currency. But Brown as chancellor would never have been able to prevent Tony Blair taking us in but for John Major’s very brave stand at Maastricht in arranging a British opt-out from European Monetary Union. But for that opt-out, we would today have been unable to use any of the weapons which the government has used to fend off recession: quantitative easing, dramatic currency easing and demand management. And yet Major was slammed for that Maastricht Treaty, both at the time and ever since.
John Major’s most enduring achievement, however, concerns public services. There is a myth — it was repeated recently by Gordon Brown — that traffic cone hotlines and the citizens’ charter were the limit of his achievement. However, it is easy to show that his government was stunningly radical when it came to education, health and the welfare state. His educational reforms gave schools autonomy from local authority control, encouraged parents’ right to choose and set head teachers free to run their own schools. In health, John Major introduced the internal market, the purchaser provider split and GP fund-holding.
All of these changes were denounced by Tony Blair. Labour’s 1997 manifesto pledged to ‘restore the NHS as a public service working co-operatively for patients’. Frank Dobson, Labour’s new health secretary, immediately scrapped patient choice and GP fund-holding. Likewise David Blunkett sabotaged grant-maintained schools, ended their financial independence and imposed an array of centrally imposed targets, few of which worked.
After Tony Blair won the 2001 election he finally realised that John Major’s view of the public services had actually been rather visionary after all. So he set about restoring patient choice, brought back GP fund-holding and recreated the internal market. It was too embarrassing to restore grant-maintained schools so they were reincarnated under a new name as ‘trust schools’. John Major’s derided city technology colleges, which he had personally rescued in July 1991, were relaunched as city academies.
So the so-called ‘radicalism’ of Tony Blair’s final few years in office was actually a laborious recreation of the John Major reforms that had been reversed by New Labour in 1997. These ‘Blairite’ reforms have now been put on hold by Gordon Brown — but David Cameron plans to implement them in a truly thoroughgoing way after the election.
Then there were the minor achievements, such as the National Lottery, which has raised £25 billion for good causes. The reason why John Major was able to achieve so much was because — in sharp contrast to Tony Blair and Gordon Brown — he genuinely believed in cabinet government. He left decision-making in the hands of a highly competent collection of ministers — Ken Clarke, Douglas Hurd, Michael Howard, Peter Lilley, Michael Heseltine and the young William Hague. There was no sofa government and no attempt to establish control from the centre, the misconception that has turned New Labour into such a disaster.
Major’s government gathered a reputation for division and there was indeed a rather honourable split over Europe. But there was very little of the hatred, the plotting and distrust between the most senior figures of government over narrow personal matters that has damaged New Labour so much in power. Indeed the most senior members of the cabinet — Major, Clarke, Heseltine, Hurd, Howard — got on pretty well.
The John Major government is remembered as sleazy. But this idea was in part the creation of the brilliant New Labour propaganda machine and in any case Tory sleaze was dwarfed by the systemic New Labour corruption and deceit which has disfigured the last decade. And consider Gulf War One in 1990. Under Major it was well-planned, with limited objectives, a considered exit strategy, and no lying. What a contrast to the Iraq invasion in 2003!
John Major will not go down in history as a great prime minister. He lacked the language and the inner poise and made one reputation-destroying howler — Black Wednesday in 1992, with sterling’s forced eviction from the exchange rate mechanism.
After that he faced a two-pronged attack. On the one hand he was hated by the Thatcherites. On the other hand, New Labour ran a brilliant, though unprincipled, operation to discredit him. It became fashionable to mock John Major by imitating his voice and mannerisms, a trend started by Alastair Campbell when he was political editor of the Daily Mirror. Snobbery was part of it. As a youngish and relatively inexperienced political reporter on the Evening Standard at the time, I am afraid that I swallowed this vindictive analysis and feel very uneasy about it today.
John Major was good at substance, but wretched at spin. New Labour was the opposite. For many years this public relations expertise worked for New Labour. However, over time I believe that John Major will come to be regarded as a more honest, decent and competent prime minister than either Tony Blair or Gordon Brown. He left Britain, as he might himself have remarked, a not-inconsiderably better place than he found it.
Peter Oborne is a columnist for the Daily Mail and an associate editor of the The Spectator.
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