“I adore Clinton; you know, naughty but nice with a very sexy voice,” said Elizabeth Hurley in a recent interview with the Sunday Times Style magazine. “John Major was terribly dry and funny in the flesh too.”
Hurley has made a lot of mistakes in her life. She dated Hugh Grant, she starred in Bedazzled and she wore a dress held together by giant safety-pins. But her assessment of the former British Prime Minister, when I met him this Wednesday at the Union, was disconcertingly accurate.
It goes without saying that he’s not the most popular, the most memorable or the most sexy of British politicians – let alone former leaders. When you google his name, only the first few results actually link to John Major, Prime Minister from 1990 to 1997. From then on in he’s mixed up with John Major Jenkins, ‘ a leading independent researcher on ancient Mesoamerican cosmology’.
When I called round PPE-studying friends as part of my recon before his evening speech, the most certain thing they could tell me was, “He’s the one after Thatcher but before Blair.” For a generation whose political consciousness came into being one May morning in 1997 when it bounded down the stairs in New Labour-red pyjamas to ask, “Mummy, did Tony win?” (just me?) Major is a sort of political blind spot. Famously wet and wimpy – “What I don’t understand…is why such a complete wimp like me keeps winning everything” is one of his more famous quotes – it’s hard even to get through a youtube video of one of his speeches.
In person though, speaking to the crowd at the Union and one-on-one at drinks after, he is every bit as dry and funny as Liz Hurley would have us believe. And he’s not just out on the after-dinner speech circuit either. He’s campaigning for Cameron’s Tories, and angrier with Gordon Brown’s government that you would ever expect. Having famously promised that in fifty years time, Britain would still be “the country of long shadows on cricket grounds, warm beer, invincible green suburbs,” you would imagine John Major – Sir John as of 2005 – would be devoting his retirement to sipping said warm beer and bowling with an amateur team on said cricket grounds. Not a bit. Well, maybe a little; at least one cricketing story makes it in to his talk. But for the moment his mission is undeniably to turn the country blue again.
In the Q&A following his speech, one of the questions picks him up on his “theatrical” denunciation of the last eleven years of Labour government.
“Theatrical?” he says to me over a glass of wine later, “of course it was theatrical. My father was a trapeze artist”.
The speech begins on a light note, calling the G7 “one of the most useless meetings God ever devised”, before moving on to an anecdote about his argument with Mikhael Gorbachev over whose nation was the most patient. Things soon get more serious, though. “We’ll find out in nine days’ time how patient the British nation is,” he says, “Whether it’s had enough of a government who is prepared to comprehensively dismiss them, and elect in turn a government that can take decisions to put right what Labour put wrong”.
He talks about the state of the Treasury when he handed over to Blair’s government in 1997, and claims that it was in the best form any incoming government had found it since the First World War. “I have to tell you Gordon Brown wasn’t very impressed: ‘What do you want me to do?’, he said, ‘Send a letter of thanks?’ Well if he did it hasn’t arrived.” Beat. “I knew I should have privatised the post office”.
His voice is soft and easy to listen to, a bit like the narrator of Noggin the Nog, even when delivering the most damning of his verdicts on Labour’s years of rule. “It cannot surely be a coincidence that every single Labour government this country has ever been cursed with has left behind a wrecked economy and masses of debt. They come in when the coffers are full and they leave when the coffers are empty…New Labour was a fraud from the very start. The political equivalent of pyramid selling. And Gordon has just run off with our money.”
He paints such a grim picture of the country – the state of the economy, the erosion of civil liberties, the moral vacuum at the heart of New Labour – it’s almost enough to induce a ‘I’ve never voted Tory before, but…’ moment in even the most die hard Labour supporters.
But then, there are a couple of reminders of the less desirable side of his own party. When he lays into the hollowness of New Labour’s political slogans – “‘Whiter than white’, well, that didn’t stand the test of time. ‘Tough on Crime’…All of them with the backbone of a marshmallow” – it’s hard not to be reminded of his own ‘Back to Basics’ campaign which so spectacularly backfired on his own cabinet, the culmination of which was the revelation of his own affair with Edwina Currie (speaking later this term at the Oxford Union. Where else, indeed?).
He also attacks the media image of the Conservative party. It’s certainly true that the ‘Tory Toff’ image could not be further from his own story, which documents the rise from Brixton boy, “living in near slum poverty in the middle of a large inner city…in two rooms as a family of five” to leader of the country, and those of many others in his party. But the Oxford location of the speech provides an inconvenient reminder of Cameron’s Bullingdon days, and the differences between the party’s current and former leaders, not to mention the rest of the would-be Tory shadow cabinet.
As I find out after the speech, Major believes he was treated differently as Prime Minister because of his University of Life- rather than University of Oxford-education; never by the political classes, but rather by the media. “Oh, Oxford does make a difference, absolutely. It’s more about attitude than ability, about having the confidence to run the country. I was never treated differently by the party; sometimes by the media, having been to Westminster and Oxford themselves, who couldn’t understand why a boy who left school at fifteen is Prime Minister”.
John Major in the flesh is the sort of person you can imagine voting for. It shouldn’t be surprising, considering he spent seven years running the country, but somehow it is.
He says he knows his place though. When I ask how much input he has in the current Conservative campaign, he tells me he’s still in contact with David Cameron but rarely offers advice on election tactics. “I don’t offer advice unless anyone asks for it, though I give it if it’s needed,” he says. “It’s a different world now, anyway”.
