The interview with Sir John Major broadcast by BBC Newsnight on 1 May 2026.
Matt Chorley: Sir John Major was born on 29 March 1943 to Gwen, a librarian and part-time dance teacher, and Tom Major-Ball, a former trapeze artist and music hall performer who later ran a successful garden ornaments business. Young John underperformed at school in Brixton, leaving with just three O-Levels. But a chance meeting with his local MP led him into politics. He became a Conservative MP in Margaret Thatcher’s 1979 landslide victory, then rose through the ranks pretty quickly to become first Foreign Secretary and then Chancellor. Within 15 months of taking his first great office of state, he reached the greatest, replacing Margaret Thatcher as Prime Minister in November 1990 at the age of 47. He went on to win the 1992 election with the most votes ever recorded for a British political party before losing to Tony Blair’s New Labour landslide in 1997.
I’m delighted Sir John joins me now. It’s great to see you. Thank you. Can you take us back to that church fete, the turning point, it seems, the moment where you discovered politics?
Sir John Major: Well, I discovered it before that. I read a lot of history and politics always fascinated me. I remember the church fete very well. The vicar was a delightful man. So was his daughter. We were friends. I was at the church fete and the local Labour Member of Parliament, Colonel Lipton, Marcus Lipton, who had been there since 1945, attended every church fete in the constituency. I don’t think church fetes were legitimate unless Marcus was there.
He talked to me and we talked about politics. He must have realised that I naturally moved to the right of centre rather than the left of centre. But he saw I was interested and he kindly offered me some seats in the gallery in order to watch Parliament in session. I did that and I saw a small part of a very boring part of the year really, but not for me. I was thrilled. It was the debate on the Budget in the mid-1950s and I saw on the benches Iain Macleod, Harold Macmillan was there, Rab Butler was there for a brief time. When I walked into that building, it reached out and grabbed me. When I left, I thought, this is where I wish to be, and my mind never moved away from that.
Matt Chorley: It didn’t focus you on your schoolwork, though. You clearly didn’t think, “I need to knuckle down if I want to get into the House of Commons.” In fact, I was looking, you didn’t do all that well at school. You were one of only eight Prime Ministers ever not to go to university, a grammar school boy, not privately educated. Do you think that now we’d call that a great backstory, but did you feel like that held you back in your pursuit of getting into politics?
Sir John Major: Of course it did. Absolutely. And it was very stupid. The background to that is not straightforward. My father was 65 when I was born. When I was 10 or 11 and went to Rutlish, having passed the 11-plus, he was very sick and also nearly blind with cataracts. He had lost all our money. We didn’t have much, but what we had he had lost in a business venture. So we moved from a bungalow in Worcester Park to two rooms, four storeys up, in an old Victorian house in Brixton. That is where we lived.
Matt Chorley: Is it still there?
Sir John Major: It is. It’s still there. It’s hardly changed. We lived in just the two rooms. There was nowhere there to study. They insisted that I stayed at Rutlish, which was at Wimbledon, so I had to travel back and forth from Brixton to Wimbledon every day. I was pretty rebellious at school. I didn’t like it. I wasn’t comfortable there. I felt alienated by life. It was extremely stupid. So I just didn’t work, except at the things that interested me, which were mainly history and English. The result of that was a lamentable record at school and the need to get up at 05.00 each morning after I left school aged 16, studying, taking more O levels and a banking degree and other matters.
Matt Chorley: These days, the House of Commons is very different to the House of Commons that you entered. Fewer trade unionists in the Labour Party, fewer business people in the Conservative Party and so on. A lot has changed. Do you think that has changed for the better?
Sir John Major: No, I don’t. I certainly don’t. If you take both parties, if you look at the Labour Party, and I have no animosity against the Labour Party. I grew up in a Labour area. I didn’t agree with their policies, but I saw decent men trying to do a decent job on Lambeth Council.
I looked at the Labour Party when I got into the House of Commons and there were lots of ordinary, everyday people, people without money, without privilege, working-class people who really knew their constituents. They may not have got degrees in English, but my goodness, they knew how their constituents lived. They cared about that and they represented that in the House of Commons. That doesn’t happen in the Labour Party now. They are much younger, much better educated and, in my judgement, much less close to their constituents than their predecessors were.
You can see it on the Conservative side. Where are the businessmen? Where are the soldiers? Where are the people who would have been a staple part of the party in the 1950s, 60s and 70s? They are very sparse now on the Conservative benches. There has been a change in nature and I think that is partly because of the way in which politics is disregarded by so many people these days. Many of the people who would be a very happy addition to Parliament simply will not contemplate going into politics. I hear that theme again and again and again. There are many reasons for it, which we both know and I think the whole world knows, but it is a loss to Parliament in my view.
Matt Chorley: Would the John Major of when you first went into politics, from your background and experience, consider going into politics now?
Sir John Major: I couldn’t not do so. I am out of politics now and I had no regrets about leaving politics when I was in my early 50s. No regrets whatsoever. But there are moments when I see things happening and I wish I was still there, because I would have a voice to point out things that I had seen being done before and I know they went wrong. Experience and a long memory, an historic memory, in Parliament is very useful. It can stop many mistakes being made. So there are moments when I wish I was back in politics, but they are fleeting moments and they are entirely overridden by the fact I couldn’t take the divorce if I were still in politics.
Matt Chorley: Norma would have something to say?
Sir John Major: Norma would have something to say. And so would my children.
Matt Chorley: Let’s talk about this. You become an MP and most people, when they become an MP, even if they only say it to themselves at night, probably privately harbour the idea that one day they might be called upon to become Prime Minister. But it happens to you in 1990. The Conservatives had been trailing in the polls for months. Geoffrey Howe’s devastating speech to Margaret Thatcher leads to Michael Heseltine’s challenge. You, though, Sir John, miss much of the drama because for some time you had been nursing a painful wisdom tooth and you were under the dentist’s anaesthetic while everyone else was plotting. Yet you wake up, you are coming round from the anaesthetic and the conversation almost immediately turns, with Norma and your daughter Elizabeth, to the prospect of you possibly throwing your hat in the ring. Was it the drugs?
Sir John Major: Well, you may say so. Others may have wished so. No, it wasn’t. The tooth has become a subject of myth over many years, with people saying he didn’t have a tooth problem at all, he was just getting out of the way and plotting, which is entirely absurd. If anyone would care to go to the hospital in Essex, I had the wisdom tooth out under full anaesthetic. It was an abscess under a wisdom tooth that I had been nursing for a couple of months. I had a hospital appointment. I wasn’t going to cancel it. I had suffered from that enough. I didn’t anticipate, frankly, the degree of drama with Michael’s challenge to Margaret.
But when Margaret decided she wasn’t going to stand, I was approached by a lot of people to see whether I would stand. I hadn’t been contemplating it. I can honestly say that. My daughter was coming up to A levels, my son to O levels. I had just got the job I really wanted in politics, which was Chancellor. I can honestly say, hand on heart, that I was not contemplating being Prime Minister.
But I was approached by a number of people. I then learned that some people had been canvassing on my behalf. I said to my parliamentary private secretary, “Look, I don’t know how many votes. I don’t want to humiliate myself by getting a few votes.” He was a very good listener, one of those rare politicians who listens rather than talks, and he said, “Well, I think I can guarantee you 150 votes if you stand. Dare you say no to that?” I couldn’t really.
I remembered the old Iain Macleod maxim. It was Macleod as much as any individual politician who took me into politics. He was a magnificent orator, not just in how he spoke but what he said. He once said, “If the ball comes out of the ruck, you grab it. It may never come out again.” That was pretty much how I felt. I was confident that I wasn’t going to be humiliated, so I decided I would stand.
Matt Chorley: You write in your memoirs that for large parts of that period, actually right up until almost the moment you won, you were stuffed with painkillers. It was an extraordinary moment, with you dealing with this pain in your mouth while each day getting closer to becoming Prime Minister.
Sir John Major: Yes. The campaign only lasted a week and it was the best-natured campaign I think I have seen in all my years in politics, between Michael Heseltine, Douglas Hurd and myself. We all knew one another extremely well. I was particularly close to Douglas Hurd. I didn’t know Michael quite so well. It only lasted a week.
As the campaign began, the painkillers were winning over the pain quite comfortably, so we sailed through the week’s campaigning. It wasn’t a difficult week of campaigning because we weren’t in the business of slagging off one another. We had worked together in the past, we would work together in the future. Whatever had happened, the three of us would have been together in the Cabinet. So it was a very good-natured campaign and it went quickly.
Matt Chorley: Michael Heseltine has, of course, concluded that he who wields the knife doesn’t wear the crown. If you are the person who leaps first, you end up not getting the top job. Do you think he is right about that? Are there lessons for today?
Sir John Major: I’m not entirely sure about that. Lloyd George might argue to the contrary, and so might others. I think it can be a disadvantage. It depends on the nature of the relationship between the departing Prime Minister and the wielder of the knife.
Matt Chorley: Tell me about that moment when you become Prime Minister. You go to the Palace. You had obviously been into Number 10 before, but it is very different going as a minister than it is as Prime Minister. What is going through your mind during the drive?
Sir John Major: Several things really. Firstly, I wondered how this ceremony goes. Does kissing hands mean literally? It doesn’t. It means figuratively. What exactly are we going to talk about? So I was thinking about the Queen and how that would work out.
A different compartment of my mind was thinking about what I was going to say when I got back to the doorstep. That was certainly occupying my mind. Two other things were occupying my mind. A new Prime Minister within two years of an election: we were going to have to have some Cabinet changes, and that was going to be awkward. I had only been in a Cabinet for three years. I was younger than most of the Cabinet. I had been there less time than most of the Cabinet. I was going to have to say to very senior people who had been there much longer than me that it was time to go and to bring some new blood into the Cabinet. Nobody likes destroying someone’s career. Only sadists like that.
Beyond that, I was very conscious of the problems we faced. You touched on some of them. The party was deeply split on the European Union, deeply. I felt as though I was standing on either side of a widening chasm. The poll tax was still around and had to be destroyed. Michael Heseltine had to come back into the Cabinet. Those last two points were bound inevitably to upset Margaret Thatcher: her poll tax, I was going to have to abolish it; and her assassin, as she saw Michael, was going to have to come into the Cabinet. So one could see immediately that there were going to be problems that lay ahead. It was only a short ride from Downing Street to Buckingham Palace, but I remember very plainly, almost as though different components of the mind were thinking of these things.
Matt Chorley: It is often said that being Prime Minister is a lonely job because so few people have been there and done it. When you were there, still alive were former Prime Ministers Margaret Thatcher, Jim Callaghan, Harold Wilson, Ted Heath and Alec Douglas-Home. Were you able to reach out? Clearly the relationship with Margaret was difficult because of the circumstances of you becoming Prime Minister. Is there a gang of former Prime Ministers who all talk to each other?
Sir John Major: I had no difficulty with the other Prime Ministers at all. The one who from time to time was most helpful was Jim Callaghan, who had a similar background to me and understood the difficulties. He understood the restraints in 1990s society, and from time to time he was very helpful. Harold Wilson by then was clearly ill, and when I talked to him we met in the corridors and discussed Huddersfield Town Football Club, of which Harold was a tremendous supporter.
So I had no difficulties there. When I met Margaret, there was never any difficulty. The first time I met her was at a by-election in 1978 in Berwick and East Lothian, which we lost. I was very impressed, because it was thought we were going to win the by-election. She had been there for a morning and came in and talked to me just after lunch, and she knew we were going to lose it. Her sensitive political antennae had grasped the fact that it wasn’t right, and I was hugely impressed by that.
I had a very good relationship with her. We had a furious fight when I was a young whip. We disagreed severely about something and everyone thought my career was over. The next day she came and sat next to me on the bench and said, “Well, we’d better regroup and discuss these matters again.” Three weeks later she gave me a job in government. I remember her saying to me when she gave it to me, “It’s the job I started with. If you learn about social security, you’ll be better equipped than most of the parliamentary party for the future.”
Matt Chorley: You mentioned that when you became Prime Minister, you knew there was a general election certainly within two years. In that election in 1992, there was an expectation that Labour were going to win it under Neil Kinnock.
Sir John Major: More than an expectation. It was almost written into the stars.
Matt Chorley: What was it for you? There has been endless discussion: was it the Sheffield rally, was it the soapbox? What was it for you?
Sir John Major: I never quite agreed with the way the opinion polls were going all the way through the campaign. It may simply have been my naivety, but everywhere I went I got a very large and warm welcome. Everywhere. There was no hostility. I was surprised about that. We had been in power for 11 years and people were plainly tired of the problems over the poll tax and Europe, and yet there was an immensely warm reception everywhere I went.
So I had this blind faith that, having come from where I did to where I was, it wasn’t going to end that quickly. I thought throughout the campaign that we would win. We had a very large lead in votes, you may recall. It was only a slender lead of 21 in seats, but we had a seven per cent lead in votes. We should have had a majority of 70 or so if the votes had been distributed, but of course they weren’t.
Matt Chorley: The record for any party in a general election still stands. Given the way our politics is going, with more and more parties, do you think that record will ever be broken?
Sir John Major: Ever is a long time. But I don’t think it is going to be broken in the near future, because there is going to be a greater dispersal of votes, which raises a whole series of other questions.
Matt Chorley: Soon after that 1992 election you discussed with Chris Patten the idea that you had stretched the elastic and defied expectations. You then spend the next five years assuming that you wouldn’t win in 1997. I wondered whether it would be better for governments if they behaved like they weren’t going to win and did what they thought was right by the country, rather than chasing percentage points in the polls.
Sir John Major: There was a bit of that. It sounds rather gallant to say you proceed entirely on that basis. Of course we wanted to win the election. But we managed to find a way of losing it quite comprehensively, and we had a lot of assistance from my colleagues in doing so.
For Europe, there was a changing of the guard in 1992. The elderly members who had been in the war or soon after and in the services were very pro-European in the Conservative Party because they never wanted to see a European war again. A lot of them retired in 1992 and were replaced by much younger and more recently baked Conservatives who had a much more Eurosceptic view. So the huge majority for Europe in the Conservative Party that existed in 1991 had gone in 1992. We faced a completely different parliamentary party. Although we had a majority of 21 nominally, on European matters we barely had a majority at all. Very soon, with by-elections, that bare majority was whittled away.
Matt Chorley: Was it then, in 1992, that the seeds of Brexit were sown in that generational shift in the Conservative Party?
Sir John Major: They were there before. Going right back to Enoch Powell and others, there were people who were, let me say, unenthusiastic, which would be a kind way of putting it, about Europe. But it was in the 1990s that the numbers began to grow. They began to grow because of opposition to the Maastricht Treaty, and that was very odd. You may say, why is it odd? Because the Maastricht Treaty did all sorts of extraordinary things, but every one of those things was actually preordained in the 1986 Single European Act. We had signed up to a whole range of things that were in the Maastricht Treaty, and the very people who had signed up to that treaty now opposed it, and opposed it violently. The new members followed them, and they became more and more of a thorn in the side.
Matt Chorley: In 1993, you were caught on camera calling some of your Eurosceptic Cabinet ministers “bastards”. Do you have any regrets about that?
Sir John Major: I remember that very well. It was a BBC feed that was left on when I was speaking privately to a single person, and the feed crept under the door and they chose to use it. Of course I shouldn’t have said that. My only excuse is that it was true.
Matt Chorley: As the pressure built over time and you faced more criticism, in 1995 you pushed what many thought was the nuclear button and challenged your opponents to put up or shut up. One of our listeners, Mike, got in touch and said, “My question to John Major would be: what would you do if you were in Keir Starmer’s shoes, assuming local elections are bad as well? Would you advise doing what you did, put up or shut up, or is this a case of different party, different circumstances, different times?”
Sir John Major: I think the circumstances are very different and the times are very different. Enough has been said by enough people about that particular issue. I don’t really wish to add to it.
Matt Chorley: Did you think you would win when you did that back in the 1990s?
Sir John Major: I wasn’t sure. I was prepared for the fact that I might have to resign. I didn’t think I was going to be defeated in the ballot, but I had put in a sealed envelope the number of votes I had to have in order, in my mind, to credibly stay. We exceeded that number by three votes. So it was very close. Four votes less and I would have resigned.
Matt Chorley: When you weren’t dealing with your own MPs, you were dealing with Tony Blair in the latter stages across the despatch box. Prime Minister’s Questions is the part of politics that most people see on the news, and he was pretty remorseless to you during PMQs. “I lead my party. He follows his.” Calling it “weak, weak, weak”. Did any part of you enjoy Prime Minister’s Questions?
Sir John Major: It was a very good line. I don’t know who wrote it for Tony, but it was extremely good. If I were in his position, I might have done exactly the same thing, because I was in a position where, whatever I did, half the party would disagree with it. I was trying to bring the party together. My fear from the moment I became Prime Minister was that the European issue could break the Conservative Party apart, as free trade had done in the past. That was very inhibiting as to what you could do, and it provided Tony with that opening.
Matt Chorley: You also faced a lot of hostility from the media during that period.
Sir John Major: Surely not.
Matt Chorley: It is said, and I have interviewed people who worked with you at the time, that there was a feeling among some that you focused too much on the media, that you read the papers too closely. With the benefit of hindsight, do you think they were right?
Sir John Major: Possibly. But it’s difficult to know what you’re facing unless you hear about it and read about it. It is very easy to say. I seem to recall it was Franklin Roosevelt who read 18 newspapers a day, something of that sort. Yes, I suppose you could say I wasted too much time reading things that were unnecessary, but you needed to be prepared. If you are suddenly asked a question and you don’t know why the question has come, you could be in a very difficult situation.
Senior politicians face that today with social media. They may be going around the country, they’ll be stopped, they’ll be asked a question about an event that has happened on the other side of the world, and they don’t know of the event. Sometimes they are foolish enough to commit themselves and get themselves into a great deal of difficulty.
Matt Chorley: I was thinking about the way that everything has sped up, rolling news and then social media. Thinking of a drama like Black Wednesday, do you think you could have survived Black Wednesday in a world of social media, with the sort of frenzy that people whip themselves up into?
Sir John Major: It could hardly have been worse if social media had been there. There is a great deal behind that. Many of the myths in it still survive, but it was extremely difficult. It lingered a long time and it marked us.
There were two things about Black Wednesday really. Firstly, when we were forced out of the Exchange Rate Mechanism after a market turmoil that began in northern Europe, not with us, and injudicious remarks by the governor of the Bundesbank led them to concentrate on sterling, which was very unhelpful indeed.
When we were forced out of the Exchange Rate Mechanism, I was already in discussion with the policy unit about how we could leave it, because its purpose had been to bring down inflation, and it had done that. Many people hated the ERM because they thought it was a stepping stone to the euro and that we were going to join the single currency. That was never going to happen while I was there. I wasn’t going to join the single currency. We weren’t ready for it. Parliament wouldn’t have accepted it and I didn’t like it anyway.
We went into the Exchange Rate Mechanism because we had failed to get inflation down with every other policy. We and our predecessors, in Margaret’s time, in Ted’s time, in Jim Callaghan’s time, in Harold Wilson’s time, had seen inflation come back again and again and destroy parties. I was determined that we would stick with the ERM until we had beaten inflation. And we did. We enjoyed the benefit of that right up to about 2010. So the incoming Labour government inherited a low-inflationary position and a very good economy in 1997.
But because we had fallen out of the ERM, that masked the changes in the economy and the changes in interest rates. We got none of the credit a government would normally have got for that simply because we were thought to have been incompetent because we were forced out of the ERM.
Matt Chorley: So it was a political impact rather than an economic catastrophe?
Sir John Major: It was a political catastrophe, but it wasn’t an economic catastrophe. The economy could then sustain leaving the ERM. The difficulty was how to get out without the markets thinking you were weakening the anti-inflationary policy. That was the difficulty that we didn’t solve. So when we were thrown out, it was catastrophic politically, but it had done its job.
I felt so strongly about inflation, and I will put it in this personal way because it is how I felt. When we were living in those two rooms, there was barely a week when the money did not run out before the week. I saw my mother go downstairs and borrow money to see us through the week, then desperately try and find some way to pay it back, then repeat the exercise week after week after week. I knew what that was like, and I knew that was what inflation did not just to my family but to families all over the country. I hated inflation with a passion, and I would rather have been forced out of government and out of politics than have given up on the anti-inflationary programme. That was the ERM.
The other point I would make about it is that with all my critics, I remember even the Daily Telegraph had banner headlines saying “At last we’re going to have some economic discipline” on the day I went in. It is amazing how successes have many fathers and failures are orphans.
Matt Chorley: Can I ask you about Spitting Image? Did you watch Spitting Image? We had various questions sent in from people asking about you being portrayed as the grey man of politics, despite having the background you came from, winning a general election and beating older politicians.
Sir John Major: Politics is a rough old trade. That was originally a joke across the tea room by a friend of mine when my hair started to go grey when I was about 48. That is where it came from. It was a very useful way to portray something quite different and it was used mercilessly, because politics is sometimes a rather fierce trade. But you know that when you go into it. There’s no point crying over it.
Matt Chorley: Did you watch it at the time?
Sir John Major: I stopped watching it when I saw the portrayals of Norman Tebbit and Margaret Thatcher, which I thought were downright crude. So I did watch it occasionally, but when I began to feature in it in an indelicate way, I thought the same people who told me I ought not to read the newspapers now said, “Why didn’t you watch Spitting Image?”
Matt Chorley: Do you watch any political TV shows? The Thick of It, Yes Minister, or was it all a bit too much like work?
Sir John Major: The only one I watched was Yes Minister, which I thought was pure genius. It got so close to a parody of reality. I didn’t think The Thick of It quite achieved that. I didn’t watch that very much.
Matt Chorley: Can I ask you about the job of being Prime Minister and how you approached it? Since you were there, we have had seven or eight Prime Ministers. Is it getting harder?
Sir John Major: In some ways, yes. It is certainly getting harder because of the external pressure of social media. That is undoubtedly getting harder. On the other hand, newspapers matter less than they did politically. They are not as powerful as they were in the 70s, 80s and 90s.
The problems are wider today, and there seems to be a shorter time frame in which people feel they can deal with problems and push them aside. Most of the big problems we have in this country at the moment are long-term problems. How are we going to cope with an ever-increasing number of elderly people who will live longer and need more medicine and more expensive medicine? How are we going to prepare for that? How are we going to prepare for people having their own pensions when the Government keeps producing measures that will reduce the private pensions that people actually earn and save for in their own lifetime? They are forcing more people into state assistance when they retire by the policies they are following now. That is not only wrong, it is plain stupid.
Then there are other things like climate change. Some people deny climate change. I don’t know what planet they are living on. When they say, “I don’t believe in climate change”, it’s a cop-out. It means they needn’t put the money towards the policy and they can spend it on something else that is more politically popular. But I only have to look at my own garden. The daffodils come up six weeks earlier. The climate is different. The ice caps are not in my garden, by the way, but the ice caps are melting and changing the positions inside the oceans. There are more hurricanes. There are much more extreme weather events. The climate is changing.
Those people who say, “Let’s push it back a bit. Let’s not do anything. Let’s do it a little more slowly so we can spend a little money on something else” are saying to my children, your children and their grandchildren, “Tough luck, chaps. We’re not only leaving you a difficult economy with too many old people that you can’t afford to care for. We’re going to leave you with climate change that we should have put right for you and didn’t.”
The first role of any government, in my view, is to leave something better for the next generation than your generation inherited. This is not done now. The youngsters of today are inheriting a more difficult world and a less favourable world than my generation, and their successors may be in exactly the same position unless we now begin to take seriously those very long-term problems.
I’m sorry that’s a long, tedious answer, but I feel very strongly that it demeans politics. You are not there as a politician as if it is a game show. You are not there just to provide fodder for the media and project your own career. You are there to deal with problems that ordinary people elect you to deal with. We are a representative democracy. We send representatives to Parliament to make sure our lives are better. If you ignore and deny those issues, our lives will not get better and those Parliaments will have failed.
Matt Chorley: Some of those issues you are talking about, changes to pensions and so on, are unfolding under the Labour Government. But some of the things, climate change and net zero, those are ideas which are taking hold in the Conservative Party as well.
Sir John Major: I am not making a point against any one government. It has been going on for quite a long time. Let me put it to you in this one question. You know politics better than most people, I would guess. When did you last hear a senior politician deliver a detailed lecture about the problems we face and what we must do to make those problems better over the next 30 years? Can you remember such a speech?
Matt Chorley: Not off the top of my head.
Sir John Major: No, neither can I. Don’t you think the people out there would actually like to hear someone standing up and saying: “We’ve got these things wrong. We’ve really screwed up. We’ve really got to take this particular policy more seriously. We cannot cope with population growth and the growth in the length of years people live, and the more expensive medical treatments. We cannot cope with it unless we begin to take action on those things. At this moment, we cannot delay on that.”
Matt Chorley: So what is the problem? Is it the quality of the politicians? Is it the quality of MPs in Parliament who get restless too quickly? Is it partly our fault, the electorate’s fault, that we are impatient and we want quick and easy answers to big complicated problems?
Sir John Major: I’m afraid we do. That is because nobody is telling us we can’t have that. Instead of saying, “These are the difficulties we’ve got to face and you can’t have that,” nobody is doing that. Too many people listen to focus groups and parody the focus groups in their policies, which naturally means more expenditure, and that inevitably, in the short term or the longer term, means either more debt or higher taxes. Governments have lost the capacity, it seems, to say no. Part of the job of politics is to say no.
Matt Chorley: I suppose the counterargument is that if you say no, you lose elections and you are not in a position of power any more.
Sir John Major: I’m not entirely sure that is the case. I would guess there are millions of people out there who would be only too pleased to hear a politician stand up and set out absolutely clearly, honestly and unmistakably the depth of the problems we face and the sort of measures we are going to have to take in order to protect ourselves.
They say, “You can’t do that. You’ll lose votes.” Really? When you are setting out a policy that will ease the lives of their children and grandchildren? Are we so self-centred that we can’t take in that message? I don’t believe it.
Matt Chorley: I wonder, we have touched a bit on social media, but the role of social media in changing the way people consume the news, instead of watching the six o’clock news or reading a newspaper which might have a broad range of issues and voices. If you are just watching people you agree with, that reinforces the idea that this person has all the answers.
Sir John Major: Yes. I’m afraid there has been a lot of that over a long time, where people mix with other people who have the same views and read newspapers that echo their views, or indeed shape their views. This is happening in a much bigger way in America, I may say, but it is certainly happening here as well. It is very dangerous. You can’t debate and change the world unless you meet the people with whom you disagree and try to persuade them. If, instead of that, you avoid the people you disagree with and form your own clique with your own views, then nothing is going to change in terms of really addressing the problems that lie before us.
Matt Chorley: You have talked in the past about believing in a rough and ready decency. Do you think we see enough of that in our politics today?
Sir John Major: Sometimes you do.
Matt Chorley: Is it more rough than it is decent?
Sir John Major: There are a lot of very decent people in politics. I don’t know the present Parliament as well as earlier Parliaments. I’m not a member of the present Parliament, but I know a number of MPs from the Conservative Party and Labour Party, not so much the Liberal Democrats these days. There are lots of them who have very decent instincts. The curious thing is that many of their instincts as to what they would like to achieve are the same. What they differ about is how to achieve it.
The economy is a practical example. The Conservative Party would say we have to deal with it with much more free enterprise and much less regulation. Many people in the Labour Party would also want a much better economy but would go a completely different way: more state direction. Everyone can have their own view on that. But the interesting thing is that the objectives are the same.
The very nature of the House of Commons, with His Majesty’s Opposition being two sword lengths apart from His Majesty’s Government, actually promotes the idea that the opposition must oppose everything. I’m not sure that I agree with that. I think the opposition has a duty to point out shortcomings. But when the objectives are the same, I think it would be better if people acknowledged similar objectives and began more practically to suggest mutual ways of meeting those objectives.
The classic example I would give you is that I do not think we will get a proper concordat on health, probably the single most important issue to many people, until the main parties agree the broad parameters of it, and that includes funding. I think that is something they ought to be looking at. We can’t have one party coming into government, setting out a series of policies, making changes, and the other party denying them, then, because they have denounced them, coming in and feeling they have to change them. That is poor politics.
Matt Chorley: And yet, when we look at how politics has unfolded over the last few years, promises do not get very long, whether it is their own MPs or the media.
Sir John Major: Maybe these long-term problems would. In any event, the fate of individual politicians doesn’t really matter as much as the development of the right policy. It isn’t a good idea to keep changing Prime Ministers. I think there is also a limit. If I give you a term of years, it will undoubtedly cause trouble, but I think it is an idea to have a limited number of years. The Americans have two terms of a president and then stop.
Matt Chorley: We can’t get to two years at the moment before speculation.
Sir John Major: I know, but this is a phase we are going through. It is partly a function of the many, many difficulties that we face at the moment.
Matt Chorley: Is the frustration that people don’t believe those problems show signs of being solved?
Sir John Major: The best aphrodisiac in politics is hope. If people can see a change, there is a change in atmosphere. It doesn’t even have to be politics. If we win the Ashes or the World Cup, there is a total change in atmosphere in the country. If you see interest rates going down rather than up, there is a total change in people’s capacity to invest and their belief in what is going to happen in the future. The moment the economy turns, politics will turn too.
Matt Chorley: It sounds as if, if Keir picked up the phone to you, I don’t know if he ever does, your advice would be the old Churchillian phrase, “Keep buggering on.”
Sir John Major: I’m not going to offer advice. I have been in politics a long time and I have made many mistakes. One mistake I’m not going to make is advising a Labour Prime Minister in public. And no, I have not been asked to advise a Labour Prime Minister in private either.
Matt Chorley: You talked about Her Majesty’s Opposition. Obviously now it is His Majesty’s Opposition. When you were there it was the Queen. Tell me about the weekly audience. I have heard other Prime Ministers talk about how it is the one meeting you go into where the other person doesn’t want your job. How important was it for you, having that regular audience?
Sir John Major: It was very important. I don’t mean for me. I think the Prime Minister meeting the monarch weekly is very important for the monarch too. I have no intention of telling you the sort of things we discussed. I will tell you it wasn’t all politics by any means. The only others present at those meetings ever were the corgis. If someone had bugged the corgis, it would have been quite a revelation.
Matt Chorley: Are you a fan of dogs?
Sir John Major: Oh yes.
Matt Chorley: You got on with the corgis?
Sir John Major: Yes, the corgis were fine. We even have an office therapy dog.
Matt Chorley: Do you?
Sir John Major: No, it’s not my dog. It’s my chief of staff’s dog.
Matt Chorley: Oh, great. What sort of dog is it?
Sir John Major: I’m not going to go into the dog. I don’t want the dog to become famous.
Matt Chorley: When you were Prime Minister, it was quite a turbulent time for the royals. We have since had Cabinet papers released from when the Queen went through her annus horribilis. Did you feel that the royals were really under pressure at that moment? And did you feel that you helped turn things around?
Sir John Major: I have no intention of commenting on that, except to say I did share an annus horribilis with the Queen at the same time, so we had plenty to talk about.
Matt Chorley: You talked about how you had a small majority after 1992 and obviously that made your life hard. Is there a sweet spot for the size of a majority? Is there a point where having a massive majority is also a problem?
Sir John Major: Something between 40 and 50 is the sweet spot. One of the problems the Labour Party has at the moment is that they have such a big majority. A large number of people know in their hearts that they are a one-term Member of Parliament for that particular constituency. Unless they defy political gravity, they will lose at the next election. That will encourage many of them not to take difficult decisions, but to cry out against difficult decisions so they can be seen to be defending their constituents against something that may be necessary but is unpopular. That makes any government’s job much harder.
Matt Chorley: I just want to end on a couple of reflections. Any regrets? Your biggest regret from your time as Prime Minister?
Sir John Major: Have you an hour or two? There were lots. I won’t say it is the biggest, but a big regret I have is that when I negotiated the Maastricht Treaty, it was hugely well received in Parliament. We didn’t put the Bill for the Maastricht Treaty through Parliament before the 1992 election because it had such support. There were five or six hundred Members of Parliament voting for it. We didn’t put it through. We put through other measures that were more immediately relevant, and so we left the Maastricht Treaty until after the 1992 election.
As I explained earlier, after the 1992 election, the complexion of the Tory Party had changed remarkably. Without that, we would not have had all the troubles we had with the Maastricht Treaty, which had a great deal to do with the eternal damnation of the Conservative Government at the time. So that is a regret. I could have got it through.
Matt Chorley: And that might have changed what followed afterwards.
Sir John Major: Yes. There wouldn’t have been a Bill that they could spend a whole year attacking.
Matt Chorley: On the positive side, George, who is a listener, got in touch and said, “Does Sir John feel he did not get enough credit for the National Lottery, lottery-funded elite sports and Team GB’s success at the Olympics? Please thank him from me.”
Sir John Major: I’m very pleased it has done so well. I’ll tell you how I came about doing it. I was Chief Secretary to the Treasury in 1987 to 1989, and the Chief Secretary negotiated public expenditure with every individual minister. So he had, although he was a junior member of the Cabinet, more power than most members because he could redirect money.
I noticed in doing that that the things the public most cared about, sport and the arts, got petty cash from the Government. I could never see a circumstance in which you could take money away from health or education or defence or social security in order to enhance leisure. Governments have never been big on leisure, if you go back as far in history as you like. So I was looking for some external way of funding something that the public really loved, sport and the arts. The answer was the lottery.
Since then, I don’t know if you know how much it has given apart from prizes. How much do you think it has delivered to the public in good causes?
Matt Chorley: In good causes? It must be billions.
Sir John Major: Have a rough guess.
Matt Chorley: Three billion?
Sir John Major: £50 billion. And that was 18 months ago, so it will be £51 billion, rising to £52 billion now. You can go to almost every village in the country and you’ll find something badged with National Lottery money. If you see that badge, you think, “I did that.” Well, it wasn’t only me. Lots of other people were there. One takes personal blame and one takes personal credit, but neither of those things is fully justified. You shouldn’t entirely get the blame or entirely receive the credit. But I am very pleased it went well.
Matt Chorley: A final thought, then, going back to where we began. The young 13-year-old John not working that hard at school, difficulty at home, parents distracted by trying to make ends meet. If that young John now were to come across our conversation and had an interest in politics, what would you say to him?
Sir John Major: I would say to young people, we need you in politics. If all the talent in this country concentrates on “How can I earn more money?” and “How can I avoid public service like the plague because I don’t like the idea of it?”, then we are in deep doo-dah.
We do need people to go into politics and we need our best people to go into politics. That may mean some changes in the way in which Parliament works. It will certainly require a change in attitude where public service, whether it is elected public service in the House of Commons, appointed public service in the Civil Service or any of the government bodies, particularly local government, is attractive. We need that sort of career to be attractive and to be socially attractive as well as financially attractive. I am not suggesting one is more important than the other. We need both. When you have respect for those, I think we will be getting back into a much more healthy position. It is very silly to argue and denigrate public service. People simply shouldn’t do it.
Sir John Major, it has been fascinating to talk to you. Thank you for your time.
Sir John Major: My pleasure. Thank you.