History of England 1-6

John Smith died suddenly on 12 May 1994 of a heart attack. At once forthright and subtle, progressive and ‘right-wing’, he was universally lauded as a ‘decent man’. This is a sobriquet which tends in parliamentary circles to hint at someone ineffectual and uncharismatic, but he was sincerely mourned. Who now was to succeed him? One of the three contenders, John Prescott, put forward the choice with unusual precision. ‘The Labour party has always had a socialist and a social democratic wing. I am a socialist. Tony Blair is pleased to call himself a social democrat.’ The other candidate was Margaret Beckett, deputy leader of the Labour party and, like Prescott, of the Left. The result of the leadership election left the more cerebral Tories uneasy; Tony Blair had won, and with over 50 per cent of the vote.

The early Nineties were ready for him. The vines of Eastern Europe had withered before those of the New World, the pub had been succeeded by the wine bar, the public servant by the career politician, the celebrity by the ‘artist’, the adman by the ‘creative’. At its most extreme, right and wrong became ‘appropriate’ or ‘inappropriate’. Such curious verbal manoeuvres shadowed another movement characteristic of the time. ‘Political correctness’ was an American import. When not lampooned, it was assailed as ‘liberal fascism’, malignant and stultifying. The Guardian remarked in its defence that it seemed to be attacked ‘nine times as often as it [is] used’. In essence, it expressed what Martin Amis has called ‘the very American, and very honourable, idea, that no one should be ashamed of what they are’. Thus, ‘the disabled’ became ‘the differently abled’. While the idiom lent itself easily to satire, the principle behind it survived and even prospered. The Tories found it hard to align themselves with the new spirit. In local elections they polled only 27 per cent of the vote and lost nearly one-third of the seats they had won in 1990.

Although no formal challenge to his leadership had yet materialized, John Major knew that his authority was being undermined by the Eurosceptic right. ‘Put up or shut up’ was his message to his critics. Beneath the fighting words, however, lay the old conciliatory impulse. The Right had to be appeased. In an interview he attacked the practice of begging and encouraged the public to report it to the police. A furore ensued. The shadow housing minister, John Battle, claimed that by cutting benefits for sixteen-and seventeen-year-olds, the government was responsible for the increase in young people living on the streets. Other social problems arose in Major’s ‘classless society’. Nicholas Scott, minister of state for social security and disabled people, admitted to having authorized civil servants to assist in the drafting of a large number of amendments to the Civil Rights Bill. In addition, Scott had talked the bill out, speaking for over an hour. Several people were arrested on 29 May as disabled people protested outside Westminster. Although called upon to resign, Scott remained in office.

In Europe, the oft-repeated refrain that Britain would be ‘at the heart’ was proving difficult to sustain. In June, at a European Council meeting in Corfu, John Major vetoed the candidacy of Jean-Luc Dehaene as president of the European Commission, declaring that he objected to Dehaene’s ‘interventionist’ tendencies, and to what he had described as French and German attempts to impose their candidate on others. As the other candidates had withdrawn, this gesture was widely interpreted as sabre-rattling. Mitterrand declared that ‘Great Britain has a concept of Europe completely at odds with that held by the original six member states.’ It was an observation with which few could honestly disagree. In the UK, the use of the veto was seen as yet another genuflection before the party’s Eurosceptics. The government’s obsession with all matters European was revealed to be one that the electorate did not share. Elections to the European Parliament turned out to be spectacularly anticlimactic, with turnout a modest 36.4 per cent. In July, Major decided upon a cabinet reshuffle. Amidst other changes, he appointed a Europhile, Jeremy Hanley, to the party chairmanship and a Eurosceptic, Michael Portillo, to the post of secretary of state for employment.

The party’s various ‘sexual shenanigans’ were damaging insofar as they came in the wake of the ‘Back to Basics’ campaign; the ‘cash for questions’ scandal was another matter. This corruption was a reproach to everything upon which the British prided themselves. Two MPs were suspended for accepting money from a Sunday Times journalist posing as a businessman. Later in the year, Tim Smith and Neil Hamilton found themselves having to answer similar charges. For Hamilton in particular, the struggle to clear his name would prove protracted, bruising and finally disastrous.