History of England 1-6

The issues dominating the election were the economy, the UK’s future relationship with Europe, education, the NHS and proposed constitutional reform. On the economy the Tories had cause to congratulate themselves. Under Major, the country had seen the longest sustained economic growth in post-war history. He and his colleagues could only hope that the country would bear that success in mind. On all the other issues, Labour held the initiative. Having now styled themselves ‘New Labour’, Blair and his party found themselves subjected to a strikingly provocative advertising campaign. In one poster, the Tories depicted him with Luciferian eyes and the slogan ‘New Labour, New Danger’. Less flamboyantly, the Liberal Democrat leader, Paddy Ashdown, assured his supporters at a conference: ‘New Labour, No difference!’

In the last days of the campaign, the Tories received an unexpected windfall to their morale. On 21 April 1997, Jacques Santer, the president of the European Commission, delivered a ‘Message to the Eurosceptics’. ‘We have decided on our direction,’ he said, ‘so there is no point at all in keeping our feet on the brakes – it is even dangerous. Be constructive, not destructive. That is my message for the sceptics – wherever in Europe.’ Whether or not it was aimed at the snarling naysayers of Tory Britain, it was certainly construed in that light. Major asserted openly that the Tories had been vindicated in their reserve towards Europe, while New Labour was incandescent. Alastair Campbell suggested that someone call Santer and ask him ‘what the fuck he was playing at’. Robin Cook, shadow foreign secretary, issued a public rebuff. And the Tories, gleeful for once, released a cartoon of Tony Blair sitting on the lap of Chancellor Kohl. Was it paranoia or pooterism that led to such a storm? Mr Santer did not mention British Eurosceptics by name, and he had more proximate concerns of his own. At any rate, all political parties were publicly united in opposition to this ‘attempt to interfere’ in British politics.

In many ways, the election of May 1997 recalled that of 1979. But where the Callaghan government had contrived to find slivers of gold in the dark cave, the Major government saw only defeat. As constituency after constituency brought in its results, Tony Blair addressed the faithful. ‘You know I don’t like to be complacent,’ he announced, although his beam belied him, ‘but it’s looking pretty good.’ Indeed it was; the country had swung from Conservative to Labour by a margin of 10 per cent. For once, ‘landslide’ was apt; the government was buried beneath its own debris. Speaking of politics as ‘a rough old game’, John Major tendered his resignation as Conservative leader. Ever sanguine, he had already booked seats at the Oval for that afternoon. One party refused to take its place in the House of Commons. Sinn Féin was bound never to collude with the hated British polity. Betty Boothroyd, the Speaker, therefore issued a prohibition: since Sinn Féin had refused their seats in parliament, they would be denied their seats in the ‘Commons facilities’. It was an impeccably English response.

Major’s had been a troubled premiership, but by no means a disastrous one. Edwina Currie’s judgement that although ‘one of the nicest men ever to walk the halls of Westminster’, Major should ‘never have been prime minister’ represents the orthodoxy but not all the truth. Others thought the government successful and its leader sly, but it could not be claimed that it had been a period marked by vision. Amidst the uncertain or ephemeral achievements, one deserves commemoration: one last onslaught on the post-war consensus had been launched in 1991 in the form of the Citizen’s Charter. It had been assumed by the creators of the welfare state that those who provided state-funded services would do so with a smile; that this need not be the case was a contingency few had anticipated. Public servants were to establish charters in which their obligations to consumers would be set out. It represented a clear reversal of attitudes traditional since the Second World War, a Thatcherite initiative but one ‘with a human face’, as Major’s supporters put it.

But the face was one of which the people had tired. Major both evoked and invoked the past, whether in his ‘Back to Basics’ campaign or in quoting Orwell’s England of ‘warm beer and cricket’. Even his status as a workingclass boy made good had begun to count against him as the decade progressed. And if Major had shown that class could be discarded, Blair offered a promise of class transcended. He was, moreover, young, and his voice, emphatic and eager, seemed to carry all the certitude of youth. In place of parliamentary rhetoric, he spoke in an idiom all his own, with a blend of the company boardroom and the popular radio station. He was metropolitan to his marrow.