A tetchy PM facing a historic defeat

A disloyal party and hostile media want a leadership election

At the start of the campaign, the Prime Minister faced multiple irritations, including a former prime minister whose supporters resented their ousting and didn’t hesitate to give their views when asked, and whose supporters in the right-wing press echoed every word. Europe simmers on. Sleaze and public standards are becoming an issue. The press travelling with the PM is restless. There is talk of weak leadership. The PM, in the middle of an election campaign, has to appeal for loyalty. A Conservative voter asks a former minister whether the party is trying to lose the election deliberately so that Labour has to deal with all the mounting problems. A Tory defeat is now the default position and speculation mounts as to who will be elected leader after the election.

Not Rishi Sunak in 2024, but John Major in 1997, his plight effectively summarised by Norman Fowler in his diaries, published late last year. Sunak is supposedly notoriously tetchy, but we don’t these days think of Major in that light, after his statesmanlike performances over Brexit.

Fowler, creditably one of the few male politicians ever to state that they were leaving ministerial office to put family first (and as he ruefully remarks, perhaps ever to be remembered as the first politician to say they were leaving politics to spend more time with their family), had had a long career as a Conservative Cabinet Minister under Mrs Thatcher. After stepping down, he was soon back in action as Major’s right-hand man during the 1992 election. And it was in 1992 and the years following, rather than 1997, in which he documents Major’s irritability and tetchiness, as he has to deal with continued sniping from Margaret Thatcher and her acolytes in the media, while Fowler is party chairman. Fowler suggests that Major should meet the Telegraph journalist Simon Heffer, ‘who is one of Thatcher’s leading courtiers’. ‘Definitely not’, replies Major, angry about the personal attacks on him from Heffer.

As the Maastricht debate rolls on, Fowler notes of Major ‘he ia allowing Margaret to seriously rile him’. In Setember 1992, ‘John is irritated with life and particularly with Tory backbenchers.’ When he arrives at the party conference in October he ‘is in good form but irritated’ with Tory MPs queueing up trot out the anti-Maastricht line. After poor election results in May 1993 Fowler tells Major ‘he takes the press too much to heart’. But Fowler himself acknowledges in August 1993 that the role of papers like the Sunday Telegraph and editors like Charles Moore, with their ‘crude, undergraduate journalism’ is central to the divisions in the Conservatiove Party. He records a fortnight later that he himself did not have John Major’s ‘masochistic desire to know what this second-rate bunch of journalists think’. Major believes that their goal is to keep on until they can provoke a new leadership election.

A month later, Fowler notes

the real problem remains the Prime Minister reacting to the press stories. It is his reaction which is keeping the ferment going….John is reacting all over the place. He is attacking his backbench critics but worst of all he is attacking his supporters.

During the 1993 party conference Fowler notes again that Major takes the press criticism too personally, and the editors, knowing ‘his legendary sensitivity’ keep on at him. But Margaret Thatcher remains a real problem:

John may be difficult at times but my dinner with Margaret establishes just how impossible she has become.

Early in 1994, Fowler records how the media has swung to trivial dramas in its reporting:

The ideological (Moore and Stoddard) combine with the mischievous (Kelvin Mackenzie) and the opportunistic (English and Dacre).

(Stoddard may be an uncorrected mis-spelling of Stothard).

For them, normal politics is boring and they want to engineer crisis. After Major compromises on qualified majority voting in Europe, the Eurosceptic press goes into overdrive with cries of ‘surrender’. Charles Moore calls Major ‘hopeless’ and says he has to go.

The Fowler diaries are a valuable record of how the Conservative Party became more Eurosceptic over time. Of course they need to be trianglated with other sources. John Major’s autobiography confirms his frustrations with the press and its interactions with Euro-sceptic backbenchers (see pages 358-9 especially). In his autobiography, Ken Clarke notes how the turmoil took its toll on Major personally. He says he tried to get Major ‘to stop reading the newspapers’, and records Major’s sensitivity to them and how he would complain particularly about the Telegraph and Simon Heffer. Clarke also records the rightward drift of the newspapers and their obsession with Europe.

The Fowler diaries are also a good read. I had not expected that, given Fowler’s own political autobiography Ministers Decide had been occasionally pilloried. Jeremy Paxman said about memoirs:

(The awful warning is Norman Fowler’s Ministers Decide (1991), which is said to have achieved the sort of sales one might expect from Jeremy Corbyn’s Guide to Power Dressing.)

Perhaps Liz Truss’s book will do worse.

I met Fowler a couple of times in my career. In the early eighties, I was Parliamentary Officer of Age Concern when he was Secretary of State for Health and Social Security. He had the habit of announcing deep cuts in social security spending, then rolling back from the worst aspects later. We used to organise breakfast meetings at each of the party conferences, and Fowler and his team would come along. I remembver one breakast where the late David Hobman, Director of Age Concern, spoke for forty-five minutes, meaning we had no time to hear from Fowler and his ministers before they rushed off to the conference. Later, I met him when I was in the Assembly and he was chairing a Lords Committee on the future of the BBC, which produced a conscientious and thoughtful report. Fowler was one of the first to decide that members of the House of Lords who had been around for a while and were getting on, should retire. I had forgotten however that he was a journalist, and that ability to summarise and capture the colour of an event comes through in the diaries. They are important background reading for understanding the state of the Conservative party today and its rightward drift - and the relationship with what the historian of the Conservative Party, Tim Bale, calls the Conservative Party in the Media. And also, how the UK is now in the mess that it is. Welcome to Ukania!