and for future Conservative leaders in particular, is simply put. Not only were we following a hugely successful, epoch-defining leader. Not only did we need to heal the divide between those who supported her to the end and those who brought about her fall. We were also being compared to the mythical Thatcher, rather than the real one.
At about this time, the ageing doyen of Fleet Street, Sir John Junor, asked me to supply him with political gossip for his Mail on Sunday column, and I duly obliged, seeing it as part of my efforts to expose splits in the Labour Party. He frequently took me to lunch, at which the exchange of information would all be in the other direction. I would sit back and listen to his stories of Beaverbrook, Churchill and Fleet Street before Murdoch, together with his personal obsessions with Princess Diana and Selina Scott.
The journalist Bruce Anderson would fill in for Sir John when he was away, and I continued the service for him, starting what would become a lifelong friendship. Bruce was close to John Major, and recommended to him that he bring me into No. 10 to help sharpen up his performances at Prime Minister’s Questions.
This was the big call I had been waiting for, and I can still remember the thrill of walking through the famous black door to join the team that briefed the prime minister for what was then a twice-weekly encounter.
My partner in this endeavour was a rising star in the whips’ office, the Boothferry MP David Davis. Fifteen years later we would become rivals for the leadership, but in 1990 he would come to my office very early on Tuesday and Thursday mornings, and we would discuss what bullets we could put into John Major’s gun. We worked together well.
Some people look at Prime Minister’s Questions, with all its noise, poor behaviour and often heavy-handed prepared jokes, and think it is somewhere between a national embarrassment and a complete waste of time. They miss the point. In our system, prime ministers have to be on top of their game and across every subject. PMQs exposes them if they are not. Weaknesses, failings, uncertainties, lack of knowledge – all these things and more are found out.
Not only does it help hold prime ministers to account; it gives them more power and control by enabling them to hold Whitehall to account. While serving in No. 10, I saw policy being either determined in double-quick time, or fundamentally changed, on many occasions because the spotlight was suddenly shining brightly on a particular area, and credible answers were urgently required. It is one of the mechanisms that makes our system so responsive. You can use it to change policy and override other ministers and departments. I did this a number of times when I became prime minister.
I got to know and like, and admire enormously, John Major. He was a passionate Conservative, but a practical one, not an ideologue. If he was unsure about how he should act on a particular issue, he seemed almost always to default to the decent thing. He had a temper, to be sure – and I was on the rough end of it once or twice – and parts of the job clearly weighed heavily on him. But he was a fundamentally good man.
He was also a very tactile one. I used to arrive early for the briefing sessions and sit at the bottom of the narrow flight of stairs that led to his No. 10 flat, just outside the door to the study where we held the briefing meeting. John had a habit of bounding down the stairs and, with a cheery hello, ruffling my hair.
My main job as leader of the political section of the CRD was taking apart the Labour opposition and preparing for the 1992 general election.
The tale of that election is extraordinary. The Conservative Party had ditched its most successful ever leader, caused inflation to rise, put up interest rates, seen the property market crash and the country tip headlong into recession. Meanwhile, the Labour Party under Neil Kinnock had scrapped some of its most unpopular policies, such as unilateral nuclear disarmament, and seemed hungry for, and perhaps even ready for, power.
Yet we won. And the scale of the victory should not be measured by the small parliamentary majority – twenty-one seats – that John Major achieved. The true scale of his victory was the fact that we were almost eight percentage points ahead of Labour, and he had attracted more votes than any other prime minister in British political history.
To be sure, we didn’t expect it. I had a strong sense then that the only person who really thought we would win was John Major himself. He seemed to have an innate confidence that when given the choice, the British people would stick with him.
No one should underestimate the personal triumph for John Major. In the head-to-head with Neil Kinnock, people knew who they wanted as prime minister. But allied to this was the most systematic destruction of opposition policy that I have ever seen in a campaign. The mantra that ‘Oppositions don’t win elections, governments lose them’ was turned on its head. The hubris of Labour’s pre-polling day Sheffield rally, and the self-inflicted wound of its shadow Budget, in which Labour promised to raise taxes on people who saw themselves as middle-earners, are well documented. But those of us who were in the campaign team would argue that the costing of Labour’s spending pledges, together with the blunderbuss of our advertising campaign, were what made the biggest difference. By polling day everyone knew that a Labour government meant higher taxes.
Norman Lamont’s pre-election Budget was a political masterstroke: by stealing Labour’s plan for a 20p starting rate of income tax he pushed them into making new tax proposals. So just at the moment they should have been talking about anything other than tax, they walked into our trap.
Election night, when predictions of Labour victory turned to the reality of a Conservative majority, was a moment of pure political joy. While I would experience the excitement of getting elected to Parliament in 2001, and the topsy-turvy night in 2010, the exhilaration of 1992 wouldn’t really be matched until May 2015, twenty-three years later.
Victory in the general election, and my relationship with Norman Lamont, provided me with the chance to take the next step in my political career – becoming a special adviser, or ‘spad’, at the Treasury.
The Treasury today retains much of the power and aura it had back then, but the place I worked in nevertheless seems a world away. Women in white coats would wheel tea trolleys around the so-called ‘magic circle’ on the principal floor of the Treasury building in Whitehall where the key officials and spads sat. The office I had then – all to myself – was substantially bigger than the one I would have as prime minister.
And many of the rooms – particularly the chancellor’s – were genuinely ‘smoke-filled’. Norman smoked an endless succession of small cigars. His principal private secretary, later to become my cabinet secretary, Jeremy Heywood was rarely without a cigarette between his fingers. Chief economist Alan Budd and specialist economic adviser Bill Robinson were constantly puffing away. When the deputy governor of the Bank of England, Eddie George, came to see the chancellor he would light up too. Back then I was smoking twenty Marlboro Lights a day, and would happily join in. There were times when you couldn’t see the other side of the room.
Going to the Treasury also introduced me properly to William Hague. Elected at a by-election in 1989, he was Lamont’s parliamentary private secretary, the first rung on the ladder for a new MP.
William immediately struck me as one of the brightest and most talented Members of Parliament I’d ever come across. He had a huge understanding of the economic and other policy challenges we faced, while knowing his parliamentary colleagues and the complexity of Conservative politics back to front. We formed a friendship that has lasted ever since.
Seismic events were ahead for all of us. The decision to join the ERM – a fixed exchange rate between European currencies – was made by John Major and Margaret Thatcher in October 1990, before Norman Lamont arrived at the Treasury. Our task was to try to make the policy work. We failed.
The story of the end of Britain’s membership of the ERM is simply told. Following reunification, the German economy required high interest rates. Following the Lawson boom, the United Kingdom economy was in recession and required low interest rates. It was Germany that drove the European economy, and the mighty Bundesbank had a critical say in the ERM. Naturally, they prioritised German domestic policy. In the end the ERM could not contain this