took absolutely nothing for granted: there would be no room for ideological purity or reckless dissent in the New Labour project. Hungry for power after eighteen years in opposition, the party loyally followed its new leadership.
For an embattled government, the advent of New Labour presented considerable practical and philosophical challenges. ‘I attended many meetings with John Major in Number 10, and while we were sitting there four or five major governmental decisions had to be made while we were having a discussion about the next manifesto,’ recalls Daniel Finkelstein, who joined Central Office in 1995. ‘There comes a point when you’re holding a coalition together with a tiny majority that the wider political picture becomes secondary.’54 Central Office was reorganised, but it could not match New Labour’s state-of-the-art war room at the heart of its Westminster headquarters in Millbank Tower. The Conservative election machine, which had been so formidable in previous campaigns, was completely outclassed.
New Labour presented a far more fundamental problem to the Conservatives. ‘We knew Tony Blair would be a formidable opponent,’ recalls William Hague, who was promoted to the Cabinet in 1995. ‘He had the right appearance and attitude at the right time. It made our political strategy that much harder. The Cabinet found it very hard to decide how to attack New Labour.’ It was a dilemma that caused many of the Tories’ brightest brains to falter: they could not find a convincing response to being outmanoeuvred. ‘It was clear Blair was giving us a political nervous breakdown because we weren’t sure what we stood for, and trying to define ourselves in contrast to him was extremely difficult,’ recalls George Bridges, the youthful Assistant Political Secretary in Number 10 between 1994 and 1997. ‘He was picking up Tory principles that he felt were appealing to middle England and playing them for all they were worth.’55
Central Office strategists and election planners went through contortions trying to decide how to attack New Labour. Guided by research showing that the public believed that Labour had indeed changed, they argued that it was a change that heralded new dangers. ‘New Labour, New Danger’ became the catchy slogan inspired by the party’s advertising agency, M&C Saatchi, accompanied by a poster showing Tony Blair’s ‘demon eyes’ lurking behind red curtains. It was partly inspired by Steve Hilton, who had left Central Office after the 1992 general election to become an apprentice of the advertising guru Maurice Saatchi. But the attack on the opposition had a flaw, as Finkelstein admits: ‘It showed that we didn’t actually know what we thought was wrong with New Labour, and that the only way we could fight them was by pretending in our own heads that they were dangerous.’56 There was confusion about the approach throughout the party. Central Office staff became frustrated that Major would veer from one line of attack to another. ‘He followed what we used to call the Coca-Cola strategy, which argued that Labour was copying us, as Cola Light, and that we were the real thing. We repeatedly tried and failed to get him to understand that you couldn’t say they were dangerous and copying you at the same time.’57 Yet Major was convinced that the public would see through the ‘froth’ of Blair, which contrasted with the late John Smith, who he believed was a politician of substance.
The fact was that the party was in total disarray about how to attack the resurgent opposition. Some senior figures believed that Blair was a left-winger in disguise, while others tried to portray him either as a puppet of the old left or as believing in nothing at all. ‘Of all the iterations we went through, the one thing that never occurred to anybody was that Tony Blair might actually mean it,’ Andrew Cooper admits. ‘We completely underestimated him and the New Labour project.’58 Very few on the Tory side understood what they were up against. ‘Tony Blair was an extremely accomplished, protean, shape-shifting politician who managed brilliantly to appeal to old Labour voters and simultaneously to huge number of middle-ground Tory voters in 1997,’ Boris Johnson reflects.59
When an exhausted John Major finally called the general election on 17 March, his party had long lost the will to govern. It lay tired, divided and discredited. ‘I love my party in the country, but I do not love my parliamentary party,’ Major later admitted.60 ‘For much of the time I didn’t feel able to say exactly what I thought because I needed to keep the party together. It was my continuing nightmare that the party would split. It always felt like two horses pulling in opposite directions, and you were pulling back on both sets of reins at the same time, which was very uncomfortable.’61 Indeed, by placating the demands of the ‘oddballs who came out of the woodwork’ after 1992, as one former whip put it, Major found himself in an intolerably weak position.
As Prime Minister for six and a half years, John Major had survived longer than most of his predecessors in Number 10 Downing Street. In many ways he was given a ‘hospital pass’ in November 1990. The economy was deteriorating and the government was struggling to find its poise after the political disaster of the poll tax. Major cannot escape culpability as a senior member of Mrs Thatcher’s administration, sharing in the collective responsibility for the failures of its later years, but he was determined to draw a line under a period of huge upheaval. By promising to create ‘a country at ease with itself’ and attempting to reconcile the increasingly polarised positions within his party, he steered the Conservative Party to calmer waters for a time. His decency and straightforwardness endeared him to the wider party, and indeed to many in the country. His mandate in 1992, which was built on the highest ever popular vote (admittedly on a high turnout), was testament to his skilled management of a party in office that was seriously fraying at the edges.
Winning the 1992 general election was in fact a Pyrrhic victory for John Major and the Conservatives. Faced with such a small majority and an increasingly hostile press climate, the Prime Minister would inevitably find it harder to ride the ‘two horses’ of European opinion within the party. While his purpose was to govern the country, others recklessly indulged themselves in a civil war the wounds of which would take years to heal. After 1992, longevity would be his government’s greatest enemy, as the public tired of some in the parliamentary party, whose arrogance and obsession with Europe became abhorrent to them. Lesser men would have buckled under the strain of leading a party seemingly intent on destroying itself.
But even allowing for his scant room for manoeuvre, Major could have taken a firmer and more decisive line with those who sought to cause so much trouble, and have been less thin-skinned about what others, particularly virulent critics in the press, thought of him. By restating the more harmonious vision of Britain he espoused on becoming Prime Minister, he might have been able to create some light amid the darkening clouds after 1992. Despite his achievements in forging the Northern Ireland peace process, conquering inflation and passing on a secure economy in May 1997, he could have been more forceful in articulating a positive vision for the party.
Whatever John Major could and might have said or done, the public wanted change, and voted for it. New Labour was ready to assume the reins of power, while for the Conservative Party a journey into the unknown was about to begin.
TWO Lost in the Wilderness May 1997–June 2001
The suddenness of losing power is very brutal. After eighteen years in office, opposition was a strange and lonely place for the Conservative Party. Bereft of ministerial cars, red boxes and armies of civil servants, the surviving 165 Tory MPs would somehow have to regroup. In the dying days of government, the party often looked as though it would break apart over divisions on Europe. Yet to John Major’s credit he held it together. The price, however, was a catastrophic electoral defeat.
Leaderless and Powerless
‘When the curtain falls it is time to get off the stage, and that is what I propose to do.’