John Major

Prime minister of the United Kingdom (1990–97)

• Born: March 29, 1943
• Place of Birth: London, England

Major succeeded Margaret Thatcher as leader of the Conservative Party government of the United Kingdom. He built on her policies but was more attuned to social concerns. During his ministry, public services became more accountable and railways were privatized. He maintained gradual integration with the European Union and was able to work with other world leaders to bring some conflict resolution in Northern Ireland, the Middle East, and Eastern Europe.

Early Life

John Major was born to Tom and Gwen Major-Ball in the south London suburb of Worcester Park, county Surrey. The family consisted of two boys and a girl, with John as the youngest sibling. His father was born in the United States and worked successfully as a professional entertainer for much of his life. He settled down into a garden ornaments business.

At age eleven, Major won a place at Rutlish School, Merton, a high school for academically gifted boys, but he failed to take advantage of his enrollment at the prestigious school and focused his energies instead on sports, mainly rugby and cricket. (The latter became a lifelong interest, and in his retirement he wrote several books on the sport.) However, he soon regretted his academic failures and vowed never to lose an opportunity again.

During these early years, Major’s father lent money unwisely and even had to sell the family’s house, forcing the family to move to a poorer part of inner-city London called Brixton. Major left school at age sixteen and then worked intermittently in small jobs until deciding to enter banking. He began to expand his qualifications and also spent a short time in Nigeria on bank business. A serious accident forced him to return to England in 1967. In 1970 he married Norma Johnson. The couple had two children, James and Elizabeth.

Life’s Work

Major’s interest in politics developed while he was in high school. He felt naturally drawn to the Conservative Party because it seemed to offer individuals the most control over their own destinies. However, his early exposure to poverty drew him to the more socially aware and compassionate type of conservatism, one that countered the elitist and individualistic tendencies of the party’s far right. He abhorred the state interventionism and determinism promoted by the Labour Party, however.

This early, almost intuitive, interest led Major to join the Young Conservatives. At age twenty-one he ran as the Conservative Party candidate in local council elections in Brixton. Because the area was largely Labour and left wing, Major’s early efforts proved unsuccessful, but the process gave him a taste for politics. In 1963 he became chair of the Young Conservatives. A sudden burst of unpopularity in the community with the Labour Party brought him his first local election success in 1968 in the borough of Lambeth.

Major then served on the borough’s housing committee and became its chair in 1970. This gave him invaluable experience in handling figures, plans, and policies, and it introduced him to the importance of retaining access to individuals through the local bureaucracy. Years later, this knowledge led him to formulate the Citizen’s Charter, which forced state bureaucracies to be much more open and accessible to the general public.

Major was encouraged to run for Parliament. After a number of unsuccessful bids, his big chance came in 1976, when he was adopted as the candidate for the rural constituency of Huntingdon, a safe Conservative seat. The election for Parliament, however, did not occur until 1979, the year Margaret Thatcher’s Conservatives stormed into power with a huge majority. Major’s own majority at Huntingdon had been 21,563, a very substantial one.

The first government appointment for Major came in 1981, as he was selected parliamentary private secretary to one of the cabinet ministers. He became an assistant whip in 1983, a position that gave him an inside knowledge of how the British Parliament actually worked. Also in 1983, he was reelected to Parliament. His second tenure with Parliament saw more significant appointments: treasury whip, undersecretary, and minister of state in the department of social security. Major’s own social concerns were being given full expression.

After reelection in 1987, Major was given his first cabinet post: chief secretary to the treasury, which earned him the title of Privy Councillor. The banking skills he had learned earlier came into play as he controlled the spending demands of each department in government. His memory for figures became prodigious. From here he was suddenly and unexpectedly catapulted to the post of foreign secretary by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in 1989, only to be offered the long-desired post of Chancellor of the Exchequer a few months later.

This rapid rise did not stop with his role as chancellor, though it marked the height of Major’s ambitions. Thatcher’s autocratic leadership style was losing support throughout the country and among her own colleagues. The party was losing support in the opinion polls, and it seemed the Conservatives would lose the next election. Thatcher’s leadership was challenged finally by Michael Heseltine, a popular but previously ousted cabinet minister. In the leadership elections of November 1990, Thatcher withdrew after an inconclusive first vote. Major was nominated as a candidate who could be a natural successor to Thatcher, whose policies, for the most part, he endorsed. He also was someone from the center of the party, who could hold the party together. Major was elected prime minister.

The first Persian Gulf War, which began in response to Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, immediately plunged Major into the world arena. At home, he consolidated many of Thatcher’s policies, for example, restraining the power of the trade unions. He launched his Citizen’s Charter and drew Britain into closer ties with Europe.

The election of 1992 was one the Conservatives had been about to lose, but it was suddenly pulled back for them by their new leadership. Labour’s ambitious spending plans were exposed, and the Conservatives still seemed the safer party. Even so, their majority was small, and Major had to fight for each term of office with sometimes no majority. Major launched fresh and partly successful initiatives for peace in Northern Ireland, despite having his London residence at 10 Downing Street attacked by the Irish Republican Army while a cabinet meeting was in session. He inaugurated a national lottery and made public services, including education and the health service, accountable through “league tables” of annual results. Economically, after a disastrous period of inflation and withdrawal from the European exchange mechanism, his economic policies began to work, and a period of gradual prosperity took hold.

Abroad, the Bosnian conflict required Major to use all his diplomatic skills to help find a peaceful solution. The fall of the Iron Curtain and the end of apartheid in South Africa eased other difficult foreign issues. However, on the issue of whether Britain should commit to greater European integration, his party split down the middle. Major’s gradualist policy was unable to hold the party together.

At one time in 1995, Major dramatically resigned as party leader to try to force unity. Although easily reelected, the ploy failed. This, and growing stories of individual ministers’ corruption, kept opinion polls predicting massive electoral defeat. The rise of new Labour under Tony Blair gave the British public a viable alternative. In the 1997 elections, Major’s party suffered a massive defeat, though he himself was reelected.

Major resigned as leader of the party but remained a member of Parliament for an additional term before retiring from politics in 2001. He refused a lordship, which would have enabled him to sit in the House of Lords and continue his political career. However, he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 2005. He remains a mostly respected voice in British politics, though he is not actively engaged as a politician. He has been an outspoken advocate for the United Kingdom (UK) to use its soft, or cultural, power, as opposed to its military power, to heighten its global image. Also, he has been a critic of Scotland's quest for independence. He is a sought after speaker for private events.

Major remained a consistant public figure through sports affiliations and charity work. From 2005 to 2011, he served on the committee of the Marylebone Cricket Club. He was a patron of SeeAbility, a charity for sight loss and learning disability, from 2006 to 2012, at which time he was appointed a vice-president of the charity. Also in 2012, Major became the chairman of the Queen Elizabeth Diamond Jubilee Trust.

In the late 2010s, Major was a vocal opponent of Brexit, the UK's 2016 decision to leave the European Union (EU). Throughout the early 2020s, he made several speeches that criticized both then-Prime Minister Boris Johnson and Brexit. In a 2023 speech to Members of Parliament, Major called the decision to leave the EU a “colossal mistake.”

Significance

Major’s greatest contribution was continuing Thatcher’s conservative policies, but he did so under a kinder and more compassionate guise. Public services became more accountable, and the railways were privatized. He maintained gradual integration with the European Union and was able to work with other world leaders, especially George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton, to bring some conflict resolution in Northern Ireland, the Middle East, and Eastern Europe.

The incoming Labour government changed very few Major policies, and it was the Labour Party that inherited the firm economic basis for further reforms. In one sense, it was Major’s centrist positions that Blair’s Labour government took over.

Major’s inability to hold the Conservatives together led the party to a long period of opposition, similar to the opposition experienced by Labour in the previous decade. He proved, too, that British politics runs as a meritocracy and not an aristocracy. Attesting to this is his humble beginnings, which did not keep him from rising to power nor from exercising that power. Later reassessment showed that Major exercised firmer control of government than he was given credit for at the time of his tenure as prime minister.

Bibliography

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Major-Ball, Terry. Major Major: Memories of an Older Brother. New York: Time Warner, 1996. Print.

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Taylor, Robert. John Major. London: Haus, 2006. Print. Part of the Twenty British Prime Ministers of the Twentieth Century series.