The old values – neighbourliness, decency, courtesy – they’re still alive, they’re still the best of Britain. They haven’t changed, and yet somehow people feel embarrassed by them … It is time to return to those old core values, time to get back to basics, to self-discipline and respect for the law, to consideration for others, to accepting responsibility for yourself and your family and not shuffling off on other people and the state.
As such, it should have been unexceptionable, but Major did not foresee the reaction of the press.
It is imprudent in any government to pose as moral guardian, but the danger here was greater yet. The ‘Back to Basics’ speech was quickly construed as an appeal to some potent but hazy notion of Victorian sexual probity, despite Major’s own denials. It was unfortunate that the country in 1993 was falling prey to what Macaulay termed ‘one of its periodic fits of morality’. In this instance, the supposed fecklessness of single mothers was the object. The more right-wing members of the government openly fanned this resentment, evoking the Victorian distinction between ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ poor. The party that proclaimed itself a tower of rectitude was ripe for shaking.
The News of the World began the frenzy. David Mellor, a close ally of the prime minister, was discovered to be having an affair with an actress called Antonia de Sancha. Piers Morgan, then editor of the News of the World, remarked that ‘probably every Tory MP is up to some sort of sexual shenanigans’. And so it proved. In January 1994, scarcely a day passed without a Tory MP being unmasked. One vocal supporter of the ‘Back to Basics’ campaign, Tim Yeo, was found to have fathered a child outside his marriage; it was, to use the period’s most popular euphemism, a particularly egregious ‘error of judgement’. But not all the peccadilloes were sexual in their nature. Indeed, it was the fact that so many of the scandals lay in banal cases of financial impropriety that alerted Major to a disquieting truth: the press had turned against him. The Daily Telegraph, once the Tories’ sturdiest ally, was no more sympathetic to Mellor than it had been to Lamont. ‘It is not the business of the press to protect Mr Mellor’s family,’ a leader tartly observed. ‘It is Mr Mellor’s.’
1993 had been an unhappy year in every respect. The miners had successfully challenged another set of deep pit closures, but the closures went ahead anyway. The government’s probity was once more in question. That the pits closed had been the ones worked by the very miners whom Thatcher had praised during the strike of 1984 only added to the gall. Thatcher herself claimed that she would never have permitted such a betrayal.
But if 1993 was hard for the government, the previous year had been troublesome for an institution once thought unassailable. In 1992, Princess Anne divorced Captain Mark Phillips, the Duke and Duchess of York separated, Major announced the separation of Charles and Diana in the House of Commons, and Windsor Castle was devastated by fire. To these dramatic events may be added a slew of photographs, taped recordings and television revelations, all of which were damaging to the monarchy. The queen herself summed up her feelings in an after-dinner speech towards the end of the year. It had been, she said, an ‘annus horribilis’.
If the Tories under Major had stinted on bread, they had been more niggardly still in providing circuses. This was to change in 1994. The English had traditionally baulked at the idea of lotteries. Now, in the aftermath of recession, the advantages both to the nation and to the Tory party seemed obvious; all was grey, and a ‘flutter’ might provide some much-needed gaiety. It might also provide a novel source of revenue, as its critics felt bound to remark. On 7 November, John Major inaugurated the National Lottery, and with it a custom previously thought the preserve of those unfathomable continentals. And if it was, in some measure, a ‘stealth tax’, it was one that benefited the arts, the sciences and the lucky few who won.
It was in 1994, too, that the last great privatization came into force. The days had long passed when the railways were Britain’s boast. The system was complex beyond utility, the machinery archaic, the service indifferent. British Rail was seen as the last great nationalized behemoth and its privatization was trumpeted as a Thatcherite stroke against inefficiency and state planning. Less advertised was the fact that the move was in part the result of an EU directive. The result was a bewildering array of individual companies, each with supposedly discrete responsibilities. That the privatization would improve the rail service was doubted at the time, and the doubts remain. It seemed to many that Major could not get it right.
It was sadly ironic that this supremely conciliatory man should have presided over a cabinet more deeply divided than any in modern memory. Michael Portillo recalled telling Major that he and other Eurosceptics would accept even their own dismissal if unity could be achieved. He could perhaps have played Heseltine to Major’s Thatcher but did not take the role. In any case, Major assured him, he would never sack Portillo himself.
The reputation of the Tories for economic omniscience had been damaged by ‘Black Wednesday’, but there was no reason for them to despair. The recession had ended, and even ‘Tory sleaze’, the catchphrase of the time, did the Conservatives little harm. For after all, was there any alternative? The generation that remembered the Seventies was still politically alert. The Labour party represented, it seemed, a fast-vanishing constituency. The aspirant working class had long ago settled behind the Thatcherite banner, their ardour for political change dampened by affluence. If there was to be a successful counter-revolution, it would have to find its recruits elsewhere.
59
Put up or shut up
In the election of 1983, a young barrister named Anthony Blair had won the seat of Sedgefield. The man forever associated with the modernizing wing of Labour entered parliament just as the country rejected its socialist wing. As a comparative newcomer, Blair saw that there was no future in that faith, at least not for the British Labour party. It was fruitless, he felt, merely to rail against Thatcherism. The British had elected Thatcher three times, even while rather disliking her; clearly she was getting something right. Thatcherism must be understood and learned from – even, if necessary, emulated. He knew that any change in the party must be radical; pruning would not serve. Under the leadership of John Smith, he ensured that the block vote previously enjoyed by the unions should be replaced by ‘one man, one vote’. In democratizing the unions, Thatcher had demoralized them; in democratizing the Labour party at the expense of the unions, Blair sought to revivify it. It was the first of several links with Labour’s past to be snapped beyond mending.
John Smith died suddenly on 12 May 1994 of a heart attack. At once forthright and subtle, progressive and ‘right-wing’, he was universally lauded as a ‘decent man’. This is a sobriquet which tends in parliamentary circles to hint at someone ineffectual and uncharismatic, but he was sincerely mourned. Who now was to succeed him? One of the three contenders, John Prescott, put forward the choice with unusual precision. ‘The Labour party has always had a socialist and a social democratic wing. I am a socialist. Tony Blair is pleased to call himself a social democrat.’ The other candidate was Margaret Beckett, deputy leader of the Labour party and, like Prescott, of the Left. The result of the leadership election left the more cerebral Tories uneasy; Tony Blair had won, and with over 50 per cent of the vote.
The early Nineties were ready for him. The vines of Eastern Europe had withered before those of the New World, the pub had been succeeded by the wine bar, the public servant by the career politician, the celebrity by the ‘artist’, the adman by the ‘creative’. At its most extreme, right and wrong became ‘appropriate’ or ‘inappropriate’. Such curious verbal manoeuvres shadowed another movement characteristic of the time. ‘Political correctness’ was an American import. When not lampooned, it was assailed as ‘liberal fascism’, malignant and stultifying. The Guardian remarked in its defence that it seemed to be attacked ‘nine times as often as it [is] used’. In essence, it expressed what Martin Amis has called ‘the very American, and very honourable, idea, that no one should be ashamed of what they are’. Thus, ‘the disabled’ became ‘the differently abled’. While the idiom lent itself easily to satire, the principle behind it survived and even prospered. The Tories found it hard to align themselves with the new spirit. In local elections they polled only 27 per cent of the vote and lost nearly one-third of the seats they had won in 1990.