Controversial!!!!

[daveon]

I listened to John Major this morning on the Today programme.  Major has always been a bit of an oddity and the controversial bit is I'll admit that I've generally had a sneaking admiration for the guy, not neccessarily for his period as PM, although I'll come onto that, but more for the way he walked away from the den of idiots that the Parliamentary Conservative Party was, more on that too.

I think, for the Tories he was the wrong man to pick.  Hurd would have been a far safer pair of hands to lead the Tories to a glorious defeat in 1997, then Neil Kinnock and John Smith could have dealt with the train wreck that the ERM was fast becomming.  It would have probably radically changed the current political climate, and the Tories would still be imploding over Europe, but it would be interesting to see them doing so under more talented management.  Major is a lot of things, but he was, given what he got landed with in the 1992 election, a pretty shrewd operator.  Ken Livingstone made some comments on this subject about Major throughout the 90s that people were always underestimating just how sneaky he was.  He obviously had numerous hidden character flaws too...  how else can we explain Edwina Currie.

His interview on the Today programme was really quite refreshing.  He's got no real political axes to grind and it was nice to hear an interviewer genuinely thrown by a politician who answered the question asked, pretty directly and honestly, and was prepared to admit where he was wrong.

Black Wednesday was a disaster - I'd completed a house purchase the day before which made it personal.  However, it is interesting to see it in context.  I was a fan of the ERM, as I am a fan of the Euro.  The problem was more to do with insisting on going in at too high an exchange rate, something I understand we did because certain people (Thatcher) felt that we needed to show how strong the pound was against the DM.  While it is now over 12  years ago, a lot changed around that time. 

There is a myth around that Margaret Thatcher was a consistent politician.  She was anything but, we changed fiscal policy throughout the 80s, what really changed was Major/Clarke handing over to Blair/Brown and while there are many huge differences in the way things are being run, some good, some bad - economically Clarke and Brown created something we haven't had in the UK for, well, hundreds of years apparently.  But as Major pointed out today, it probably couldn't have happened without the ERM and Black Wednesday.  I got the feeling that he's content with what he did then and was fairly blunt about that.  He was also quite sneaky in pointing out that all of this was a matter of record in autobiography - it wasn't his fault no one had read it.  But, then again, he's making 10 times what he used to in No10 in the private sector.

Finally, the other thing that has impressed me about him so far is he's not leapt for the Lords or taken the obligatory gongs that they normally di;sh out, even to failed PMs.  Maybe he will one day, but for the time being he seems content. 

Compared to Howard, or Smith or Hague, he still sounds a class act.  I wonder if the Tory party will ever actually find leaders again?

Comments

[drplokta]

I assume you mean "Hurd would have been a far safer pair of hands to lead the Tories to a glorious defeat in 1992", given that John Smith was dead and we had been out of the ERM for years by 1997.

[daveon.livejournal.com]

Sorry, d'h, yes.

[drplokta]

WRT the ERM: 2.95 DM to the £ was too high at the time, but since then the pound has been well over that rate, and is now just about back there. The problem is that 2.95 was too high at the time, but the UK and continental (mostly German) economies are so far out of sync that any fixed rate would be catastrophically unsuitable from time to time.

[daveon.livejournal.com]

This is a feature of variable rates which allows markets to distort things inside economies. The problem with the ERM was it was neither fish nor fowl, a banding system which could be changed or ignored.

The Euro resolves a lot of the ERM system issues but you do have to go in at the right time and then manage the problems that will occur while economies get in sync.

The problem I really see with it is it needs far more convergence on taxation and other policy than we currently have in Europe and that's possibly going to sink the whole thing.

[whotheheckami.livejournal.com]

I'm sorry that I missed that interview because I've admired John Major for a number of years. Mainly for the way in which he held the cabinet together and delayed the implosion of the Tory party after the departure of Margaret Thatcher. I don't think we'll ever know how much wheeling and dealing was done between the various personalities.

[peteyoung.livejournal.com]

I welcomed his low-key understated style after the bombastic Thatcher, and I didn't go along with the way he was constantly insulted for being the 'grey man', having no personality - this is politics and it's the policies I'm interested in - or not, in my case. Major was a far better manager than he was ever a leader, which is why the Tories eventually still lost direction under him, even though the rot had already set in long before he took up the reins.

[whotheheckami.livejournal.com]

He also had one of the most able and experienced cabinents of recent history. Major's problem was that they all had egos commensurate with their abilities. I'm amazed he managed to herd those cats for so long!

[daveon.livejournal.com]

I'd prefer to say that their abilities were in inverse proportion to their egos, especially in the case of idiots like Redwood.

[whotheheckami.livejournal.com]

Fair point - I should have said that there was a fair sprinkling of total [expletives deleted] in there too