24: John Major: The Gulf War, Black Wednesday, and Populism (Part 2)

29:19That's on the day. I'm coming to that. Yeah, wonderful. But so they can understand the impact. Tell us about it. On the day, we were facing huge outflows of money. We tried to protect, to stay within the ERM. We had signed up to it in Europe. And the only leave you had was interest rates, essentially. The only lever we had was interest rates and support from other governments. Strange to relate, we didn't get the support from Germany that we thought we would have. And later, when the French franc hit the same problem, they did get support from the Germans. So that was a very sore point indeed.

29:56But the fact of the matter is it became clear as we put interest rates up. We had got them down under the RM from 14 to 10 percent, I think. We put them up to 15 before realizing it wasn't working. and then we had to withdraw from DRM. If we had done it without battling, it would have been seen as bad faith apart from anything else. Now, maybe these days people don't care about bad faith, but I did then. Alistair, maybe it's a bit of a question to you. How important was that debacle in Labour's subsequent victory and how at the time did Labour present what happened to Sir John Major's government?

30:30It was fundamental, wasn't it? I think it was a defining moment from which the government probably never recovered because the sense was you were losing control of your own strategy and your own policy. Is that fair? It was a political disaster. Yeah. But what I was about to say was it was not an economic disaster because when we were driven out of the ERM, we were looking to see how we could withdraw because it had done its job. We didn't enter the ERM as a preliminary to a single currency, which is what the Eurosceptics always feared. We were never going to do that. Lawson wasn't and I wasn't.

31:06So we were looking to see how we could get out of the ERM. Now, that was more difficult because if you withdraw from the ERM, the markets say, ah, you've given up fiscal discipline and you have to put up interest rates. So we were trying to we were trying to deal with that problem. And the crisis came upon us before we could deal with it. So it was not an economic disaster for us, but it was a political disaster. How did you, what about personally, how did you feel when you were watching these screens and they're just going wild? How do you actually deal with that? Well, it's just something you have to deal with.

31:44You don't go and stay in a corner and weep about it. You just have to try and deal with what's happening and make a judgment as to what you can do. and we made judgments. I was in the room with a number of other senior members of the government and we made judgments and eventually we concluded that interest rates were not going to work. The die was cast. We had no choice but to withdraw from the exchange rate mechanism. Let me just follow on from Alistair's question about the emotional impact of being PM. Do you still wake up in the middle of the night sometimes worrying about things that you ought or ought not to have done as PM?

32:18What is the lasting emotional impact on you of doing a job with that scale of responsibility? The answer to your question is yes, you do. I spend more time looking back thinking about the things that we weren't able to do, not just that I didn't do, but that we weren't able to do because of the circumstances than I do about the things that we did do that went well. So the answer is yes, you do. And I think that must be true of everyone with any sensitivity who has been prime minister. So, John, what were those things? Give us a sense of some of the things that you would have liked to do that you could have done and some of the things you would have liked to do that you couldn't do.

32:56Well, I'd like to have done a lot more towards reforming education, particularly education at the primary level. That was one of the things that I very much wish to do. I thought we needed a complete reform of the tax system. Nigel Lawson had done a great deal, but it still had a lot of anomalies in it. And today the tax system is desperately in need of reform. other things that I thought needed doing, like the Irish peace process, like the lottery, things like that, I was able to do. But there were a number of things that I wasn't. Do you regret not having spent more money? I mean, of course, Labour came in, took the results of your economic boom, found a good exchequer, and were able to increase public spending in a very successful and popular way.

33:36Rory's becoming a sponsor for the Conservative Party's history today. Yes, I would have liked to spend more money. But of course, I wasn't in a position to do so. We were still dealing with the problems of inflation and making sure that it didn't get out of control and bring it down, which we did. As I say, from went over 10 percent at one stage down to 2.6 percent and growth up. But just when we were in a position where we could have spent and I would have spent, we lost the election and Gordon spent it for us. now listen you can do something very helpful for a lot of students who listen to this podcast because apparently one of the questions that's doing the rounds in schools and universities at the moment in both history and politics it seems is to what extent did the tories lose the election in 1997 and labour won it that is apparently a very common question so if they wanted to quote the former prime minister who was leader of the conservative party at that time what would your runs a beat of that?

34:42Well, I may be said to have a bias in that question. May I not? Well, I think in all cases, it's a bit of both. It's a question of how wide it goes. The Labour opposition in the 1990s were the most ruthless and best organised I have seen since my time in politics. And I think for the reason I set out, it was do or die for them. If they hadn't won that election, would there had been a credible Labour Party in the future. So they were completely ruthless. They had an extremely friendly press because we had been there too long. It was partly a problem that I was neither very right wing or nor very left wing.

35:20And of course, that did remove from you some of the natural support you might otherwise have got. And many of the policies, if I may put it this way, that Tony Blair successfully introduced, I supported because they had been my policies before they were his policies, except that the Labour Party branded them much better than I had done. So you're basically still labouring under this illusion that it was all about the communication, not Tony Blair's... No, no, no, no, I don't think it was all about the communication, but I do think the communication was very important. And our communication, after 13 years, there comes a time, I think, when people cease to listen in such a friendly fashion as they do there's a balance where people will give you the the benefit of the doubt and people where they won't and at some point the benefit of the doubt goes it went on black wednesday and that was crucial as you rightly said so john you you've talked about they labor being very ruthless you could almost have said you were being pretty ruthless because you're sitting opposite alistair campbell and and i wanted to know whether when you think back to that period, do you think like a kind of tough Machiavellian politician, we should have communicated just as ruthlessly and just as brutally as they did and taking the election?

36:41Or do you actually think that the brutality and the ruthlessness of that communication damaged British politics in some way? It's difficult to go back and be clear about that. It certainly set a new trend in forceful politics. That is undoubtedly the case, I think, in the 1990s. By the way, I think Neil Kennett would argue about some of the stuff that the Tories did to him. He would. He would. I mean, he'd argue about the tax bombshell and things like that, which are the sort of things I had in my mind, because all political parties will present their side of the case as though it is beyond doubt that that is the right thing.

37:18And that's the nature of political debate. The question is, which side of the political divide has a public audience at that moment? And at that moment in the 1990s, The audience was listening to the Labour Party and not to the Conservative Party. I want to talk a little bit about, you mentioned Ireland there. Just give us a sense of your relationship with Albert Reynolds, which became key to the establishment of the peace process. And also, I guess, just more broadly, how important these personal relationships are in politics and foreign policy. Oh, I think they can be very important indeed. need.

37:58And I think Albert Reynolds was very important. Albert and I had met when we were both finance ministers. And we met mostly at finance ministers because in those days, the Irish and the British rarely met, except to disagree. But he and I met at European meetings, and we got on well. And when he became a Taoiseach and I was Prime Minister, he came to London. And we had a meeting upstairs on our own, with a bottle of whiskey and two glasses. and we both decided that terror in Northern Ireland and on the mainland of Britain was utterly unacceptable and we should make it an absolute priority to do what we could to stop it.

38:40Now we both knew that that could not happen without London and Dublin working in lockstep. That hadn't truly happened before in the same way and we began to do that and it was very difficult to get the Downing Street Declaration, which was the first element. The first time in 70 years since partition in 1922, when the North split off from the rest of Ireland, that the British government and the Irish government had been able to agree on anything significant. And we set out the principles of what a peace process would be. That nearly failed. There was an awful lot of fear in Northern Ireland that we would sell them out and that they would find themselves drifting into United Ireland, which they passionately did not want to happen.

39:32And again, I had to use the churches to reassure them. I briefed the churches regularly and Archbishop Eames and others then went to the unionists when they said, can we believe this guy and said, I think you can. And so the peace process was a construct of many hands. It wasn't just the senior politicians, although they had their role to play and were crucial. But the relationship with Albert Reynolds was a very interesting one because we often rowed fiercely. I remember at one stage breaking a pencil and throwing it across the room and we marched out of the room and had a real fight in Dublin Castle.

40:12What was that about? It was about the last agreements that were necessary for the Downing Street Declaration. And we were both aggrieved with one another. I thought he had been going behind our back and he thought I had been going behind his back. So we had a really rough discussion. And then out of that discussion came agreement. And 10 days later, with a few I's dotted and T's crossed, we were able to announce the declaration. One of the things, Sir John, which I really admire you for, is the stance that you took on gay rights. You were very early in inviting Sir Ian McKellen into Downing Street, you led the drive personally to drop the age of consent from 21 down to 18.

40:53Can you reflect a little bit about that and then maybe think, are there courageous things that need to be done today? What are the equivalent issues that might face the prime minister today? I think there are lots of things. I mean, it was plainly necessary to deal with that particular problem. And many people are critical that we didn't go further than we did. But I was very impressed. I asked Ian McKellen to come and see me after some speeches he'd made and some comments he'd made. And I was extremely impressed with the arguments that he presented to me on a very human basis. And it seemed to me that the extent to which being gay was illegal and the impact it had on people's lives was absurd when you consider the people who were sent to prison in earlier years.

41:44and the sheer ostracization from so much of life that they faced. So I think that was the right thing to do. I don't know enough about this trans debate, to be honest, to have a clear view. But plainly, it's something that needs proper examination by Parliament. And I don't mean hot-headed examination. I mean a cool collective examination of whether reform is necessary, if so, what it should be. There's all sorts of problems. I mean, I know you're very keen on sport, famously famously keen on sport who's your favorite cricketer rory yeah yeah it's uh uh i don't know don don bradman god's sake yeah jolly good have you seen him that recently exactly it's a good question but i mean plain plainly there are lots of questions to be asked about that to which there are no easy answers and uh i don't i don't pretend to have the answer to that it's not something i've studied deeply i'm not in politics i've taken an interest in it but I wouldn't claim to be really informed on it.

42:46And I suppose also there's a question of protests. We have freedom of speech and freedom of protest in our country and defend that very much. Should we be worried when the protests take a form that prevent citizens going about their normal jobs, getting to the hospital to see people who are sick, getting to see people who are perhaps dying, not being able to get to work when their companies may be in difficulty because roads are blocked or whatever it is. Nobody wants to end freedom of speech. Thank God we can stand up and say what we like about people in power, and it is safe to do so in this country within the parameters of law.

43:25And there must be places where people can demonstrate. But is it really right to have absolutely freedom of demonstrating at the expense of the innocent citizen whose life is totally disrupted by it that's a debate to be had you mentioned the the build-up to the 1997 and i know because i've read your book again that you felt that you know the way that your back to basics campaign was traduced and the whole sort of produced that's a very kind word it was totally lied about it's traduced and the and the the sex scandals and so forth but ultimately here's where I'm going to cheer you up about your role in modern life.

44:07I think you can make the case that the reason ultimately that the recent prime minister that you don't particularly want to talk about, nor do I, but the reason why Boris Johnson went ultimately is because he was sort of held to account against the Nolan principles. And you brought in the Nolan principles, honesty, openness, objectivity, selflessness, integrity, accountability, leadership. There you go. And so that was, if you like something good that came out of something bad for you which has had maybe enduring impact do you think that standards in public life have been so damaged that we can't recover from what's gone on or do you think actually there is hope that we can get back to a politics oh i do oh yes i mean i mean nothing is irreversible i mean very little is irreversible and politics is like a great tide.

44:59It comes in, it goes out and so do fashions of opinion and fashions of behaviour. We have had times before when Parliament and public life has fallen into disrepute and been restored. So yes, I do think it can be corrected but I do think it needs action and example at the top. I don't only mean in politics, I mean in life generally and people have to be held to account irrespective of their position. I mean, you see that now in the United States in a very big way. I mean, quite extraordinary scenes we've seen over the last few weeks with the charges against former President Trump. Well, he is an American citizen, first and foremost, and the law should treat him as an American citizen, not as a former president.

45:46And that would apply to prime ministers, politicians and everybody else. But yes, I do think it is recoverable. What do you think we have to do to recover it as a culture, as a society? What do we have to do? Well, I think that we have to live up to what we say. If we admit the Nolan principles are right in terms of Parliament, to take that particular example, we have to live up to those Nolan principles. And people who do not live up to Nolan principles must pay the price for not living up to them. And if that is done and rigidly enforced, it will set an example that people will soon follow. they soon follow a slack example of not accepting the law or not obeying the conventions.

46:26We slipped into that habit quite quickly once it happened. It's reversible and it must be reversed. I sometimes wonder, Sir John, whether this isn't too optimistic. I mean, it's easy to see it as maybe just, you know, Boris Johnson comes in, he doesn't follow these codes, he breaks the ministerial code, and that somehow if he's replaced, things get better. But the rise of populism is a global phenomenon. And I wonder whether part of it actually isn't to do with what started happening to politics in Britain in the 1990s and the US in the 1980s. The development of a more aggressive, hysterical 24-7 media campaigns actually created some of the permanent conditions out of which populism has come, maybe made even worse by social media.

47:12I don't know whether that's pessimistic or realistic, to be absolutely honest. I could make a case for and against, almost as if I was deciding which side of an argument to take. I'm inclined to the optimistic side because there are so many people I have met who are not in politics, who are normal citizens, whom I've met in all sorts of different positions, who feel completely let down by what they have seen. And I think the power of that is compelling. Now, I can't possibly know how widespread it is in every part of the country, and I don't pretend to do so. But I do think the tone of the country is beginning to change.

47:59And so I am on the optimistic side. You may be right in your pessimism. It may have gone too far. Populism is a slightly different beast, of course. Populism has got a lot to do with political self-interest. And that depends upon whether it is successful or not. The book that your wife is very kindly reading. Remind me of the title. It's called But What Can I Do? That's right. There is a chapter which begins by quoting a speech that you made not long ago, the title of which was In Democracy We Trust? question mark. And admittedly, it was when Boris Johnson was at his peak, as it were. but the question mark said to me that you have real concerns about whether we are going to be able to sustain democratic systems i do no i i think i do but i think that's because in in in some ways there are bits of them they're a bit out of date frankly i mean there are several things i had in mind firstly i had in mind the growth of populism i also had because it goes hand in hand with this the growth of intolerance populism isn't a political creed it's a self-interested and selfish creed.

49:09It promotes its cronies, not the people who are best suited to a particular job. It recklessly seeks out scapegoats in order that they can attack the scapegoats to the general encouragement of the populace. It's an unpleasant way of conducting public life and it needs to be seen for what it is. If it is seen for what it is And if it is not supported nationally in the media, then it will be defeated. And I think that can certainly be done. But I had wider things in mind as well. Our politics has changed at the grassroots. It's very difficult to claim these days that the three major parties are mass movements.

49:54They aren't. Millions of people now have better things to do with their life than join the conservative, Labour or Liberal parties. and they don't. And the constituency parties have shrunk. And with the constituency parties shrinking, it is in the nature of life that the people who feel most strongly pro-Tory, pro-Labour, pro-liberal remain. And the people who are middle of the road, but on balance think this is the right mob for me, drift away. And the danger that arises from that is you're going to have people who are more Tory, more Labour and more Liberal as the people selected as candidates and elected.

50:35And you get a more fractious, disputatious Parliament than you have had before in which you can't lean across the aisle. And other things have helped with that. For example, one well-meaning thing was Robin Cook's reform of ours in the House of Commons. Now, it was meant to make the House of Commons more family-friendly, but it's had a secondary effect. it means there are no late night sittings Tory Labourers and Liberals are not sitting there in the smoking room or the tea room getting to know one another and talking to one another there were, used to be quite a considerable number of friendships across the party barriers it wasn't so tribal they weren't all in their tribal hideouts poking nothing but opposition at the other side and what about the institutions?

51:20what would you do about the House of Lords as a revising chamber? well, yes it is a revising chamber and that's a key point. There is a suggestion firstly the House of Lords is needed of reform it's much too big and there are too many people who really don't attend. A House of Lords between five or six hundred is ample and it should certainly be smaller than the size of the House of Commons because it is a revising chamber but let us consider it as a revising chamber. If you have an elected House of Lords, the people elected to it are likely to be people who could not get themselves elected to the House of Commons.

51:59So the cream of those willing to face election will get in the Commons. The Lords would be secondary. And if it was all elected, you wouldn't have the experience of the captains of industry, the great academic leaders, the leaders of the armed forces who have a lifetime of experience in revising the legislation. They don't make legislation. They revise it. And an elected House of Lords would not be in a position to do that remotely as well. So I do not in any way favour an elected House of Lords. I do favour an appointed House of Lords, maybe not the way it's done now, of a much smaller size than the one we have got.

52:41And in terms of things like prime minister's nominations, I don't think you can stop them and I don't think you should stop them. What I do think is you should limit the number of nominations to so many for every year the Prime Minister has served. So Liz Truss should get 0.6 OBEs in her resignation. I wasn't planning to determine what the award should be. But clearly, Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair, who served 11 and 10 years, would get more nominations than I would, who served seven or David Cameron, who served six and so on. because I think you would remove some of the irritations to the public if you were able to do that.

53:21Yeah. I'm amazed you didn't put any 29-year-old interns into the House of Lords when you resigned. Plainly an oversight. Well, look, Sir John, your watch is telling me we've already taken up two hours of your time, which is incredibly generous. But it does mean, looking at my long list of research, that we haven't covered China, we haven't covered Brexit, we haven't covered asylum and immigration, we haven't done lots and lots of the things i wanted to talk about i haven't got your assessment of the seven other living prime ministers which would have been fascinating to get but i want to thank you for your time and i hope that when you realize the love that is going to come your way from our many many listeners that we might even be able to tempt you back for a third episode at a later date we might even discuss prison reform and cricket and cricket with the ashes coming indeed thank you very very much sir john and very much hope to see you soon so thanks for having me thank you for coming goodbye so alistair um john major part two prime minister onwards what did you think well i mean to be fair to the guy he's 80 uh looks incredibly fit clearly is pretty fit but that was an awful lot of time you gave us there so we should both be very grateful for that however we didn't even get on to brexit so we covered a lot of ground we covered a lot of ground i did as as we left um uh as he left the building rory i did have a quiet word and say that we might have to get you back on at a future date to talk about brexit and china and maybe he'll also tell us where he thinks the labour party's going wrong well it's interesting to say i mean i i think he is sincere I think he genuinely is a rather wonderful man.

55:09And I think he is a pretty decent guy. I mean, I'm not going to tempt you to do what I failed to tempt John Major to do, which is to try to bring the other side. If you were being critical, as you were of him in the 90s, what would be the other side of it from the point of view of somebody who was fighting hard to topple him and make sure that Tony Blair replaced him? What was wrong with that government? um he said john major says in his book that the single most devastating line that tony blair ever delivered against him was when he said i lead my party you follow yours and listening to him now and also looking back at that time i just wonder whether it was at a point where post thatcher the conservative party was becoming virtually ungovernable and whether actually he had he did have clearly considerable political skills but i wonder whether he maybe didn't face down some of those people as strongly as he might have done but having said that he did in the end we didn't even discuss this we there's so much that we could have covered that we didn't have time for but you know there was the famous moment when he basically resigned whilst prime minister resigned as party leader and said put up or shut up if you want to get rid of me put yourself up and in the end john redwood stood against him um so he was in a sense doing the things that maybe i would have recommended that he do i think there's something in what he said about having the conservative party having been in power so long we'd had the whole thatcher thing and then he comes along he had you know he had seven years as prime minister he was one of the longest serving prime ministers well i mean i i think that there's a slight danger with both of you that you're both mellowing with age and becoming more and more generous to each other So why do you do the job that we both failed to do?

56:55Well, if I went back to the Alistair of the mid-1990s, you would have said this is a truly horrible government. They've imposed completely unnecessary destructive cuts. They've emptied out our public services. They've got a pessimistic view of the country. We need new Labour to come in. We need a new social contract. We need to increase public spending. We need to put social justice at the core of this. We need to restore integrity in Parliament, I guess, and other things too. This is why you've got to become a Labour candidate. Stop all this trying to go onto the Tory candidates list again. You've got to become a Labour candidate.

57:29You're such a Labour person now, it's obvious. So let me just push you on that one more time. Basically, Tony Blair and you believed that he needed to be got rid of and you needed to get in. And it was a very good thing for the country to get rid of him. So just remind us a little bit about why you felt that it was enough. It wasn't just that the country was tired of the Conservatives or he couldn't manage the party. you disagreed with his policies didn't you yeah i think i think that we had a feeling that the conservative party had been in power too long didn't really have a clear agenda for the future we didn't really get into a lot of the domestic policy stuff but if you think about how john major's premiership was defined on the domestic front he talked about wanting to do more on education and so forth but there was the whole citizens charter thing which wasn't of itself a bad thing to do but it wasn't i don't think was kind of defining the lottery was an incredibly important thing to do.

58:21But again, it wasn't sort of defining in a way that we think of the great political leaders. And on Europe, I think this is where the ungovernability of the Tory party is a factor. I think on Europe, his instincts weren't that bad. But it became impossible to take the country and the party in that direction he wanted to. I also wonder, I mean, it's also difficult talking about this after Brexit, but I was struck by how difficult he found it to empathize at all with the right wing of the conservative party with the euro skeptics that he basically said just wrote them off as these guys are leftover of nostalgic for empire now that may or may not be true he may or may not think that but that cannot have helped him in managing the maastricht rebels i mean you would have needed a prime minister who at the very least was able to think thoughtfully and respectfully about what the better arguments would be.

59:13I mean, you know, you could imagine someone saying, look, I disagree with them completely, but I can see they had anxieties about sovereignty or they had anxieties about immigration. And there are bits of the right wing conservative tradition that I respect, but I think they went the wrong direction. But he doesn't do that, does he? He basically is incapable of seeing the other side of the argument there. Yeah, but I think if you go back to what that must have been like for him at that time, again another very famous episode in his career that we didn't talk about was the thing about the bastards do you remember the bastards when he was the bastards here which is ian duncan-smith and people right well it was gordon it was gordon brown bigotgate moment for john major wasn't he did an interview with michael brunson of itn didn't realize that the microphones were still on the feeder was going through to the pool which i think was the bbc and he basically talked about these three bastards which at the time i think people thought were portillo and a couple of other ministers but it turned out he meant i think he meant people like duncan smith who were kind of not then necessarily high up in the government i think he had this kind of visceral experience of i think he felt that these people really really were trying to destroy him and i guess now i think it must be quite difficult it's a bit like when jeremy corbyn was leader of the labour party it was quite difficult for tony blair and gordon brown to think that's the party that we led into power and we were prime ministers and now you know we're not really even considered persona grata and i think there must be a part of john major that thinks that you know every time that speech i mentioned about democracy or the speech you made recently about prison reform or the interventions that you made in the brexit debate you know you often see when he's not on social media but i often see he makes these speeches and you see these awful tories out there saying you know has been who the hell are you you know get back in your box sort of stuff i mean i think there must be a part of him that thinks I did a pretty good job for the Conservative Party.

1:01:06And, you know, I'm now treated by some of them by the populist wing as being yesterday's man. Yeah, I agree. It is a very interesting style of communication, isn't it? He's, as you say, quite eloquent, talks in full sentences. He's very good at not being drawn on things. He's still quite sort of poised and restrained and reflective. Yeah, but listen, Rory, he's very good also at giving you an answer when he's not giving you an answer. So you asked him about, you basically said to him, could you please dump on Alistair Campbell, please? You asked him that one several times. And he sort of didn't do it, but he did it in a way which meant that, you know, if he was being completely frag, he would have said a few choice things.

1:01:48And likewise with Boris Johnson. I thought his put down of Boris Johnson was absolutely superb. I don't want to talk about it because that's what he wants. Well, and yet I think Boris was sort of the ghost at the feast there, wasn't it? Because when you talked about the Nolan principles, when he talks about the degradation, when he defined conservatism, that was basically an attack on Boris Johnson, wasn't it? Oh, totally. Absolutely. He obviously thinks that Labour hasn't quite pulled it together. But when I try to ask him what I thought would be a very natural question, which even I am very happy answering, which is what's Keir Starmer doing wrong?

1:02:22He gave me the answer that the Russian ambassador in Kabul once gave me. I was at a dinner with a Russian ambassador in Kabul and the Russian ambassador who was called Kabulov said, you guys are making all the same mistakes that we made in the 1980s. And I said, oh, what were those mistakes, Ambassador? And he said, you'll think I will tell you. Ha ha ha.

1:02:45Anyway, there's another Tory I've pulled in, Rory. One day you'll get me one, but anyway, we'll just have to wait for that. Thank you very much, Alisa. It was a great pleasure. Thank you. See you soon. Bye bye. Thank you.