258. Major’s bastards and Labour’s deal

By winning the 1992 general election, John Major had gained his own mandate to form a government, instead of imply inheriting Margaret Thatcher’s. He’d shown himself capable of leading the Conservative Party to success, as he led it to a fourth successive election win. He’d emerged somewhat from the shadow of his Iron Lady predecessor.

And then things immediately started going wrong. Black Wednesday, just months after the election, saw a major run on the pound that turned George Soros into ‘the man who broke the Bank of England’ and drove Britain out of the European Exchange Rate Mechanism. Major’s positive poll ratings collapsed overnight and never really recovered.

Then his own party began to creak as its seams, as a growing group began to emerge and express an increasingly strident Euroscepticism. That group mounted a rebellion against the government’s proposal to ratify what came to be known as the Maastricht Treaty, which converted the European Economic Community into the European Union, with more ambitious aims towards integration (from some of which Major obtained British opt-outs). Though eventually the sceptics voted with their own party’s government to avoid bringing it down, their behaviour had been so objectionable to Major that, in an unguarded moment with a journalist, he referred to them as ‘bastards’.

Meanwhile, in the Labour Party, John Smith, the well-respected leader who’d replaced Neil Kinnock after the general election defeat, died suddenly of a heart attack. There were two frontrunners to take over from him, Gordon Brown and Tony Blair. It seems clear that they came to a deal whereby Brown would stand down as a candidate for the leadership to give Blair a clear run, in return for a big role in a future Labour government.

Blair took over from Smith. He’d be leading Labour against Major’s Conservatives at the next general election. Our subject for next week.

Illustration: promotional image for Stephen Frears’ The Deal, showing David Morrissey as Gordon Brown and Michael Sheen as Tony Blair

Music: Bach Partita #2c by J Bu licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives (aka Music Sharing) 3.0 International License