John major

Tories talking to themselves

If Grant Shapps and John Major gave a speech but no journalists were there to cover it, did it really happen? That’s what happened today. The Tories invited one pooled camera into their headquarters to see the former prime minister stand next to the party chairman in a belated attempt to prove that at least two senior Tories did not go to Eton. Loyal MPs and spinners delivered the speech line-by-line on Twitter; but the only interesting bits were briefed out to the Daily Mail last night. Apparently, Sir John could only afford half an hour off from watching cricket, so there was no time for a Q&A – nothing

The Tory rebels have two choices: shut up or lose the election

[audioplayer src=’http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_30_January_2014_v4.mp3′ title=’Douglas Carswell MP explain why he now agrees with this article’ startat=518] Listen [/audioplayer]Things could scarcely be going better for the Conservatives. Every week seems to bring more news of the recovery. High street tills are ringing, employment is at an all-time high and Britain’s economy is growing faster than that of any major country. No wonder the Labour party’s opinion poll lead has been reduced to one vulnerable point. Two years ago, the Conservatives had almost given up hope of winning the next election. Now, it looks within their grasp — if they keep it together. And therein lies the problem. Two groups of people are working

David Cameron’s craven surrender to China follows a pattern

‘This week I make a visit to China. I come with a clear ambition: to build a lasting friendship that can become a blueprint for future cooperation between our countries. We have a responsibility through our ongoing dialogue to work together on a range of wider international issues – from negotiations with Iran, to counter-terrorism and climate change.’  North Korea’s President Kim on the verge of his latest visit to Beijing? It must be. North Korea is China’s only ally in the normal sense of the word. With all other countries, Beijing’s relationship waxes and wanes depending on how ‘friendly’ Beijing deems them to be. But no, actually. This, lightly

Ground control to Major John

Sir John Major was beginning to make a habit of embarrassing Downing Street: by suggesting windfall taxes on energy companies and denouncing private school cliques. But he was on his best behaviour last night at the Institute of Directors’ annual dinner. He praised Cameron and Osborne for their ‘brave policy’, adding that their ‘unpopular policy’ had ‘been proved to be right’. He slammed Alex Salmond and the SNP. So far so good; but, when it came to Europe, the old dog reverted to being decidedly ‘unsound’. He believes that the EU would suffer if we were to leave (which is not something that overly concerns Eurosceptics): ‘Of course, we would survive

Sir John Major is right about education and privilege in modern Britain

Sir John Major is, of course, correct. It is depressing, though perhaps not surprising, that the British upper-middle-classes – that is, those educated privately – still dominate what he termed the “upper echelons” of “every sphere of British influence”. Depressing because no serious person can sensibly believe that talent is restricted to the minority of people educated in Britain’s excellent private schools. But unsurprising because elites – I use the word dispassionately – have a natural tendency to do whatever it takes to maintain their elite status. Ed West is right about this. Still, Major’s remarks were hardly, as has been claimed in some right-of-centre quarters, “an attack” on private education.

Should state education be abolished?

These days I find myself so drifting away from the bounds of acceptable opinion that I don’t even shout at Radio 4 for being biased, because I don’t even understand the basis of what the arguments are about. Take this morning’s schools feature (occasioned by Sir John Major’s comments about the ‘truly shocking’ dominance of a privately educated elite in public life), in which Harry Mount argued in favour and Owen Jones against the motion that grammar schools lead to more social mobility than comprehensives. listen to ‘Owen Jones and Harry Mount on social mobility’ on Audioboo

Sir John Major and the Number 10 vacuum

When Ed Miliband announced his eye-catching energy policy, Tory MPs hoped that their party would respond in kind with something similarly interesting to voters but that would really work. They hoped this would underline that the Conservative party is the party of government, while Miliband was only suitable for opposition. George Osborne’s conference fuel duty freeze and his noises about green taxes and levies on fuel bills reassured many of them, but Sir John Major’s intervention yesterday has highlighted the vacuum caused by a refusal by Number 10 to engage with what one strategist described to me as ‘the footling little things’. One MP said after Major’s speech: ‘Number 10

Transcript: John Major calls for an emergency tax on energy companies

Sir John Major told a Westminster lunch this afternoon that the government should impose an emergency tax upon the energy companies to help families keep warm this winter. Here is a transcript of what the former Conservative Prime Minister said: I think when Ed Miliband made his suggestions about energy some weeks ago, I think his heart was in the right place but his head had gone walkabout. But he did touch on an issue that’s very important. The private sector is something the Conservative party supports, but when the private sector goes wrong, or behaves badly, I think it’s entirely right to make changes and put it right. Governments

Our rulers don’t seem to care that the National Lottery fleeces the poor

Now the latest on the Politicians Keeping In Touch front. It’s funny how it’s the wives who take the brunt of the endeavour. It was Samantha Cameron yesterday who had to parade at the Tory party conference in a teal £42 polyester dress from Asos.com…no question, then, of Mr Cameron being asked to take a turn in an M&S suit. Alas, Mrs C did what every sensible person does who has to wear something from Asos or Florence and Fred (and may I say, given their modest cut when it comes to fabric only skinnies can carry this off) and replaced their belt with one of her own. It was a

Women think that David Cameron is out of touch for good reason

Well, the great breadmaking debate hots up. David Cameron neatly sidestepped the heffalump trap that Nick Ferrari put in his path in an interview on LBC when he asked him the price of a Value Loaf in Tesco or Sainsbury. As you and I know, dear reader, Mr Cameron would no more eat that stuff than his own fingernails, and I for one applaud his good sense. If you can afford not to, don’t. But his elegant solution to the problem of not knowing that loaf-shaped carbohydrate costs 47p (he thought bread costs ‘north of a pound’, which is true of the kind he eats, only double that) was to

A Classless Society, by Alwyn W. Turner – review

The title of Alwyn W. Turner’s book could deter readers. Even the Hollywood film The Secret Lives of Dentists promised more excitement. John Major sought the creation of a classless society in the 1990s. He confused this with equality of opportunity and social mobility. Efforts to engineer classlessness always end in tears. George Orwell was right: some animals are more equal than others — even in death. Orwell shares an Oxfordshire churchyard with Herbert Asquith. It was an insipid decade when managerialism triumphed over leadership. Ideas and intellectual rigour were kept in check, and institutions were repeatedly assaulted. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, this inertia may have been

Matt Hancock vows to fight low pay, but fails to emphasise the importance of low inflation

Matt Hancock, the business and skills minister, addressed the Resolution Foundation’s low pay debate this morning, an indication of how seriously the Tories are taking the rising cost of living. He delivered a resounding defence of the minimum wage. He said that the evidence was overwhelming: the minimum wage did not harm employment levels: and declared that the Conservatives should ‘strengthen’ the minimum wage. He said that the minimum wage should be enforced, and hinted that the Low Pay Commission might be reinforced. He said that working more hours was not necessarily the right answer, contrary to those who hold that Britain needs to harder and longer. Beyond that, Hancock proposed

Are the Tories united on Europe? Pull the other one.

Party unity is one of those things you can measure by the frequency with which the idea is mentioned. The more often it is talked about, the less it exists. When a political party is actually united there’s no need to mention party unity. As Isabel notes, Sir John Major has long, wearying, experience of this. The speech he gave yesterday is full of sound advice. Like many other leading politicians, Sir John seems more impressive – and commands more respect – as the years roll on and the memory of his own time in office fades. At Conservative Home Harry Phibbs responds to Major’s speech with a piece that

Sir John Major on how to win an EU renegotiation

John Major knows a thing or two about naughty Tory MPs and Europe. So David Cameron would do well to listen to his Chatham House speech today in which he advised the PM to give up on the ‘irreconcilables who are prepared to bring own any government or any Prime Minister in support of their opposition to the European Union’. He made two particularly strong points: 1. The Prime Minister should start preparing for the negotiation now. Major doesn’t want the UK to leave the European Union, and neither does Cameron. So the former Tory Prime Minister gave a detailed briefing on how Cameron can avoid this. A referendum would

The View from 22 — BBC in crisis, a Major problem for the Conservatives and Lost in Europe

What is going to happen next with the BBC Jimmy Salvile saga? In this week’s magazine cover, Rod Liddle blames institutional problems within the organisation and predicts there will be plenty of buck-passing to come. Fraser Nelson says in this week’s View from 22 podcast that although he sympathises with the decision the BBC took, he believes there are more scalps to come: ‘As an editor myself, I know that if you are to come up with a story that makes an explosive allegation it has got to be absolutely nuclear-proof nowadays and if it’s not, if there is a slightest bit of chink in your armour, it could sink

Steerpike at the Tories’: Grant Shapps’ ‘how to guide’ on gate-crashing

If warm white wine and dodgy canapés are your thing, then party conferences will be your heaven and I urge you to gate-crash them before the parties become extinct. Gate-crashing is an innate skill. Mr Steerpike crashed a members-only do for constituency bigwigs at the Tories’ tempestuous conference in Birmingham, and found himself in good company: Tory party chairman Grant Shapps revealed that he is an expert gate-crasher. Back in the nineties, ‘a strong young Conservative, who was never going to be a real security threat’ swiped John Major’s schedule and invitation list for an entire party conference in the loos. While a flustered member of the prime minister’s security detail scoured

Sir John Major glimpses the sunny uplands

The standard joke is that Sir John Major is the ultimate grey man, as if Charles Pooter had been painted by Wilhelm Hammershoi in particularly pallid light. But the pea-eating caricature of yesteryear was not in evidence on the Andrew Marr Show this morning. There was something calm and old-fashioned about Major during his interview; even his platitudes carried an air of wisdom. The former Disability Minister praised the Olympic and Paralympic Games, revelling in the fact that the games had revived aspects of our national character which he had assumed dead. The conversation was about old times: his father’s career in Music Halls during the early years of the

Blair’s bid for elder statesmanship

Tony Blair has chosen this summer to launch his re-entry mission into British politics. He hired a UK communications director in May, guest-edited the Evening Standard yesterday and agreed to a rather intriguing interview in same paper, stating he would like to return to office, while accepting it was not likely. So what is the aim of Mr Blair’s new campaign? Blair had little choice than to take a back seat during the Brown premiership. But the dismal failure of his successor, followed by Miliband’s growing authority and strong Labour polling, makes now the perfect time for the former prime minister to start rehabilitating his image. Until now, he has

Lord Leveson’s generation game

It was back to the future at the Leveson inquiry today, as Sir John Major suggested how the press might be regulated. He was calm and confident, launching the odd softly-spoken salvo at former enemies, among them Rupert Murdoch. He said: “Certainly he [Murdoch] never asked for anything directly from me but he was not averse to pressing for policy changes. In the run up to the 1997 general election in my third and last meeting with him on 2 February 1997 he made it clear that he disliked my European policies which he wished me to change….If not, his papers could not and would not support the Conservative government.’

The Tory leadership is still fighting John Major’s battles

Bruce Anderson has written a typically trenchant piece today describing the Tory party’s treatment of John Major as ‘the most unworthy, the most shameful, period in Tory history.’ Based on both how close Bruce is to those around David Cameron and my own conversations, I would say that this is a verdict that many in the Tory leadership would agree with. Indeed, the way in which Major was treated by some Tory backbenches has informed — often with calamitous consequences — Cameron’s approach to party management. Take, for instance, Cameron’s effort straight after the election to neuter the 1922 Committee and turn it into the Conservative Parliamentary Party. This move was