John Major: The Autobiography. John Major

      At the end of the week, I issued a statement of support describing Margaret as ‘one of this country’s most successful peacetime prime ministers’. It was a true representation of my views, but incomplete since it excluded my concerns. Nonetheless I would have been willing to help further in her campaign, but there was no attempt to rope me in. Peter Morrison was confident the operation was under control.

      It wasn’t. At Number 10 there was no chain of command, no systematic canvassing and not enough recognition of the political danger. During the crucial final days of the contest the Prime Minister was in Paris, at the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) summit to mark the end of the Cold War. In retrospect it is probable that a hard-fought battle against Michael (who did more than fifty press and media interviews within a day of declaring his candidacy) would have flushed out the two missing votes which would have enabled Margaret to win on the first ballot. Even had it done so, she would have been mortally wounded. In the event, those closest to her left her behind ‘like an old umbrella in a taxi’, as Tristan Garel-Jones put it.

      Nonetheless, Margaret was right to go to Paris. The presumption on all sides was that she was going to win. As the only other prime minister who has fought a leadership election while in office, I know it would have been undignified for her to rush around asking MPs for their support. Clearly a contest against Michael Heseltine was quite a different proposition from the fight with Tony Meyer a year previously, and the whips had warned her that he would get a substantial vote. Still, Margaret had led the party for almost sixteen years, and had won three general elections. Conservative MPs knew everything there was to know about her. If she had fought tooth-and-nail in Westminster, people might have put it around that she was being forced to do so because Heseltine was ‘doing better than expected’. Far better, she must have thought, to appear as one of the victors of the Cold War among world leaders in Paris than to throw herself into the Tory scrum in Westminster.

      I, though, was not on the pitch. On the morning of Saturday, 17 November, three days after Michael kicked off the contest, I entered the Herts and Essex hospital in Bishop’s Stortford for an operation on my wisdom teeth that had been arranged weeks before. Though I was discharged the next day, I recuperated at Finings, and did not return to London until the following Thursday, by which time Margaret had decided to stand down.

      When Michael announced his candidature, I did consider postponing the operation. I had been warned that I might be out of action for up to a week. The government was in crisis. The press in ferment. Should the chancellor be hors de combat? Jeffrey Archer, one of the Prime Minister’s most energetic supporters, thought not. He called to see me at the Treasury and urged me to delay the operation. I declined: if I had done so, the impression that I expected the Prime Minister to lose and was preparing myself to stand in the second round of voting would have been overwhelming.

      In the event, when Margaret had resigned and I did enter the contest, the rumour spread that my operation had been a ploy. David Davis, the MP for Haltemprice and Howden, picked up this mischief. It came, he thought, from an over-enthusiastic supporter of Douglas Hurd who was trying to damage my candidacy; it fell away swiftly, but it had entered the political bloodstream and was often to emerge, as though it were fact, in later years.

      It was nonsense: I was in pain from an abscess under a wisdom tooth, and had been for a long time. The operation had been booked weeks earlier after Jenny Acland, wife of the British Ambassador in Washington, had rushed me to a dentist there for late-night emergency treatment. Norma was insistent that the operation should go ahead, and Graham Bright, my PPS, also urged me not to postpone it any longer.

      ‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘I’ll report to you every day and let you know what’s going on.’

      ‘I don’t want you running around organising things,’ I said to him.

      He followed my orders, but he kept tugging at the leash – ‘You’ve got to stand’ – and his certainty began to persuade me that I stood a chance should Margaret fall. People had said this sort of thing to me before, and had left me unconvinced. But now I began to wonder. The support did seem to be there. Shortly before my operation, Terence Higgins, the MP for Worthing and a senior figure in the Commons, had called on me at the Treasury and urged me to stand if the Prime Minister failed to survive. Since Terence was a former Treasury minister, a Privy Councillor, a leader of moderate Conservative opinion in the House and one of the great mandarins of the 1922 Committee, I took his words seriously. I had suspected I would be written off by senior figures in the party as too inexperienced, but Terence’s advocacy was reassuring. I would make a credible candidate.

      Still, I was not keen. Late on the afternoon of Thursday, 15 November, as I worked in my study at Number 11, a call came through. It was Tristan Garel-Jones, ringing from the Foreign Office. Tristan’s reputation as a Machiavelli-in-waiting is so strong that it is easy to overlook the fact that in his personal behaviour he is very straightforward and rather old-fashioned. What he thinks, he says without frills, especially to his friends. And he did to me. ‘I think you ought to know,’ he said bluntly, ‘Norman Lamont has canvassed me on your behalf, and I must say I think his behaviour is rather improper.’

      I agreed. Norman was not acting with my encouragement, and I told him so. ‘If he’s doing that, it’s not my wish,’ I said. ‘I intend to vote for the Prime Minister, and I shall tell others to do likewise.’