What was it like fighting New Labour? Why did Black Wednesday happen? How did Ian McKellen help bring the campaign for gay rights into Downing Street?
Join Alastair and Rory as they answer all these questions with Sir John Major in the second of two episodes with the former Tory prime minister.
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So, welcome to the Restless Politics Leading with me, Alistair Campbell.

And we are part 2 of our interview with former British Prime Minister Sir John Major.

And I think we should get to the point of you being Prime Minister.

So tell us how it finally came about, talk us through the those heady days that saw you finally making that short journey as you put it in your book from Cold Harbour Lane, Brixton to Number 10 Downing Street?

Well there's not much to tell really, it was fairly straightforward.

After Margaret resigned it was clear Michael Heseltine was going to be a candidate.

I wasn't sure whether I wished to be or not, people won't believe that, but it is true, because my daughter was just about to take A levels, my son was about to take O levels, and I wasn't at all sure that I didn't wish to stay in my previous job for a little longer.

But my parliamentary private secretary Graham Bright said, I think I'm sure you have a hundred and 50 votes so you can't run away.

You won that election, you walked in and what was your first impression of going into that job?

And what I suppose most importantly, what was the difference that you noticed immediately between being Prime Minister and being a very senior Cabinet Minister?

I remember we had a vote in the House the evening I became Prime Minister, and though I wasn't appointed until the following morning by the Queen of course, and I went in there and you could feel the conversation stop when I walked in.

And I actually made a brief speech in the Eye lobby that particular evening, and you notice there is a different attitude.

Power resides with the Prime Minister and that has an impact, and you notice that pretty soon.

Suddenly, people reacted to you differently to the way they did the previous day.

And that is as much to do with the office as with the individual.

I think there's a degree of formality about being Prime Minister.

It's not a question of being stuffy, but I think the Prime Minister needs a degree of formality because that is what is required by the office, even if not welcomed by the individual.

And tell us just sort of very quickly, but that of course tempts me to ask, give us a bit of a sense of Boris and how he rates in terms of the dignity of the office and the seriousness of being Prime Minister.

Boris is no longer Prime Minister, He's no longer in the House of Commons.

But Neil Kinnock once jokingly said to me, the best time to kick a man is when he's down.

He's down, he's very possibly out, and I really don't want him to continue to be part of the conversation.

He would wish to be part of the conversation, but I would wish to look forward.

You mentioned Neil there, I was going to bring this up later, but actually I will bring it up now because I want to talk about the Gulf War.

I was really struck in your book by how warm and positive you were about Neil, because of course the public will just remember you across the dispatch box, at each other.

You basically said that Neil was an incredible support during the Gulf War, he was an old fashioned patriot.

And I was really kind of quite blown away by your assessment.

And of course later, after he stopped being leader of the opposition, you made him a European Commissioner.

So I suppose this is, Rory and I, we have this motto of disagreeing agreeably.

It feels to me that that sort of defined how you 2 operated.

I think without a formal agreement, when I first became Prime Minister, we both tried to clean up Prime Minister's question time.

I mean, the purpose of holding the Prime Minister to account has long since gone.

It's a carnival in which the Prime Minister tries to cheer up his troops and damage the opposition and the opposition tries to prove that the Prime Minister is either incompetent, craven or whatever is the determination of the day.

I think for the first 3 months Neil Kinnock and I tried to clear that up.

We didn't have a formal agreement to do it, it just was the way things worked.

And of course our peers on either side eventually got the better.

The press said this is very boring and it went back to the old merry-go-round which is of no use then or now to man nor beast.

But I thought Neil Kiddock was a more considerable person than he was given credit for at the time.

I can only say when I shared confidences with him, they remained confidences.

When you meet someone you either are neutral about them or you think, this is quite a nice guy.

I didn't agree with his politics, of course, but I rather liked him and I thought he was quite badly treated by many people.

And he was very supportive over the Gulf War.

I mean when the Gulf War began it seemed to me if we were sending young men and women conceivably out to the Gulf to be killed because we were really worried about biological and chemical weapons at the time and the Republican Guard, if we're going to do that there are several things we need to do.

1 of them was a broadcast I made to the families, because it was their husbands, brothers, children who were being sent out there.

The second 1 was to, and I don't put these in any particular order, to make sure all the churches, Church of England, Catholic Church, all the churches were fully on board with the necessity of the war.

And thirdly, was to make sure that all the party leaders were.

And so I did go out on my way to make sure they were well briefed.

I was fascinated by that because so Saddam Hussein invades Kuwait, the Gulf War begins, you have to commit or you decide to commit UK troops And yet it's clear from reading your book that you really felt it mattered not just to get the politicians on board But you had I think you had the Archbishop of Canterbury Runcie and Cardinal Hume come

Well, I think it was necessary If you have young men on your behalf, they were predominantly young men.

I remember addressing them on a tank and I had this vast array of soldiers as far as the eye could see surrounding this tank in Saudi Arabia.

And I looked at them and they were very young and I knew, which they did not know, that the war would actually begin on the 12th of January.

And the 12th of January was my son's 16th birthday.

But for an accident of a year or so it could have been my son, I was looking out there, who could have been going into war and could have been killed in a few days time.

And I thought they deserve to know that they had the whole country behind them without a shadow of doubt.

And that was what, that was what was in my mind.

Coming on from that, give us a sense of what you thought the moral responsibilities of being a Prime Minister are.

1 of them is your Ian Macleod point about the moral component of politics.

And I think the second is the extraordinary transformation from being a cabinet minister focusing on 1 narrow field to suddenly having to be responsible for everything right the way through to young men going out to die.

It's quite difficult to answer that without sounding pious or sanctimonious.

Let me have a crack at it at the risk of doing 1 or the the other in terms of the moral responsibility and perhaps I can do it by mentioning the thing that I least like doing and most regretted during the time I was there.

On the day I became Prime Minister we were heading for a serious recession.

inflation was very nearly 10%, growth was down to half a percent and we were going into what was going to be a very deep recession.

In order to correct that we had to do some pretty uncomfortable things in government.

We had to put up some taxes, we had to cut public expenditure.

We did many things that caused an awful lot of pain to people.

The things that I wished to do when I came into politics were precisely the opposite of what I had no choice but to do during the period of that recession.

And the belief that we didn't care was simply untrue.

But I had a thing about inflation in particular because I remember in my childhood that for us to get through the week, my mother often had to borrow money.

I don't ever remember her in my youth buying herself a new dress or a new pair of shoes or going off to the hairdresser or spending money on herself.

And I knew there were many families up and down the country who would be in a similar position.

But I had no choice if I was going to bring inflation down and that was immensely damaging.

It made us look hard-hearted, it made us look as though we didn't care and many people would genuinely have felt we didn't.

And the opposition, of course, Alastair, were making it clear that they felt we didn't and that was perhaps their job, but that's what they were doing.

The moral aspect was it, if I may say so, On the day we left office, interest rates had fallen from 14% to 6%.

Inflation had fallen from, it went up to over 10%, to

Growth from being in recession was at 3.5%, which I think is the largest we've seen it for a very long time, and the public finances were 1 billion in deficit.

I don't think you'll find figures like that very often in politics, if at all in living memory.

And yet we had caused so much hurt and we had been there so long and we had blue on blue battles which is always absolutely fatal for any government.

For those 3 reasons we went down to a terrible defeat.

But it's also interesting to note that we did it because we thought we had to get rid of inflation.

And the fact of getting rid of inflation lasted for a very long time.

But I do think the way the government behaves, any government, not just the 1 I was lucky enough to lead, but any government can look callous when in fact the reasons behind it are much more complex and rather different.

Can I just ask you about the 2 elections, 1992 and

There was a conventional wisdom going into 1992 that you weren't going to win, and you did.

And I guess there was a conventional wisdom going into

that you weren't going to win, and you did.

And I guess there was a conventional wisdom going to 1997 that you weren't going to win, and you didn't.

Talk me through the kind of psychology of the 1992 election, because it was fascinating to watch.

Did you feel through that campaign that you were going to win?

I was pretty much the only person who did I think, but I did.

The first week or more of the campaign I loathed it.

The Labour campaign was very professional.

If I use the word slick, I mean it in the sense of professional, and it was very televisual.

And yet, when I went out into the streets, there was a warmth that led me to believe that we were doing better than the opinion polls told us.

If I made a long speech about education for an hour, it would get 1 minute on the news followed by 1 minute from the Labour spokesman announcing it, 1 minute from the liberal spokesman denouncing it and 2 minutes from a reporter explaining what it was I meant by what it was I said.

Though in practice, I'd actually said what I meant.

So the message just wasn't getting through.

And then I went to Bolton and it was a near riot.

And I thought, hang on, why can't I speak to people directly?

I had learnt my politics in Brixton as a boy, starting at 14 or 15, whatever, 13 actually, standing on the soapbox in Brixton Market and in Brixton Road, just speaking to anyone who was passing and answering questions.

Here was this kid who knew nothing about everything and it taught me something about British tolerance.

Many of them just walked on, of course, but they did listen and they'd gather in little groups and they'd cross-examine me, but nobody ever, ever told me to buzz off.

I didn't have a right to review and I was very struck by that.

So I was encouraged to get out of soapbox and I did it first at Luton and it was dismissed by many in my party who thought I ought to be on television but it worked with the public.

Was there something sort of almost primal about going back?

Many people thought I was silly, but it just felt right.

So it was a really wonderful moment where you suddenly rediscovered your genuine authenticity as a politician.

And I think it's an incredible sort of shifting moment isn't it?

Moving away from the slickness of television back to standing on a soapbox and communicating and then winning.

But I guess the question that comes out of that is Would that still be possible today or do you think we've now entered a completely new political media landscape where that form of direct communication has become almost irrelevant?

I think it would be very difficult today.

It was a novelty value in 92 that was so effective, I think, because people thought that politicians were growing away from the public and here was suddenly someone in the middle of election, actually in the middle of a crowd with a microphone, surrounded by large numbers of people, some of whom were shouting at him.

So it was a novelty value I think that worked.

Tell us very quickly about how spin changed things, the extent to which you felt that spin and the culture that actually Alistair himself was associated with changed politics during your time.

Well, it was part of a whole series of changes.

I detect in your question a degree of mischief.

I'm asking you to be blunt what you think about what Alistair did to our politics.

Well he did for Tony Blair what I could have probably used someone doing for me and he was extremely good at it and the Labour Party had been out of office for a very long time.

They had lost the 1992 election unexpectedly, they thought they were going to win it, and they were ruthless in needing to win the 1997 election because if they hadn't, there would have been a real question about whether we were a plural democracy and whether the Labour Party had a future.

So there was a range of circumstances that made the Labour Party completely ruthless about what they did and plainly 1 of the things they had to do was to damage the Conservative government and the Conservative Prime Minister.

Alistair and his colleagues were very successful in doing that.

Did you ever think, when John Smith died and Tony Blair became leader, did you think, we're not going to win?

I'll tell you a story that will give you your answer.

In the 92 election, Chris Patton, who was party chairman, lost his seat at Bath.

He was as able as anyone in our generation as a politician and his career has been extraordinary.

The following morning he came to number 10 and we went up to sit in the White Room and have a coffee and talk about it.

And we realized then that having been in government for 13 years and then got another 5 years just, we had stretched the democratic elastic as far as it could go.

Unless the Labour Party imploded, We agreed the day after the 1992 election, not in any defeatist mode at all, but we just agreed that dispassionately, as observers of politics, it would be extremely difficult for the Conservative Party, even if led by the Archangel Gabriel, to win the next election.

And therefore we should do what we thought was was right because we thought it would be extremely difficult to win simply because longevity people there's a time and tide when you can feel the mood changing.

think that's what's happening in the country now?

It may be I'm not sure yet because I think the Labour Party are making 1 or 2 mistakes that will damage them in the general election.

we foresaw the probability that we would lose in 1997, unless Labour imploded.

And so it wasn't a surprise to us in 1997.

The scale of the defeat was, but not the fact of it.

You've raised this question, this comparison.

What is it that you think Labour isn't quite doing to put them in the position that Alastair and Tony Blair were in driving into 97 at the moment.

What is it that Keir Starmer is not doing?

I'm not going to alert the Labour Party to what they're doing that will cost them votes at the next general election.

I'm a Conservative because I believe in what Conservatives believe in.

I believe in the unwritten laws of politics that we call conventions.

I believe in internationalism rather than nationalism.

That is the conservatism that I believe in, that I've always believed in, and I haven't changed.

Parts of my party may have changed, but not all of it.

So can I ask you a very, very direct question?

Did you vote Conservative when Boris Johnson was leader?

Who was a Conservative and whom is a middle of the road conservative and in whom I had faith.

Let's go to the big fault line for a succession of conservative leaders, probably going back to Ted Heath, certainly for Thatcher, certainly for you and all other leaders since and that's Europe.

Again, going back to your book, I covered a lot of the events that you were talking about as a journalist and

Well, that's because he's not as tribal as you are.

He's probably not trying to get a seat on Rishi's list.

What about the Maastricht Treaty negotiations, which I covered and I thought I had a sort of handle on but that felt like 1 of the most difficult complicated European negotiations.

So just give I'd really love a sense of who the key players were, how you sort of operated as you were trying to get the agreement that you finally got?

There were several points that were fundamental.

The Europeans were going to move towards the Maastricht Treaty whatever we said and if we had just tried to block it we would have made ourselves complete outliers in Europe and we would have lost all the influence that we had in Europe.

The point about negotiation is you give something to get something.

You don't just say I'm having this and throw your toys out the pram if you don't get it.

There were 2 things that were a red rag to the majority of people in Parliament.

1 of them spread widely across the Labour Party, the other didn't.

The first was not joining the euro currency.

Nobody thought I could negotiate a deal that kept us out of the euro.

The second was the social chapter which we conservatives believed rightly or wrongly was going to be a job-destroying event.

Nobody thought we could negotiate our way out of that.

And so those were the 2 things which led people to declare the negotiation was a triumph on the day the negotiations were complete.

And the biggest single mistake that I made in politics was not to get the Maastricht Treaty through before the 92 election.

There were 3 dates and the date I picked for the 92 election, the 9th of April, was a sentimental date because it was a day I met Norma.

But we couldn't have gone on any longer and so there wasn't time to get the Maastricht Treaty through and since it had had a massive majority in Parliament there seemed no difficulty in leaving it till the next Parliament.

What I did not foresee was that the nature of the Conservative Party would change with the membership of the Members of Parliament in the 1992 election.

The old guard who'd been in or after the war, who believed unity with Europe was imperative for the future security of our country, left Parliament and in came people who were imbued with a different view about Europe and were prepared to vote against it.

And I should have really taken the treaty through before but I didn't and so new people coming into Parliament led by some people who'd been there and encouraged by others who should have known better caused a great deal of trouble in getting the treaty through the House of Commons and it disrupted the whole parliament and in many ways blew the government off its programme.

And so John, of course, this then is repeated in spades when I was a member of parliament over the fights over Brexit and Theresa May trying to get her Brexit deal through and the rise of Boris Johnson and things.

But yours was the first glimmer of the way in which Europe could really tear the Conservative Party apart.

And I wondered whether, you know, we're all Remainers here.

But I wonder whether as somebody who was a Conservative from your early teens, you could play devil's advocate and reflect a little bit on why it is so many Conservative Party members then and now continue to be Eurosceptic and why that was such a strong tradition within the Conservative Party?

Well, it goes back to the Empire Loyalists, of course, if you go back to that, immediately after the war, they were quite a significant feature in the Conservative Party.

And that strand of opinion has always been there.

Tell us about them, I think most listeners won't know about them.

They were distraught at India becoming independent, for example, in 1948 under the Atlee government.

And they disliked the fact, they found it hard to come to terms with the fact that we were no longer an empire, that we no longer had the whole of the world with large pink blotches in which 50 million Britons as we were then actually governed a very large portion of the world.

It isn't that we have retreated, it is that many countries like India and many others that are in the Commonwealth have grown, grown enormously.

As of today for example, we British are 70 million people in a world of 8, 000 million.

So let's not pretend we can be cock of the walk in the way we were 50, 60 or 70 years ago.

Now that is a very hard lesson to learn and many people found it very difficult to accept that Britain wasn't an exception.

It went hand to hand with the growth of English nationalism, which has got far worse, accompanied by the growth of populism.

The 2 things in the UK have gone hand in hand and there are people in all the political parties who don't really belong in them, on the fringes of them, but who have gone to the 3 main parties because they can get themselves elected to Parliament under their labels and they believe with many of the tenants of those parties, but not perhaps all of them.

And I think that's what you have seen in politics on both sides of the chamber over the last 20 years and certainly what you have seen in recent years.

And let's go to Black Wednesday, 16th September

I guess of all the days of crises that you had, whether it was Mad Cow disease or the Gulf War, all the different things, That must have been the worst day of the lot, was it not?

It was and the most frustrating for a different reason, because why did we enter the exchange rate mechanism?

We entered the exchange rate mechanism because we had a huge inflationary problem and had had since the 1960s and no government Tory or Labour had managed to tame inflation for a long time.

Time and again things had been tried it had become too difficult too painful policy had changed inflation had dipped a little and come back.

I hated inflation with a passion I cannot begin to tell you because I learned about it.

If the week is longer than the family's money that's a problem and inflation means that applies for everybody.

So I was determined in our term of office not to back away from handling inflation.

We had run out of everything except the exchange rate mechanism.

When we went in it was to almost near universal acclimation.

Even the Telegraph and the Sun were warmly supportive, the Labour Party was strongly supportive, John Smith had been kicking me for ages about why we hadn't gone in.

Bank of England were, Paddy were, CBI was, only a handful of people opposed it for different reasons.

And just explain for our younger listeners what it actually entailed.

When we say joining the exchange rate mechanism, what were we actually doing?

It actually meant keeping sterling within fairly narrow bands and the base of it was the Deutschmark.

And what happened subsequently was the Deutschmark, the policy of the Deutschmark began to change.

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