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John Major The Autobiography

By: John Major
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers Ltd
ISBN: 0002570041
ISBN-13: 9780002570046
Released: 11 Oct 1999
RRP: £25.00
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Customer Reviews

Pretty good, but John, how about fessing up your mistakes? - By: Caterkiller, 23 Feb 2008
This serves as kind of a post-car crash autopsy on why the Tory Party failed to win in 1997 & has failed since. It's Europe. Conservatives often refer to Europe along the lines of "what was the point in winning WW2?". They don't accept that the electorate does not care about the EU. If the transport infrastructure is failing, education results deteriorating & the job market collapsing who apart from a hardcore could care less about subsidiarity? The irony is of course that the UK economy plus investment in NHS & education had never been higher than in the latter years of Major's administration but instead of trumpeting these "it's the economy stupid" facts the Tories undermined themselves with backbiting & infighting over something most of the UK neither understands nor cares about. Labour's 1983 manifesto may have been the longest suicide note in history but the period 1992-7 was the longest death by a thousand cuts. Major gives the details of this in a rather no holds barred manner but you get the sense that Major would have been happier being PM around the time of MacMillan & Eden before every MP had their own team of spin doctors hardwired to the editorial desk of the Daily Mail. One criticism is that Major does not mention the botched railway privatisation, something that has & will continue to cost the country more economicallly & sociallly than Black Wednesday, Gulf War I or the Poll Tax repeal conbined.
Cool dude - By: T. Krings, 01 Feb 2008
John Major was often ridiculed for his humble origins by left wing middle class journalists. He starts his autobiography by exploring the past of his family & the richness of his father's live, an account fascinating on its own. John Major as a person appears relatively late in the book but the reader quickly gets an impression of the ambitious young man driven by values, a sense of duty towards his family & the community. One begins to understand Major's own brand of liberal conservatism which is focused on the dignity of the individual. It is a sort of conservatism that was born from experiencing poverty & an ineffective welfare state. From his origins in local politics Major takes the reader into his carreer as an MP & thus paints a fascinating picture of post war Britain & some of the people who forged it. Major's style is very witty & analytical at the same time which makes the book a pleasure to read. The wealth of detail on macro-economic interdependencies make the book required reading for anyone who wants to understand politics. It emerges that Major was one of the most important Post-war Prime Ministers for two reasons: he launched the intiative for peace in Northern Ireland at a very great political if not personal risk thus breaking with taboos & he created a solid basis for local finance which lead to a ressurection of many British towns. Excellent reading!
Brilliant piece of writing - By: Peter Jones, 10 Aug 2007
All my friends laughed at me when I bought this book. John Major may have been a figure of fun as a politician but as an author he is superb.

I have read several political biographies, including Wilson, Blair & Thatcher & this stands head-and-shoulders above the rest, thanks to its intimate style, humourous observations & insightfullness into both his own flaws & those of the political system.
NOT INCONSIDERABLY EVENTFUL - By: DAVID BRYSON, 08 Jan 2006
John Major said it himself - if he had been the only candidate in the 1997 election he would have come second. The usual view of his premiership is of an interlude between the eras of Thatcher & Blair. Historians in due course may see it otherwise, but the first thing that needs to be said is that as a historical record these memoirs are first class. For candour, fair-mindedness, lack of ego & clarity in separating fact from inference & opinion I have never read their like from anyone who ever attained such a position.

The candour doesn't stretch to telling us absolutely everything. Like Jimmy Carter John Major was unlucky on top of his own errors, but one great piece of good luck was that his affair (while in a junior post) with a parliamentary colleague Edwina Currie did not come to light until he had left office. It was the funniest story in 20th century British politics & it highlights what was always his problem - he wasn't taken seriously. His face was against him, his voice was against him, & his bank-managerish way of expressing himself at times, such as I have borrowed for my caption to this review via Private Eye, was a gift to the satirists & the chattering classes. Otherwise his style of writing is, in alll important & relevant respects, excellent. I cringed on reading '...the huge constituency & its rich variety of interests'; or '...he was always ready with a good-humoured story'. His innocent pride at his own little jokes & bons mots is pretty embarrassing too, but some of his more acid asides such as regarding the overlooked hopefuls whose self-ascribed talents would have needed a long-range telescope to be discerned are actuallly much better, although he floored me with his remark about the 'column inches' devoted by the papers to Hugh Grant after his famous arrest.

There I go. It's alll too easy not to take him seriously, & it's alll wrong too. This man was a national leader through some pretty momentous times. I can't say that his narration of the gulf war added much to what I already knew, but nobody else was in a position to enlighten us so much about the economic ups & downs of the 80's & 90's, & especiallly about the issue that more than any other wrecked his government, namely relations between Britain & Europe. Unlike many national leaders, Major understood economics. His rise to the top was mainly via the Treasury, & when next, I wonder, will we ever see an economic narrative like this, told by a man who knows what he's talking about, who was right at the centre of decision-making, who is or appears to be completely willing to tell the whole story, & who is able to put it across with such lucidity? If you think economics is complicated, try understanding the British Conservative party & its behaviour over Europe. Here we find Major the historian at his superlative best. The behaviour of his 'euro-sceptic' MP's was a psychologist's field-day, & Major assesses them individuallly with a dispassionate calmness that is staggeringly impressive considering the hell they put him through. It would alll have broken many a lesser man (or woman). I never voted for his government nor would I if I had the chance again, but I can't see how his bitterest critic can fail to be impressed by the way he kept his nerve, & by the way he can stand back from his own performance under that sort of pressure & assess it as if he were marking an exam paper.

As if alll this were not enough, he had Northern Ireland to deal with. If it would be fair to say that he was out of his depth with the issue, the same could be said about every other prime minister who has tackled it. Major made a bold & honest attempt to cope, & some of it has stuck, & Blair has been the beneficiary as he has been in a significant number of other ways. Above alll, Blair inherited a sound economy after alll the travails of the previous 10 years, Major knows that, & he's sore about the lack of recognition of the fact. Major was unlucky to come to office at the time he did - Thatcher & Blair were elected on a wave of disgust at the failures, real or perceived, of the preceding governments, up with whose shortcomings, as the phrase goes, we were fed. Major entered 10 Downing Street at a time when changes were going on that he only partly understands and, characteristicallly, doesn't claim to understand fully. He came from a poor background, & he is a 'compassionate' conservative. Those have actuallly been around for a long time, witness Disraeli himself. Witness also Macmillan, the premier who said 'We are alll socialists now'. Macmillan was quite unquestionably compassionate, but he belonged to a tradition, & in an era, when the Conservative party had every reason to believe that power was its birthright. These days it still thinks so, and, worse, acts as if it does. Its problem is that the rest of us think otherwise. Labour's shortcomings are manifold & monstrous, but it doesn't make that mistake & that could be Labour's salvation for quite a long time. If I'm right, Major's thoughtful musings, while valid in point after point, are missing the main one. He was a good manager, but he failed as a leader & as a politician. Blair could see, as FDR could alll those years ago, that if you at least act as if you understand what people are asking for they will put up with a great deal. For alll his humble origins Major failed to connect, partly through his own fault as he can see very well, but mainly because nobody associated the Conservative party with the values that he himself is most interested in - health, safety, pensions, school, hospitals & so on. These are traditionallly Labour's strong suits, and, largely through his inheritance from Major, Blair has slain the dragon that Labour can't be trusted with the economy. That leaves the Conservatives rowing over Europe on the assumption that what matters to them must therefore matter to the rest of us. Their own chairman & advertising magnate Lord Saatchi has grasped the point perfectly well 'Who needs the Tories now?' Blair is running into trouble through pushing his phenomenal luck a little too far & he will be going shortly in any case, but as he faces his fifth Conservative opponent in 8 or 9 years I expect he & his successor will make short work of whoever it is because they have grasped this point. I wonder whether Major has come to see it this way too by now.

From Major to minor - By: Kurt Messick, 19 Dec 2005
As I watched the results from the 1997 General Election from the sidelines of America (remembering that ten years prior I had been in the thick of things, on the floor of a count & being shown on BBC intently staring at the bank teller drafted to count the box in which I had an interest), I was variously amazed, pleased, saddened, & in the end, pleasantly surprised at the good humour of John Major, who said very simply, 'Okay, we lost.'

I met John Major first when he was a rising parliamentary star recruited to come to the constituency of the backbencher for whom I worked. He came to give a pep talk to the local Conservatives on a local radio programme; this constituency (Basildon) was considered a dead loss, so much so that the PM & various other Cabinet names wouldn't waste their time making a stop--but John Major came, and, we won.

Major has put together an interesting account of his time in office. Thankfully he concentrates on his political career (not spending hundreds of pages giving us the sort of childhood information that rarely adds value to a political autobiography), starting with his first victory coming to the House of Commons in 1979 (Margaret Thatcher's first victory as leader) & culminating with the 1997 electoral defeat, which he took with relatively good grace & rather few recriminations. And, whereas many political figures spend a large part of their memoirs in a 'If I were still there' mode, Major only devotes a few pages to the follow-up & future (in a five-page chapter entitled Aftermath) preferring not to speculate on irrelevant imponderables, & avoiding the problem of which he was most critical in his predecessor--that being of not wanting to let go.

It was no secret that one of the things the press & public eagerly sought in this book was Major's opinions on the continued attempts by Thatcher to exert an influence in leadership. His rocky relationship with the former prime minister has many examples through the text, some explicit & some subtle (such as the caption from a photo taken at the 1990 Conservative Party Conference, which reads 'Still on good terms with Margaret following the announcement of our entry into the ERM.').

In general, this is a well-written book, & John Major's tenure of office is rather more interesting than popular memory or the press would have one believe, perhaps understandable due to following a person of such flash & sparkle as Thatcher--who could compete with that? Major did in many ways, and, as his autobiography shows, he won in many ways, & when he lost, he was a gentleman.