As yesterday’s attack showed, there’s no love lost between Boris Johnson and John Major. Mr S has previously chronicled the many times Major has criticised his successor, with whom he so publicly disagreed over Brexit. The enmity between the two men stretches back to the early 1990s when Johnson was the Telegraph’s main man in Brussels and subsequently the paper’s chief political commentator in Westminster.
The-then journalist had great fun lampooning Europhile excesses at the time of the Maastricht debate, something which naturally didn’t make him popular with the pro-EEC Major as he tried to ram the treaty through Parliament. As Johnson later recalled:
I was just chucking these rocks over the garden wall, and I’d listen to this amazing crash from the greenhouse, next door, over, over in England, as everything I wrote from Brussels was having this amazing, explosive effect on the Tory Party, and it really gave me this, I suppose, rather weird sense of, of power.
‘I was just chucking these rocks over the garden wall, and I’d listen to this amazing crash from the greenhouse, next door, over, over in England,’
Major subsequently tried to get his revenge by blocking Boris as a Tory candidate when the latter sought to run in the European Parliamentary elections of 1994. Major’s efforts were unsuccessful and Boris was ultimately elected in Henley, the safe seat of Major’s onetime ally Michael Heseltine. The rest, as they say, is history. But now Johnson is in trouble, with his enemies circling in Westminster and a vote of confidence still appearing likely. From where can he draw inspiration as he seeks to prove his media critics wrong?
Well, Mr S has the answer. Flicking through a 2004 compilation of Johnson’s old Telegraph columns – Lend Me Your Ears – makes for insightful reading, not least for his comments about Cherie Blair, in light of claims made about Carrie Johnson’s own media treatment. How would some in No. 10 react, for instance, if a broadsheet columnist suggested an Eva Perón themed musical number for the PM’s Desert Islands Discs appearance?
But Steerpike’s eye was drawn to the column Johnson wrote in July 1995 on Major’s triumph in the Tory leadership contest. Under the headline ‘So much for the pen and dagger men’, the Old Etonian confessed he’d called the result wrong, beginning his column by describing the sound in Westminster of:
The gentle mastication of humble pie on the part of much of that which used to be called Fleet Street, and – for there is no point in denying it – your reporter had a mouthful himself.
For Johnson then delivered something of a ‘mea culpa’ on behalf of the press while noting that many of Major’s problems were not the newspapers’ responsibility:
One might conceivably follow Douglas Hurd, and blame the Sunday Telegraph for encouraging the Danes to vote no in 1992, and so triggering the Maastricht crisis. But one cannot blame Fleet Street for the decisions of Messers Major and Lamont to stay in the ERM, long after it had ceased to be economically defensible.
Wise words perhaps for Boris to reflect on when he mulls his current dilemma. Yet it was the conclusion of Johnson’s piece which might give him most succour as he battles to save his premiership. Reflecting on Major’s triumph over John Redwood by 218 votes to 89, despite the criticism of much of the Tory press, Johnson wrote:
The press has the power to convey its own public dissatisfaction to the Prime Minister. But it does not have the power to break him. Last night’s results proved that.
Something to remember perhaps the next Johnson receives another damning editorial.
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