Sir John Major has been sounding off. Again. The former Tory prime minister criticised his party’s Rwanda asylum plan as ‘un-Conservative and un-British’. In an interview with the BBC, Major said he thought Rishi Sunak’s plan to send migrants to Africa was ‘odious’:
‘I thought it was…if one dare say in a secular society, un-Christian, and unconscionable and I thought that this is really not the way to treat people.’
Major is the man – let it never be forgotten – who led the Tory party to a landslide defeat in 1997. The former prime minister also presided over Black Wednesday in 1992 – the exchange rate debacle that shattered the Tories’ reputation for economic credibility – and the era of Tory sleaze. Yet now Major has the gall to emerge from retirement to give the BBC’s Amol Rajan the benefit of his dubious wisdom in a wide ranging interview on where his old party has gone wrong, and how it should proceed in the future.
Major is the man – let it never be forgotten – who led the Tory party to a landslide defeat in 1997
He says that he refrained from such critical commentary recently because he could not support much that the party was doing in office, and didn’t want to harm their electoral chances. But now that Sunak has led the Tories to a Major-style election defeat, he is once more happy to let rip.
The burden of Major’s song is familiar: the Tories are too right-wing and should appeal to what he calls the ‘centre-right’. Asked who he would be supporting in the party’s leadership contest, Major said:
‘I would like to support someone who’s going to look at the long-term problems and make a suggestion as to which direction we should go and bring people back into the party who are genuinely centre right.’
He also suggested that any pact with Nigel Farage’s Reform party would be ‘fatal’:
‘People may have made a misjudgement about the last election. We lost five votes (seats) to Reform UK and people are jumping up and down, and some, rather reckless people are saying, well we must merge with them.’
Forgetting the fact that Nigel Farage’s Reform party came a close second to the Tories in dozens of seats, Major, it seems, wants to adopt a style of politics more likely to appeal to wavering Lib Dem voters than those who backed Reform. Why?
Major says that he dislikes ‘intensely the way society has come to regard immigration as an ill in the way it has. I don’t agree with that, I’ve never agreed with it’. Yet he offers no credible alternative to stop the flood of illegal small boat crossings of the Channel.
Before rejecting Major’s intervention out of hand, let us briefly remind ourselves of his less than starry record when he was actually in power. Having won the party leadership race and the premiership against Michael Heseltine by posing as a Thatcherite in 1990, Major then went on to adopt blatantly Europhile policies.
Major dragged Britain into the ERM mechanism – the precursor to the euro – only to be forced to withdraw from it in 1992 (exactly 32 years ago this week). That decision ultimately paved the way for the victory of Tony Blair and New Labour.
Major’s other main ‘achievement’ was his ‘back to basics’ morality campaign. This ludicrously backfired when a raft of Tory MPs were caught with their trousers down in a succession of sexual scandals that made the party a national laughing stock. (The news of Major’s own affair with his fellow politician Edwina Currie only emerged later.)
Seemingly impervious to this dismal record, Major, instead of adopting a dignified and welcome silence, periodically emerges to blast the Tories and their subsequent leaders for departing from the Majorite programme.
His chief hobby horse has always been the EU and the folly of Britain exiting that sclerotic and undemocratic organisation. Ignoring his own catastrophic engagement with Brussels, Major has never ceased to mourn Brexit. He said in 2018 that Brexiteers ‘will never be forgotten nor forgiven’. But on this, as on many other things, Major is wrong.
No one can pretend that Rishi Sunak was a good prime minister. But his Rwanda plan was at least an attempt to solve a crisis that needs dealing with. Major is good at pointing out other politicians’ faults. But perhaps he should reflect on his own legacy before doing so.
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