Observer Interview With John Major

This is worth reading ...

He suffered at the hands of journalists; now former Prime Minister John Major talks candidly to a distinguished political writer about his fears for the press and his anger at the Blair media machine

Julia Langdon
Sunday March 4, 2007
The Observer

John Major's view of the world these days is stunning. Ten years after he lost office, the former Prime Minister looks down from an apartment that offers a panorama akin to the London Eye's. He makes a practised joke about being able to keep an eye on the Houses of Parliament, MI6, the Archbishop of Canterbury - look, in tiny little Lambeth Palace way down there - and all without having to leave his imposing drawing room. Is his apartment higher than that of his old friend Jeffrey Archer, whose penthouse is also within sight? Yes, he says firmly, with a speed that suggests he has already considered the matter.

So here he is, 10 years out of office, back in his native Lambeth where his political journey started more than 40 years ago. And there does seem to be something of a rather obvious metaphor here, not just about how much he has gone up in the world since he first stood, at 21, on a soapbox in Brixton market, but about how he has risen above all that he used to know and deal with: the machinery of government and state and church, the panoply of powers he once wielded, the grubby business of politics, and, yes, how to handle the media. He has done this largely by steering clear of comment of any kind. He rarely gives interviews and he emphasises several times during our conversation that he is not in politics any more, that he has moved on.

However, he has agreed to talk about the nature of the press during his term of office and as it is today, and although he insists that what he has to say is not prompted by the bruising coverage he has received over the years, there is more than a trace of bitterness in his remarks.

He has an agenda for our interview. I had been asked to propose in advance the questions he might address and he has evidently given considerable thought to his response. He wishes to make a number of points about what he sees as the way forward for newspapers and the broadcast media. He wants the press to accept a voluntary, independently supervised code of conduct, and he wistfully admits mistakes in dealing with the press when he was Prime Minister, showing a previously unseen self-confidence.

'I don't think I handled the press very well,' he says now. 'It's difficult to be clear why. I thought it was fairly improper to get too close. I'm rather a puritan in this respect. I thought it was my job to deal with policy and the press's job to report it, and I blithely assumed it was proper to proceed on that basis.' He thinks it would have been wrong to have used individuals in the press, or personal friendships, to try to influence the way his government's activities were reported, and he did not do so. I can vouch for him on this score: when he was first elected as an MP in 1979 and I was the political correspondent of the Guardian, we spoke often in the corridors. We got to know each other well and talked frankly about politics. When he became Prime Minister I was invited to Sunday lunch at Chequers - I knew he was acknowledging that I had spotted him as a politician who could go places, but our professional friendship did not survive.

He was deeply hurt by the press he received and quite uncomprehending of it. When I was political editor of the Sunday Telegraph I received a call from his then press secretary, the current Cabinet Secretary Sir Gus O'Donnell, asking me to explain why a Conservative newspaper was being so beastly to a Conservative Prime Minister. I had written a front-page story reporting that Margaret Thatcher had been raging about what a mistake she had made in supporting him as her successor - 'He is grey. He has no ideas'. All I could answer was that I was accurately reporting her words.

Now Major agrees - 'absolutely!' - that he read the newspapers too assiduously when he arrived at 10 Downing Street. 'I was wrong. I shouldn't have read the papers so much.' He denies that he regularly stayed up at night, nervously awaiting the arrival of the first editions - 'all that stuff was overdone' - and, in his defence, says that the volatile political situation he inherited, with his government effectively in a minority on the European issue, meant that newspapers had influence on Conservative backbench opinion, to which he had to pay regard. 'The most extraordinary stories were appearing daily and one did need to know what they were. That said, I should have ignored them more than I did.' Defensively, he adds: 'It didn't affect policy.'

He is 63 and doesn't look much older than one recalls him in office. He seems glossier - he is reputed to be earning £30,000 a pop for after-dinner speeches - although when he sits down, the yellow socks don't seem quite right. The big smile is the same, but there is an assurance that he used to lack. He is harder; scrupulously polite, but not interested in political gossip as he once was. When she was Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher had a handshake that discouraged loitering and propelled guests past her at top speed; Major has developed a similar conversational skill. He uses it to get swiftly down to business with his proposal for a code of conduct. The previous week, in a letter he wrote to the Times about the paparazzi pursuit of Prince William's girlfriend, Kate Middleton, he had described the idea that existing legislation could be tightened to protect individuals in such circumstances as 'sheer bunkum'. Proprietors and editors should agree not to publish photographs without the consent of the subject, he wrote, commending Rupert Murdoch for doing so. 'Whatever happened to common decency?' he asked.

Now, he says: 'I have been reading the press more regularly than others over 50 years and it seems to me that there are things that have changed in the press that have changed its character.' He is reading from prepared notes. He believes the existence of too many national newspapers has led to greater competition for sales, which has produced sensationalism and thus reduced their overall standard. I mentioned that there are not more newspapers now, but Major insisted there were still too many.

He thinks 24-hour news channels have made the straightforward reporting of facts into what he calls 'stale buns' for a TV audience that has been listening to the same news for 18 hours, and that consequently newspapers contain less news and more comment. His third point is that newspapers are much more politically labelled than previously, that it is difficult to buy a paper that does not represent a political point of view, and that while this had always been the case in the editorial and comment columns it is now spilling over into news reporting. In his opinion, all of this, plus the internet and the declining readership of newspapers, means a tremendous scramble for sales that ignites a pressure for sensationalism. '"Government gets things right" does not encourage sales. "Government makes another blunder" does encourage sales, so there's a commercial imperative that pushes sensationalism.'

He has other gripes. He doesn't think that journalists check their facts in the manner they once did. He worries about the degree of unattributable comment used as though it were fact. And then there is the harassment of celebrities, people such as Kate Middleton, who are targeted by paparazzi hanging around outside restaurants on the off-chance of a photograph they can sell.

'People are in the public eye but they do have a right to go about their normal business without harassment. This could be stopped by proprietors.' It would, he thinks, do wonders for the prestige of the press. We have an amusing diversion about Neil Kinnock, when Labour Party leader, taking a swipe with a rolled-up newspaper at a diner who had provoked him in an Indian restaurant. 'I rather like Neil Kinnock,' Major says, then collects himself and adds quickly: 'Anyway, he shouldn't hit people over the head in restaurants', and then laughingly refers to John Prescott in Tony Blair's words 'just being John' when he lashed back at a voter who threw an egg at him.

He pays tribute to some photographers - 'thoroughly decent guys' - who would respect his wish not to be pictured but bewails the 'mob mentality' that can take over. He goes on: 'There is something distasteful about those little boxes at the bottom of stories which say: "If you have a story about a celebrity please contact us." What sort of society does that create? Is it in the best traditions of journalism? I think not.'

It is an issue he addressed in government. 'I looked at whether a form of privacy law would be practicable and I reached the conclusion that it wouldn't. I couldn't see how you could frame a law which would protect traditional press freedom and also protect the general public ...' (The public's right to know? I asked. 'Yes'). 'That raises the question of whether self-regulation is working as well as it could, and I don't know that there are many people who think it is.'

The answer, he believes, could lie in a new voluntary code of conduct - setting out, for example, the right to the correction of a newspaper error that occupies the same space and page and uses the same typeface as the mistake - which would be policed by an appointed independent regulator whose remit the press would accept. The Press Complaints Commission, chaired by his own former press secretary, Sir Christopher Meyer, could not do this, he says, because there are too many newspapers represented among the commission's members. He dismisses the ombudsman system that some newspapers have developed.

The relationship between the media, Parliament and the press is a unique one, he says. 'I am trying to make sure that because we all believe in the freedom of the press - and I genuinely do believe in it - we have to protect that freedom from becoming licence. It could be done by agreement if the press agrees a code of conduct and agrees to abide by it - and I would prefer to avoid legislation.'

No, he has not discussed these ideas with his friend Meyer, or anyone else, and no, he is not putting them forward now because of the mauling he underwent from the press, nor even because of the revelation of his love affair with Edwina Currie. Her name is not mentioned, but I allude directly to this. He is aggravated. 'It's 10 years on!' he says. 'My personal experiences were a long way ago. I like the best of the British press. The best of the British press is very good. I dislike the fact that it's let down by the worst of the British press. The press could choose to do this [agree a code of conduct] if the press wished to do so.

'I am assuming that the best of the people in the press wish the press to have a very high reputation and wish to ensure that those who wish to misbehave are not able to do so. I am assuming the press understand the point about commercial imperatives moving them towards sensationalism and wish to protect the reputation of their newspapers. An agreement of this sort to regulate is a step towards doing that.'

So what about Tony Blair's approach to the media? Does he have sympathy with the approach the new government adopted after he was turfed out in 1997? He is incandescent. 'None whatever!' He believes New Labour's policy of replacing career civil servants in the public information service with political partisans was 'entirely improper'.

The Blair government politicised press relations within the government and in such a way that those whose words were previously unquestionably accepted could no longer be believed without corroboration. 'I think that was largely because of the way they spun the news in the late 1990s. It was wrong, completely wrong. It is true that we might have run into less trouble if I had had a press service that was not Civil Service, but it is more important for the integrity of government information to be upheld.'

He is similarly angry about the 'really distasteful' spectacle of MPs with pagers being given a political line to take. 'The sight of allegedly sophisticated politicians parroting complete tripe trivialises and demeans government and it has to be stopped. It's played a significant part in public disillusionment with politics and has led to the absurd situation where more people vote for Strictly Come Dancing than voted in the general election.' (Not quite, but we take the point.) 'It's very bad for democracy. But I'm bound to say I sat back when I saw what they began to do in 1997 and asked myself why the press accepted it. If you were favoured you got stories; if not you were frozen out and, because [Labour] had a big majority, the press accepted what was going on. I was deeply disappointed in that.'

He was horrified at the way New Labour sought to court the newspapers. It would have been 'absolutely inconceivable' that he might have accepted a gold-embossed invitation from News International to fly to any of their conferences. 'I think it's demeaning for elected Prime Ministers to keep in with unelected men who happen to be proprietors.' Surprisingly, he turns out not to be gratified by the negative press that Tony Blair receives now. He doesn't seek to encourage contempt for politicians among the electorate and thinks while the press has now realised that even Labour ministers have feet of clay, criticism of them has nonetheless swung too far.

Does he think there is a difference between the contemporary assessment of a political situation by the press and the historical analysis? OK, it's an easy question and the triumphant answer from a politician whose reputation in office was so tarnished is a resounding positive. He came into office in 1990 with three problems: the Tories had been in office for 11 years and were beginning to be regarded as 'stale' by the press; Europe; and what he calls 'a series of individual incidents'.

'There was a time when the Conservative Party went quite mad over Europe,' he says. Only two disputes in the party's history remotely compared: the reform of the Corn Laws in the 1840s and the row over protectionism in the early 1900s. As for the 'individual incidents', it turns out he is describing the sex scandals that beset his administration, unfortunately timed after he had made an appeal for 'back to basics' at his party's annual conference. The 'basics' he had in mind - education, family values, apple pie, etc - were not the ones for which his MPs became celebrated.

What now of the historical perspective of those drear days? What was the most successful economic period in the last 30 years and which government had the lowest tax proportion in the last 25? You've guessed? The answer, says the former PM (1990-97) and former Chancellor (1989-90) was 1992-1997. Who says so? According to Major's office it was Peter Sinclair, professor of economics at Birmingham University.

The figures? November 1990: interest rates 14 per cent; inflation 9.7 per cent; growth 0.5 per cent and falling. May 1997: interest rates 6 per cent; inflation 2.6 per cent; growth 3.5 per cent and rising. Says the architect of this success: 'When you look at things in perspective, you see reality rather than current dramas. It takes a long time. You need to wait for the academics and the historians.' He says commentators are now beginning to refer to 'the boom that began in the 80s' and that Brown is well aware of the debt he owes.

Major believes that Brown won't be in office for long if he does take over. He is extremely reluctant to be drawn on David Cameron's leadership of the Conservative party beyond saying, somewhat sparingly: 'I think he is very able and I think he will be Prime Minister.' As for New Labour: 'It has lost Labour's soul,' he says. 'It had a soul and a heart. I grew up in Brixton, with "old" Labour in Lambeth. I disagreed with them, but I admired what they stood for.'

He can't see them out of the window though, not now he's come up in the world. Brixton is on the other side of the building and he doesn't have a window facing that way.

• A longer version of this article appears in the British Journalism Review, Vol 18 Number 1, available from SAGE Publications, 1 Oliver's Yard, 55 City Road, London EC1Y 1SP (telephone 020 7324 8703; or email subscription@sagepub.

Major after No 10

John Major is a member of the Conservative Advisory Council, and the European advisory board of Carlyle Group; chairman of the European Advisory Council and Emerson Electric Co; senior adviser to Credit Suisse First Boston; chairman of Ditchley council; member of the InterAction Council, Tokyo; president of the Cricket Charitable Trust and Asthma UK.

Premiers on the press

I read a great number of press reports and find comfort in the fact that they are nearly always conflicting.
Harold Macmillan, 1957-63

As to freedom of the press, why should any man be allowed to buy a printing press and be allowed to disseminate pernicious opinions calculated to embarrass the government?
Winston Churchill, 1940-45, 1951-55

Christianity of course - but why journalism?
AJ Balfour, 1902-5

The press lives on disaster.
Clement Attlee, 1945-51

A lie can be halfway round the world before the truth has got its boots on.
James Callaghan, 1976-79