John Major's tenure as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom began on 28 November 1990 when he accepted an invitation from Queen Elizabeth II to form a government, succeeding Margaret Thatcher, and ended on 2 May 1997 upon his resignation. As prime minister, Major also served simultaneously as First Lord of the Treasury and Minister for the Civil Service; he was also concurrently Leader of the Conservative Party. Major's mild-mannered style and moderate political stance contrasted with that of Thatcher.
After Thatcher resigned as prime minister following a challenge to her leadership, Major entered the second stage of the contest to replace her and emerged victorious, becoming prime minister. Major went on to lead the Conservative Party to a fourth consecutive electoral victory at the 1992 election, the only election he won during his seven-year-premiership. Although the Conservatives lost 40 seats, they won over 14 million votes, which remains to this day a record for any British political party.
As prime minister, Major created the Citizen's Charter, removed the Poll Tax and replaced it with the Council Tax, committed British troops to the Gulf War, took charge of the UK's negotiations over the Maastricht Treaty of the European Union (EU), led the country during the early 1990s economic crisis, withdrew the pound from the European Exchange Rate Mechanism (a day which came to be known as Black Wednesday), promoted the socially conservative back to basics campaign, passed further reforms to education and criminal justice, privatised the railways and coal industry, and also played a pivotal role in creating peace in Northern Ireland.
Internal Conservative Party divisions on the EU, a number of scandals involving Conservative MPs (widely known as "sleaze"), and questions about his economic credibility are seen as the main factors that led Major to resign as party leader in June 1995. However, he sought reelection as Conservative leader in the 1995 Conservative leadership election, and was comfortably re-elected. Notwithstanding, public opinion of his leadership was poor, both before and after. By December 1996, the government had lost its majority in the House of Commons due to a series of by-election defeats and an MP crossing the floor. Major sought to rebuild public trust in the Conservatives following a series of scandals, including the events of Black Wednesday in 1992, through campaigning on the strength of the economic recovery following the early 1990s recession, but faced divisions within the party over the UK's membership of the European Union.
The Conservatives lost the 1997 general election in a landslide to the opposition Labour Party led by Tony Blair, ending 18 years of Conservative government. After Blair succeeded Major as prime minister, Major served as Leader of the Opposition for seven weeks while the leadership election to replace him took place. He formed a temporary shadow cabinet, and Major himself served as shadow foreign secretary and shadow secretary of state for defence. His resignation as Conservative leader formally took effect in June 1997 following the election of William Hague.
Conservative leadership bid
Opposition within the Conservative Party to Margaret Thatcher had been brewing for some time, focusing on what was seen as her brusque, imperious style and the poll tax, which was facing serious opposition across the country. In December 1989, she had survived a leadership bid by Anthony Meyer; though she won easily, 60 MPs had not voted for her, and it was rumoured that many more had had to be strong-armed into supporting her. By early 1990, it was clear that bills for many under the new poll tax regime would be higher than anticipated, and opposition to the Tax grew, with a non-payment campaign gaining much support and an anti-poll tax demonstration in Trafalgar Square in March ending in rioting. The Conservatives lost the 1990 Mid Staffordshire by-election to Labour and the 1990 Eastbourne by-election to the Liberal Democrats, both Conservative seats, causing many Conservative MPs to worry about their prospects at the upcoming general election, due in 1991 or 1992. Thatcher's staunch anti-European stance also alienated pro-Europe Conservatives. On 1 November, the pro-European deputy prime minister Geoffrey Howe resigned, issuing a fiercely critical broadside against Thatcher in the House of Commons on 13 November.
The day after Howe's speech Michael Heseltine, Thatcher's former Secretary of State for Defence who had acrimoniously resigned in 1986 over the Westland affair, challenged Thatcher for the leadership of the Conservative Party. Both John Major and Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd supported Thatcher in the first round. Major was at home in Huntingdon recovering from a pre-arranged wisdom tooth operation during the first leadership ballot, which Thatcher won but not by the required threshold, necessitating a second round. Following discussions with her cabinet, in which many stated that though supporting her they doubted she could win, Thatcher withdrew from the contest and announced that she would resign as prime minister once a new leader had been elected. Major subsequently announced on 22 November that he would stand in the second ballot, with Thatcher's backing. Major's platform was one of moderation on Europe, a review of the poll tax, and the desire to build a "classless society".
Unlike in the first ballot, a candidate only required a simple majority of Conservative MPs to win, in this case 187 of 372 MPs. The ballot was held on the afternoon of 27 November; although Major obtained 185 votes, 2 votes short of an overall majority, he polled far enough ahead of both Hurd and Heseltine to secure their immediate withdrawal. With no remaining challengers, Major was formally named Leader of the Conservative Party that evening and was duly appointed prime minister the following day. At 47, he was the youngest prime minister since Lord Rosebery some 95 years earlier.
Domestic Immediate changes Major aimed to consolidate the gains achieved during Thatcher's premiership, whilst also seeking to spread the rise in wealth seen in the Thatcher era across society more widely, so creating "a country at ease with itself." Concerned at the rise of inequality and relative poverty in the 1980s, Major sought to position himself as a 'One Nation' Tory, with a more compassionate attitude to those negatively affected by the social and economic changes enacted during the 1980s.
Upon becoming prime minister Major conducted a minor reshuffle, appointing Norman Lamont as chancellor, bringing back Michael Heseltine into Cabinet as environment secretary and later as deputy prime minister, and moving Kenneth Baker to the Home Office. Major was praised by colleagues for his more consensual Cabinet style, though the Labour Party criticised the lack of any women in his Cabinet. Thatcher, initially supportive of Major, over time came to regret her support for him, often issuing highly publicised criticisms of Major that he found increasingly irritating.
Amongst the first issues Major had to deal with upon taking office was replacing the deeply unpopular Poll Tax, a task he delegated to Michael Heseltine. The potential electoral fallout of keeping it was again underlined when the Conservatives lost a by-election in Ribble Valley in March 1991. A temporary relief grant of some £1 billion was granted to Local Authorities to offset the costs associated with the Tax. In April 1993 the Poll Tax was replaced with Council Tax, set at a sliding scale based on property prices, paid for partly by a rise in VAT.
Following a series of high-profile dog maulings, the Dangerous Dogs Act was enacted in 1991 to tackle the breeding of aggressive pedigrees.
Citizen's Charter
Major was firmly committed to tackling poor performance in the public sector and the often substandard levels of service faced by users, of which Major had personal experience. Major wished not only to improve performance, but also to change the overall culture of the sector into one that was more open, transparent, and consumer-focused. His idea was to create a set of guidelines and benchmarks against which progress could be measured and then published for the public, collectively referred to as the 'Citizen's Charter', which was formally launched on 23 March 1991. Major continued to push the idea despite opposition from within the Civil Service and the sometimes lukewarm support for the concept from his ministers. Tiring of the slow progress on implementation, Major created a Cabinet Office Committee under Andrew Whetnall to force through change and monitor departmental compliance. A major aspect of the Charter process was the introduction of public performance tables so as to 'name and shame' poor performers and thereby spur change; such tables were duly introduced in schools (with league tables), rail (with British Rail publishing performance figures) and the NHS (with waiting lists). Following his 1992 general election victory Major continued with Charter-related reforms, creating the 'Charter Mark' for those departments and organisations that were meeting their Charter targets. One less successful aspect of the reforms was the so-called 'Cones Hotline', a phoneline which motorists could use to report out-of-place coneage, which proved to be an embarrassing failure and a source of much mockery. However, overall the Charter went some way to change the culture of public services in Britain, with most of Major's initiatives in this area being left in place and indeed expanded by the Labour government after 1997.
1992 general election victory
The UK economy entered a recession during 1990, which deepened in 1991, with unemployment rising rapidly to 2.5 million. The Conservatives had been consistently behind Labour in the opinion polls since 1989, and the gap had widened significantly during 1990, with Labour hoping that the economic gloom would convince voters to switch allegiance. However, the Conservatives managed to regain a lead after Thatcher left office, with opinion polls also showing Major as the most popular prime minister since Harold Macmillan in the early 1960s.John Major: A life in politics, BBC News, 28 September 2002. Major pondered calling a snap election 1991, but poor local election results in 1991, followed by further by-election losses in Monmouth, Kincardine and elsewhere, convinced him to wait. Major also hoped that the economy may have recovered somewhat by 1992 (the last possible date the election could be called), and he was also keen to avoid accusations of exploiting the recent Gulf War victory for electoral advantage. In spite of Labour Leader Neil Kinnock's repeated calls for an immediate general election after Major became prime minister, it wasn't until 11 March 1992 that Major called an election for 9 April.