When John Major speaks truth to power, only fools sneer at him

“So what?” tweeted Tory MP Lucy Allan, thereby taking two short, sneery words to dismiss a long, thoughtful, substantial speech delivered by a man who once led her Party, and led the country for seven years.

In the Tory pantheon, John Major may not be in the Thatcher league, let alone Churchill’s, but he is a serious political figure, someone of enormous experience and wisdom, whose reputation has grown since his government was swept away by New Labour in 1997. I speak as someone whose job back then was to help Labour get rid of him.

“So what?” tweets Allan, Jacob Rees-Mogg’s parliamentary private secretary, directly beneath a BBC headline, “Major – Brexit set to be ‘more brutal’ than anyone expected”. My God, what has the Tory Party become? 

The jibe was Allan’s comment on a Laura Kuenssberg tweet pointing out that the speech Major made to the Middle Temple on Monday was “quite something”. It is quite something, too, that a current MP would feel no compunction about showing such contempt for someone who gave most of his life to the Party she now represents.

“So what?” indicates a view, doubtless widely held among the MPs Johnson helped to win their seats, that what Major has to say is irrelevant. “So what?” says he is a has-been, of no significance and of no interest to anyone.

The crime Major had committed was to speak truth to power, with a calm, sober, and withering assessment of the current state of the government and the country. Sadly, in the age of social media, the role of the big political speech has been downgraded. But this was a big political speech and anyone interested in politics at all – one would hope that would include MPs – ought to be interested in the kind of big argument Major mounted.

Even before the Johnson MPs began with their sneers and dismissals, I had been sending the speech to all and sundry, emailing and tweeting it, fairly sure most of the media would not give it the coverage the content merited. They too have largely lost interest in bigger arguments that cannot be neatly encapsulated in a tweet, a headline or a short two-way.

In the speech, entitled “The State We’re In”, Major portrayed a country whose own government is wilfully leading it to decline. He was scathing about the lack of adherence to the rule of law, and the damage already done to our global reputation; bemused and alarmed at the government’s determination to pick fights with the judiciary, the civil service, the BBC; angered by the lies told and the fantasies peddled before, during and since the 2016 referendum; fearful that the UK could be broken in two places, Scotland and Northern Ireland, as a direct consequence of this government’s actions; sceptical that the “levelling-up” agenda would be met; sympathetic on Covid-19.

Of course, part of the speech’s appeal to me, passionately opposed to Brexit as I remain, was that I agreed with so much of his analysis on that. But it was also deeply refreshing to hear a politician make a speech that ranged far and wide, seeing individual policy areas as part of a bigger geopolitical picture, and warning of the severe dangers to the UK’s power and prosperity as a result of change taking place.

Not long after I read his speech – and that too was a rare pleasure these days, to read a speech that merited reading, and was not simply the endless repetition of a line the speaker hopes to get onto the news and into the minds of the people – Boris Johnson “addressed the nation,” as the media have taken to calling his press conferences. 

The news was good. Progress on a vaccine. For once, he was not trying to take credit where none was due, and nor was he overdoing it on the hallelujah front. Is it too much to hope, I wondered, that seeing what has happened to Donald Trump has taught him that over-promising to under-deliver is the wrong way round?

Yet towards the end, the “ummms”, “errrrs” and “aaaaahs” took up more time than the actual words coming from his mouth. That was the other thing I liked about Major’s speech. The sentences were properly constructed and clearly delivered. He was articulate. “So what?” I can imagine Lucy Allan trilling.

But I can’t have been alone in watching Joe Biden’s victory speech, and the announcement of his Covid taskforce, and feeling a huge sense of relief, realising that the American people have chosen as President someone who can speak clearly, without all the hideous verbal affectations we have had to endure day after day from Trump and Johnson. And even in his not-overdoing-it mode, Johnson could not resist tooting his bugle and filling his quiver.

There is no doubt who Major had front of mind when he said: “Complacency and nostalgia are the route to national decline. So I favour reality and optimism – but with the warning that false optimism is deceit by another name.”

Deceit runs through the whole Brexit story, and continues to do so. It was sobering indeed to be reminded of all the things we stand to lose when finally this Brexit saga is over. In so far as Johnson has a foreign policy, it is founded on Brexit and closeness to the US. But the one weakens the other. As Major put it, we are now less relevant, both to the EU and to the US.

Brexit and Trump are the crowning glories of the populist era, not least because they happened in democracies most considered too mature to allow such populism to take hold. “Emotion overcame reality,” Major said of the referendum debate. “Fiction defeated fact and fostered a belief in a past that never was – whilst boosting enthusiasm for a future that may never be. If that mode of politics takes root, it will kill all respect in our system of government.”

“So what?” I don’t think so. No sensible democrat should be so complacent.

Major tore to shreds the arguments on which the referendum was won. “It defies logic that intelligent men and women making such extravagant promises did not know they were undeliverable – and yet they continued to make them. It was politics. It was campaigning. It was for a cause. It was also unforgiveable.”

Johnson has reduced the options on trade with the EU to no deal or a bad deal. Biden’s election makes the deal more likely, but it will be the deal the EU now wants us to have, and no amount of flag-waving by the Brextremist media will hide that.

Major is clearly as frustrated as millions of others at the rubbish we hear on the airwaves. “There is no Australia deal. It is a fantasy: a euphemism for no deal at all. It is time to stop putting Ministers on the media who speak to a pre-prepared script and parrot misleading or pointless slogans.” Good luck with that. It is all they do.

And, however the negotiations with the EU end, as the twin blows of Covid and Brexit continue to rain down on us, was I alone in feeling a slight shiver on hearing vaccine supplies for the UK will come from Belgium, and have to be kept at minus 70 degrees centigrade in a logistical challenge far bigger than those of which the government has made something of a mess this far?

Heaven forfend if there is anything happening early in the New Year to cause queues and delays at the ports, or the need to build ever bigger car parks in the Garden of England. Tory MPs will need more than “so what?” to respond to that.

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