Major revision

Since even Rory Bremner has seen fit to dust off his John Major impression (good Surrey tie and undoubtedly more fun than trying to do David Cameron and George Osborne) and JM now seems to be the benchmark for all things poor in a Prime Minister, it seems a good time to try to recall those not so halcyon days of the 1990s when JM was at the helm. And for those of you who have not read my CV, I should declare an interest as JM is undoubtedly the politician I know and have known best, as his Private Secretary as Chief Secretary at HMT, and then again in the Policy Unit at No.10.

One thing everyone forgets about John Major is that he was actually Prime Minister for a very long time - six and a half years - no Paul Martin and Kim Campbell he (short-lived Canadian PMs - check them out on wikipedia). Everyone remembers that he squeaked a chancy - Labour not quite ready, not sure about the welsh bloke election - in 1992 - but before that he was really quite popular. Partly because he wasn't Thatcher, but also because he defused the political time bomb of the day - the poll tax - with the council tax, because he did genuinely change the style of government to a more collegiate basis and partly because he seemed quite nice and normal. And remember that at the time, Maastricht was seen as a major (joke - he had to suffer a lot of those) negotiating triumph.

One of JM's problems was that his meteoric rise to the top meant that he did not come to No.10 with any particular agenda - and indeed was not elected on a particular mandate other than not being Heseltine. But the seeds of destruction of his Premiership were only in one respect self-sown - the decision to join the ERM in 1990 at too high a rate - though the consensus view at the time. For the rest what wrecked his Premiership was partly the country's fatigue with the Tories vs a still only semi electable Labour party, partly the legacy of the last 1980s boom and bust, but mainly the fact that the Tories failed to recover from the divisions over the manner of Thatcher's exit, and the fact that they were really deeply and genuinely split over Europe. To manage all that with a majority of 20 was the near impossibility that provided the backdrop to Major's last five years -- and to do that when your biggest move as Chancellor had backfired spectacularly was beyond impossible.

The need to get the Maastricht Bill through at almost all costs - with all votes on eh knife edge provided the background for all the time I was at No. 10. But despite that - even though there were some mad gesture politics going on to appease the right with Back to Basics as the nadir - the Major government does deserve to be remembered for some positive things. The Good Friday agreement would never have happened so quickly without the foundations being laid by the Downing Street declaration. The post ERM regime put in place by Lamont and then Clarke laid the foundations for Bank of England independence and they managed their way out of the early 1990s recession and took some tough decisions to get the pubic finances back on track. And the council tax - whatever its faults - has stuck.

So maybe there are worse things than being compared to John Major - and maybe the time is due for a Major revision.