The Worm in the Apple: A History of the Conservative Party and Europe from Churchill to Cameron by Christopher Tugendhat

Author:Christopher Tugendhat
Format: epub

Our gut feeling was that this was a dog that had not barked, and we did not see any point in waking it up before the election campaign. Our general sentiment was that Europe was not going to be much of a problem before or during the campaign and this turned out to be true.¹⁸

Nobody seems to have taken a contrary view, and when the election took place in April it looked as if the decision had been proved right.

During the campaign, Labour, under the leadership of Neil Kinnock, looked to be on their way back to power after thirteen years of opposition. For most of the campaign, the pollsters were predicting this, and it was what most people expected. With the economy still in the doldrums, it seemed inconceivable that the Conservatives could win an unprecedented fourth consecutive election victory. But, as in 1970, the Conservatives with a widely underrated leader came from behind to win when the polls opened on 9 April. As the Labour MP, Giles Radice,¹⁹ recorded in his diary, ‘The big swing to Labour that most of the commentators and the polls predicted has simply not materialised.’²⁰ The Conservative majority was greatly reduced from 102 to 21, but that was as nothing compared with the fact of the victory. Moreover, although the party’s majority was well down, its share of the total vote was only 0.3 per cent less than when Thatcher won her landslide in 1987. For Major, the victory was an astounding personal triumph.

The extent to which Thatcher begrudged him his laurels may be judged from an article she wrote two weeks later for the American magazine Newsweek, in which she declared, ‘I don’t accept the idea that all of a sudden Major is his own man. He has been prime minister for seventeen months and he has inherited all these great achievements of the past eleven and a half years … There isn’t such a thing as Majorism,’ she added, whereas ‘Thatcherism will live. It will live long after Thatcher has died.’²¹ She was to be proved right in her boast, and justifiably so; her achievements were considerable. What she failed to appreciate when she wrote that article, and later, was her debt to Major for securing them. If a pre-Blair Labour Party had won the 1992 election, it would have reversed much of what she had done. By winning the 1992 election, Major ensured that there could be no going back. She never gave him the credit he deserved for that.

In terms of Europe, the centre of gravity among the Conservative MPs who returned to Westminster after the election was quite different from where it had been in the previous Parliament. The fifty or so members of the old House who had retired had been overwhelmingly pro-Europe, whereas a majority of their younger successors took a more sceptical view, among them the future Conservative Party leader Iain Duncan Smith. As I have previously explained, constituency associations throughout the 1980s, feeling it

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