From Major to minor

Dubai: When John Major returned to his childhood haunts in Brixton for a famous 1992 election broadcast, he looked distinctly uncomfortable.

Dressed in an Armani suit, he was filmed buying kippers at the market before sweeping past his former family homes in a chauffeur-driven car. Then he spotted his parents’ old house in Burton Road and his self-consciousness slipped away. “It’s still there,” he whispered, straining against his seatbelt. “It is, it is ... it’s still there.”

It’s no secret that he loathed the experience and commentators assumed he was ashamed of his background.

The son of a trapeze artist, music-hall entertainer and purveyor of garden gnomes, he was painted as a complex man full of insecurities, suppressed rage and an educational and social chippiness he could never overcome.

“I wasn’t embarrassed about my background at all, but I was concerned about the privacy of my family,” he says in a recent interview.. “I’m very proud of what my parents achieved and what they stood for. They didn’t have much, but in many ways they were richer than most. But it’s perfectly true that I didn’t wish to do the Brixton video. I thought the idea was corny... Everyone said that famous line was fake, but it wasn’t. It was absolutely genuine. I thought the house had been redeveloped.”

It seems his lot in life always to be overshadowed by meddlesome women. When he was prime minister, it was his “backseat driver”

Margaret Thatcher

Major, habitually dubbed the grey man of politics, is 69 and looking very much the elder statesman.

He was British prime minister from 1990 to 1997 where he led Britain to join the ‘coalition of the willing’ against Saddam Hussain’s invasion of Kuwait, and was instrumental in developing the Good Friday Accord with the Republic of Ireland to end three decades of sectarian and political violence in Northern Ireland.

But his beginnings were very different. Major never really knew his father, Tom Major-Ball, who died shortly before his 19th birthday, and wishes he’d asked more questions. He was, he says, Victorian to the core; loving but remote “with all the virtues and vices of the age into which he was born”.

From 1901, Tom spent nearly 30 years on the road as a music-hall artist, for much of that time the proprietor of his own show. He cut his teeth working in circuses and travelling galas, but in 1902 formed a double act with a singer and dancer called Kitty Grant, whom he later married — performing acrobatics, baton-twirling, patter, comic duets and comedy sketches.

But Kitty wasn’t John Major’s mother. That distinction fell to Gwen Coates, a Lincolnshire girl who joined the company as a dancer. She stepped into Kitty’s shoes when a steel girder from a safety curtain struck the unfortunate woman on the head. On her death bed, Kitty asked her to look after Tom and Gwen married him a year later.

Tom wasn’t the most practical of men. He made and lost a fortune several times, but his luck ran out in his early 70s when he lost his savings in a business venture and had to sell their modest but comfortable family bungalow in Worcester Park, south-west London.

Claustrophobic existence

Bankrupt, they moved into two rooms in Brixton. It was a claustrophobic existence.

Poignantly, his parents never lived to see him become prime minister, though his greatest regret is that he wasn’t able to share his prosperity and buy his mother new clothes.

His background, more classically Labour than Conservative, inevitably changed his outlook.

“It was useful because I saw things I wouldn’t have seen, though it often made life quite awkward because my natural instincts were quite adrift from the free-market instinct of a typical Tory. One of the things that upset me most was when some colleagues on the right started being censorious about single mothers and I got the blame.

They were emphatically not my views and couldn’t have been, given my background.

“I thought I could do something different from any Conservative prime minister before me. But I couldn’t. I was trapped with a socking great recession. Shops were closing, people were losing their homes — all the things I went into politics to avoid — and I was almost powerless to do anything about it. And then, after handing over the best economy in generations, I watched other people spend the money. So, was that frustrating? You bet it was.”

He never succeeded in shaking off his grey image, and his father’s colourful background was often used as a stick with which to beat him.

Seemingly, even he came to believe the stereotype, once flatly telling an interviewer: “Maybe I am just grey and ordinary, like they said.”

But who cares? I’m no longer public property, so I no longer care what they think.”

— with inputs from Guardian News & Media Ltd