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Lord Butler (John Major's Cabinet Secretary)

This speech is from a response to a lecture given by Professor Vernon Bogdanor, which is available from the links page on this site, or directly here.

I think I was billed to do a response to Professor Bogdanor, but I really do not need to do that because I agree with a very great deal of what he said. I agree that John Major was the unexpected Prime Minister, unexpected perhaps even by himself.

I do not agree with all the criticisms of Bosnia. I think it is true that Britain probably did too little and too late, but we did after all join the UN force which eventually went there and we made a contribution to the peacekeeping, and indeed still do, in that country.

There is one omission from Professor Bogdanor's account of John Major's achievement, and it is an important omission, and that is Ireland. I was in the room in Ten Downing Street, and I shall never forget the moment, and you will imagine why, when somebody came in and said, 'There is a message from the IRA' and the message started, 'The conflict is over, but you must help us bring it to an end.' Of course, with all such messages, it was extremely uncertain what the provenance was - it had come by various means. To have any dealings, to make any response to such a message was fraught with danger. It took the risk of antagonising the Unionists of course and there were many Unionist sympathisers in Mr Major's Cabinet who would have been opposed to that. You also ran the risk of naivety, that people warned him that if he did have any truck with this, sooner or later, the other side would reveal it. But I remember very clearly, he said, 'This may be a false message, but if there is any chance that it will lead to a stopping of the conflict in Northern Ireland, I'm prepared to take the risk to do it.' He did take that risk. He responded to the message, and there was a further response to that. There was then the Warrington bomb, which might have stopped it all, but nonetheless, after a period, he continued, to engage the Irish Government, and that led to the Downing Street declaration and eventually to the first ceasefire, which set in train the events that led to the Good Friday Agreement, which Mr Blair pulled off, but the foundation for that was laid by John Major, in circumstances where very great political courage was needed.

As Professor Bogdanor said, I think he was a very talented conciliator. He was the best negotiator of the five Prime Ministers that I worked for, and he was a good negotiator for this reason: that he was capable of putting himself in the shoes of the person with whom he was negotiating. He understood his own objectives, but he also understood the objectives of the person he was negotiating with and tried very hard to find a means of reconciling the two, and showed that he was trying to do that. He was somebody you wanted to agree with, and his success, which Professor Bogdanor has referred to, at Maastricht recognised that, and Mr Blair is going to be in the same position this week. Will his European interlocutors recognise Mr Blair's difficulties at home and want to meet them? That is what Mr Major achieved and Mr Blair will also have to achieve it.

He tried to reconcile the Conservative Party and hold it together, and as Vernon has said, and he succeeded in doing that in a formal way. I remember Willie Whitelaw saying, in 1989, when he was still Deputy Prime Minister, that the danger was that Margaret Thatcher would split the Conservative Party for a generation, like Peel, and Professor Bogdanor referred to that. The Conservative Party was so split that it was not really reconcilable during that period. John Major had to hold it together, but it had lost self-discipline and that was why it went down so badly in the 1997 Election. Mr Major fought that Election almost single-handed. He was the one we saw on the television the whole time, he never lost his patience, he maintained his good humour, and he left office with dignity, and perhaps with relief.