Major Importance

Now, don't get me wrong. John Major gave this country the Maastricht Treaty, VAT on fuel, the consolidation of Thatcher's surrender to the IRA, the ruinous privatisation of the railways, and the totally unfulfilled promise of a grammar school in every town, among other very bad things indeed. His witness to moral standards is not compromised by his own having transgressed in the past; furthermore, his is repentant, which Edwina Currie is not. He did, however, make divorce legally easier than release from a car hire contract.

But he kept us out of the military interventions, and those in order to back the wrong sides, noisily demanded in Yugoslavia, Rwanda and elsewhere by the people who now control all three parties, having controlled the Lib Dems even then.

Major now says that he was only a "reluctant supporter" of the Iraq War launched by those, his enemies. Well, that is certainly one way of putting it. Of his allies still in the Commons at the time, only Michael Howard was pro-war. Fifty per cent of Tory votes against the war came from those who had been his Cabinet Ministers: Ken Clarke, John Gummer and Douglas Hogg. Clarke and Gummer had been Ministers continuously from 1979 to 1997, a record matched by no one else. Clarke had been a figure of the utmost seniority under Major. Hurd and Rifkind were also anti-war, Rifkind particularly strongly. It is not hard to discern Major's true feelings on the subject.

And now, we know for certain. His stated position is the one that no one really holds: "If I'd known then what I know now". But it is the one most devastating to Tony Blair, who has admitted publicly, on television, that the whole thing was never remotely related to WMD, the existence of which in Iraq he never imagined for one moment, nor ever thought mattered in the least. Major had his faults. But he never did anything remotely as bad as this. No other Prime Minister ever has.