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With the failure to delay or block the EMU initiative, Major was left to bridge the unbridgeable, caught between a divided party and European credibility. Party divisions prevented any radical shift of policy. More constructive rhetoric did not disguise essential policy continuity. Major's instincts were for pragmatism, but any scope for building alternative coalitions (e.g. with the German–Dutch bloc) were not exploited, despite compatibilities in policy belief (on monetary policy and on free markets). Thus, the end game became dominated by the technical design of an opt‐out from EMU and a weakening stage 2. The ‘victory’ on the opt‐out was somewhat hollow: not least because Britain's partners had all but given up on her. The problems of reconciling Britain's interests were graphically portrayed by its exit from the ERM in September 1992. The irony of Major's leadership was that, despite him giving priority to party unity, the Conservative Party was left in almost terminable decline and he failed to ease the constraints on his successor.

The emergence of EMU on the European agenda caught Whitehall off guard. The task soon became one of resistance. Two alternative plans were launched—for a competing currency, then for a common currency—but their motivation and purpose remained uncertain. Mrs Thatcher saw them as a means to delay or dilute EMU. Lawson, Howe, and Major favoured a more constructive engagement in the EMU debate. Both the alternative plans failed to restructure the debate in Europe, a feature to be explained by both short‐ and long‐term conditions affecting British policy‐making. Strategic miscalculations (concerning the Delors Committee, as well as the British alternatives) were evident in the perception of the balance of political forces and the ability of Britain to reshape them.

The chapter gives an evaluation of the inconsistencies in the conservatives' approach to Northern Ireland under Prime ministers Thatcher and Major. It applauds the Conservatives eventual recognition that intergovernmental cooperation with Dublin was essential to the successful management of the conflict - even if it took some ministers nearly two decades to relearn what Conservative prime minister Heath had appreciated in 1973.

Although John Major was born during World War II, he was a child of post-war Britain. Unlike Margaret Thatcher, who was already a teenager when war was declared, Major had no visceral fear of what a reunited Germany might do. He did not share her sense of a Britain which, almost alone, embodied the values which he held dear. Major did not wish, as the new Prime Minister, to change the fundamentals of Britain's European Union policy. The substance of policy would remain robust but the approach and presentation would change. Major wanted to be active in making a success of Britain's EU membership. He did not share his predecessor's view that all the problems of his lifetime had come from Continental Europe. He wanted to rebuild the relationship with Helmut Kohl which had had to be kept alive by Douglas Hurd in the last part of Thatcher's premiership. One month before the Maastricht European Council, Major set out his vision of an enlarged European Community.

The deal agreed in Maastricht was a great success for Britain and a personal success for Prime Minister John Major. However, this success was clouded by the bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), or mad cow disease, crisis in 1996. It was one of the unhappiest chapters in Britain's relationship with her partners. It led to a feeling among Britain's partners, subsequently reinforced by the government's approach to the Amsterdam Treaty, that perhaps even its commitment to European Union membership was in doubt. The BSE crisis had been slow to build up but sudden to break. The risk to cattle from feed made up of mashed-up sheep parts had been recognised and measures to ban the use of such feed put in place. But the enforcement of the ban had been very patchy and the extent of the disease among the British herd came to light belatedly and with devastating speed. The measures that the government took to tackle the crisis were an uneasy compromise between the scientifically necessary and the politically deliverable.

Nigel Lawson, the British Chancellor, viewed Margaret Thatcher's agreement, at the Hanover European Council in June 1988, to a committee to examine the Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) as a disaster. Lawson was always in favour of Britain's membership of the exchange rate mechanism and against EMU. Michael Butler, by now working for Hambros in the City, set up a City Committee to monitor the whole issue of EMU and the work of the Delors Committee, and himself began to advocate a scheme which was the brainchild of a brilliant young economist at Midland Montagu, Paul Richards. Known as the hard European currency unit, the idea was to replicate the rigour of the deutschmark in a common currency, rather than a single currency. The British government did not immediately warm to the scheme, with some long-term costs. Thatcher would be eventually succeeded by John Major as British Prime Minister.

During the administrations of Margaret Thatcher and John Major, there was a decline in trust between local and central government. New Right theory is not necessarily inimical to local as opposed to central government. New Right policy for the Thatcher government meant that public services should be transferred to the private sector and that welfare services should be reduced to a minimum necessary to prevent destitution among the deserving poor. Fashionable monetarism also committed the Government to ensure that the money supply was kept within limits compatible with economic growth, and at a time of relatively high inflation, this required reductions in public spending. This chapter looks at local government in Britain under the Thatcher and Major administrations. It discusses the 1980 Local Government Planning and Land Act, privatisation of Direct Labour Organisations, housing and regeneration, local socialism, the 1984 Rates Act and its consequences, abolition of the Greater London Council and the metropolitan county councils, and the poll tax.

This chapter illuminates the factors that might have played a role in Major John Bell Hood's rise: a West Point training, an impressive physical size, association with Texas, and—possibly—personal recommendations from Albert Sidney Johnston, Hood's old commander in the Second United States Cavalry, as well as from Hood's distant relative, Gustavus Woodson Smith. From his first encounter, Hood rose to be the last of Jefferson Davis's generals, attaining an army command. Although Hood failed officially and unofficially in army command, he was a better general than many historians and students of the civil war have indicated. Hood was an honest man who simply rose two steps beyond his maximal level of competence—which was at division command. The tragedy is not that he could not see this but that Davis had so thoroughly overestimated Hood's capacity and that the South's resources of command below the very top echelons were so meagre.

This chapter focuses on discussions held between the British Government and the Provisional IRA between 1993 and 1995. By late 1993, Irish Taoiseach Albert Reynolds was trying to hammer out an agreed-upon joint position on the peace process with John Major, a dialogue that was often tense and fractious, and which several times bordered on total breakdown, as each government pulled in different directions. The initial result of the official talking between the two governments came with the publication of the Downing Street Declaration on December 15, 1993. The IRA announced a ceasefire in August 1994 because it had come to the conclusion that the armed struggle alone would not lead to Irish unity. It was also by then clear to the IRA that a dynamic for political change existed through dialogue, especially in the context of a joint Sinn Fein–SDLP–Irish government position, facilitated by the Clinton administration in the United States.

The Conservative administrations that John Major led were so convulsed by governing incompetence and party infighting that he was an easy target for putdowns. He himself was never to deliver the type of classic parliamentary sound-bites that were used against him by his principal opponents, such as John Smith (‘a devalued Prime Minister of a devalued government’) or Tony Blair (‘I lead my party…he follows his’). He was not a stirring orator who could fire of the emotions of Conservative members, but nor did he claim that he could. His central political appeal, which had propelled him to the party leadership after the leadership cult that was Thatcher, was his status as a team player. Nonetheless, Major was to deliver some notable oratorical moments in his Prime Ministerial tenure, whether at conference; in the heat of parliamentary combat, or through the wider media.

This chapter discusses social policy since 1979, and views the welfare state changes that were made over the past quarter century. It looks at an account of Mrs Thatcher's social policy crusade, and then discusses the contribution of John Major. It identifies Major's administration as the one that implemented a lot of the most significant reforms of the Conservatives. It was also responsible for joining them into a ‘coherent national framework’ that had both central government frameworking and local competitive autonomy. The chapter ends with a discussion of the Conservative welfare legacy under New Labour.

This chapter suggests that family policy is one aspect of social policy where the coalition with the Liberal Democrats may push the Conservatives in a more socially liberal direction. It first considers the genesis and development of current Conservative attitudes to marriage and the family. Next, the extent to which they differ from those of New Labour and the earlier Conservative governments of Margaret Thatcher and John Major are explored. Withdrawal of state support for the family was a consistent policy motif in the 1980s. In policy terms, the Major government continued along the lines set by its predecessor. Marking a clear departure from the Thatcher and Major years, Michael Gove acknowledged that there were many aspects of Labour's policy on the family that needed to be preserved. Finally, the chapter reflects upon the possible implications for future social policy arising out of David Cameron's commitment to supporting marriage.

Alwyn Turner’s compendious study, A Classless Society: Britain in the1990s (2013), ends after 574 richly observed pages seemingly contradicting its title. Turner writes of John Major and Tony Blair, that ‘both had sought to create a classless society, both had failed, with wealth inequality increasing and social mobility decreasing, and both found themselves ill at ease with the kind of classless culture that emerged instead’ (574). Turner adds that Major and Blair (and before them, Margaret Thatcher) had aimed to refashion Britain as a meritocracy, where ability was more pertinent and consequential than family background and traditional networks of social power.

This chapter puts the past 30 years of policy change into a longer historical context and broadens the focus to consider a wide range of policy and social policy, and governmental and political change. A troubled economy and industrial unrest overshadowed social policy and led to the fall of the Edward Heath government in the early part of the 1970s. The Labour government of 1974–79 introduced a raft of anti-discrimination laws and expanded universal benefits, non-means-tested benefits and second-tier state pensions. In the 1980s, the overall inequity of the poll tax played a part in its huge unpopularity and that tax contributed to Margaret Thatcher's downfall. John Major's government moved back to a property-based tax for local government finance and introduced individualised income taxation. Tony Blair set the historic target of eradicating child poverty within a generation in the annual Beveridge lecture in 1999 and Gordon Brown subsequently announced the aim of ending pensioner poverty.

At the end of the twentieth century there were major reforms to the honours system. These were connected to larger processes of social change following the political and social shifts of the 1980s and 1990s. In 1993 the honours system was revised by John Major and civil servants concerned about its reputation as class-based and automatic for civil servants. The lower ranks of the Order of the British Empire (which make up a majority of total honours given out) were reoriented towards voluntary service and away from professional state service. Honours became a way of paying volunteers to do work once done by the state using social capital rather than money. This chapter also details the relationship between these changes and the role of the monarchy in British society. After 1948, all British recipients of honours at the level of MBE and above were entitled to visit Buckingham Palace and receive their award from a royal personage. Autobiographical writing suggests a set of characteristic experiences and feelings. Many who recorded their experiences not only celebrated their encounter, but also expressed empathy with the monarch, affirming both the normalcy of the royal family and also their special status. John Major’s reforms (and similar ones that followed them in the early 2000s) thus reintegrated two functions of the monarchy—its role as the affirmer of national merit through the honours system and its status as the leader of the voluntary sector in Britain.

This chapter describes Major John Thomas Jones's trip to New York City and how it had been an eye-opener, proving to be as frustrating as it was enjoyable. After making a celebratory round of the city's popular bars on New Year's Eve, he had brought in the New Year by ice skating in Central Park with a bevy of adoring young ladies. Later, however, while visiting Barnum's Museum, he discovered that his jacket pocket had been skillfully slit open by a pickpocket, who had lifted most of Jones's vacation cash. Only when he was near broke did he learn why he had been so popular with the Yankee girls: His traveling companion had passed him off as a millionaire Southern planter. “I thought the young ladies paid me great attention, but for a long time did not know the reason,” he admitted in a letter to his father.

Chapter 2 considers the context faced by the Conservative Party upon entering opposition in 1997, following the degeneration of John Major's government and landslide election defeat. This unfavourable environment is explored through the problems faced by the Conservatives on both the electoral and ideational dimensions. The electoral context is considered in terms of the party's opinion poll rating and public image, particularly with regard to the key issue of management of the economy. The work of three Conservative thinkers (John Gray, Ian Gilmour, and David Willetts) is used to consider the intellectual response of conservatism to the Thatcherite legacy. This ideological uncertainty over the direction of Conservative politics after Thatcher is an important frame of the debates in the party post-1997, from Hague through to Cameron.

On 21 June 1995, P. V. Narasimha Rao, celebrated his four years in office as India's Prime Minister with much fanfare. The following day, his British counterpart, John Major, resigned as leader of the Conservative Party, presumably to silence his critics. Although both prime ministers run a parliamentary democracy, Rao marginalised, stifled, and eventually expelled his detractors. Political parties function democratically in Britain but not in India. Britain under Major demonstrated a political culture that was opposite of that in India under Rao. Rao promised to step down as president of Congress Party but refused to do so. In addition, he staged farcical organizational elections, appointed chief ministers, destroyed the Congress, and suppressed democracy in his party.

This chapter addresses the longer-term development of Conservative Party thinking. Attention is focused first on the emergence and development of modern One Nation Conservatism from the end of the war until the demise of the Douglas-Home government in 1964. Second, attention is given to the neo-liberal turn in the Conservative approach to the welfare state, which surfaced briefly in the early years of the Ted Heath's government and came to fruition during the Margaret Thatcher (1979–90) and John Major (1990–97) eras. Third, David Cameron's ‘progressive’ Conservative approach to social welfare is explored. There have been significant changes in Conservative approaches to the welfare state over the post-war period. It can be concluded that Conservative ‘support’ for the welfare state has waxed and waned since the Second World War, depending to some extent on the relative strength of underlying paternalist or libertarian ‘dispositions’.