Remember the Citizen’s Charter and those ‘Labour’s Tax Bombshell’ posters? Mocked at the time, they turned out to be winning moves by an underestimated John Major. Today, although it may seem unpalatable, Gordon Brown needs to study the lessons of the Tories’ victory against the odds in the 1992 general election.
As Gordon Brown and his advisers sat down at the start of this month to mull over the question of an early election, Sir John popped out of retirement to declare that it would be a disgrace to go to the polls this autumn. The former PM said that such a move would have raised ‘serious constitutional issues’.
He, of course, decided against holding an early election when he took over from Margaret Thatcher in 1990, despite the Tories enjoying a three-point lead in the polls after his first month in office. He even resisted the lure of calling a ‘khaki election’ in the wake of the first Gulf War in 1991.
As Brown was reaching his crucial decision, those ministers who were urging him to be cautious drew heavily on the lessons of 1970, when Harold Wilson went to the polls before he needed to and suffered a surprise defeat.
One member of the National Executive Committee, who argued against the idea of an early election before it was ruled out, told me that the case of 1970 was a key plank in the argument that going to the polls early would be a bad idea.
Yet there is a crucial difference between June 1970, when Wilson had been elected in his own right four years earlier, and 2007, when Brown has only just entered Downing Street. Surely the closer parallel, and the more positive one, is with the early 1990s.
A former chancellor enters Number 10 with a reputation as a principled politician, admired for decency and telling it straight, if not for his fine speeches. His main selling point is that he is not his predecessor. His first step is to reverse the government’s most unpopular policy. Once he has done that, he has the choice of whether to go to the country and seek his own mandate immediately, or hang on in the hope that things will get better.
During his first 18 months as premier, Major was able to build up a kind of politics that was visibly Majorist – even if that didn’t amount to much more than dropping the poll tax, introducing a charter of citizen’s consumer rights and uttering warm words about warm beer. At the same time, he got the best of both worlds, because he was still able to present himself to the electorate in 1992 as a new PM who deserved a chance to govern.
What’s more, in that 18 months the public had more time to mull over an opposition whose leader had mixed public appeal and still faced battles within his own party to keep to the centre ground. And the opposition had more time to make mistakes – in 1992, it was John Smith’s shadow budget.
True, there are differences between the scenarios, not least that John Major was a relative unknown when he became premier, whereas Brown has been the chancellor for a decade. But over that decade he managed to maintain an air of mystery over his real views on Iraq and public service reform, for precisely this moment.
In any event the lesson of the 1992 and 1970 elections is the same – go long, don’t cut and run. So at this difficult time, Brown must shrug off the ‘bottler’ jibes and ponder Major’s second-greatest quote (after the one about the ‘bastards’ in his cabinet) – ‘When your back’s against the wall, it’s time to turn around and fight.’