JOHN MAJOR
THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY

COPYRIGHT

William Collins

A division of HarperCollinsPublisbers Ltd. 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

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First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublisbers 1999

Copyright © John Major 1999, 2000

John Major asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

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Source ISBN: 9780002570046

Ebook Edition © FEBRUARY 2013 ISBN 9780007400461

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DEDICATION

To Norma, Elizabeth and James

CONTENTS

COVER

TITLE PAGE

COPYRIGHT

DEDICATION

FOREWORD

1 The Search for Tom Major

2 From Brixton to Westminster

3 Into the Commons

4 Climbing the Ladder

5 Into Cabinet

6 ‘What’s the Capital of Colombia?’

7 An Ambition Fulfilled

8 An Empress Falls

9 Prime Minister

10 The Gulf War

11 Raising the Standard

12 Maastricht

13 Winning a Mandate

14 Black Wednesday

15 The ‘Bastards’

16 Back to Basics

17 Protecting our Heritage

18 The Union at Risk

19 Into the Mists: Bright Hopes, Black Deeds

20 The Wider World

21 At the Summit

22 Hell’s Kitchen

23 Unparliamentary Behaviour

24 Faultline Europe

25 Put up or Shut up

26 Mad Cows and Europeans

27 The Economy: Rags to Riches

28 The Curtain Falls

AFTERMATH

THE EMPTY HOUSE

KEEP READING

APPENDIX A: Brief Chronology

APPENDIX B: The Cabinet, November 1990–May 1997

INDEX

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

FOREWORD

SINCE I LEFT 10 Downing Street, I have often thought – why politics?

From politicians themselves the standard response is a burning ambition to improve the lot of the poor, say, or the disabled, or to ‘change things for the better’.

There is truth in these claims – they are not to be disparaged. But the answer is too often calculated to win approval, too self-serving, and almost always incomplete. Motives for entering politics are much more complex. Mine certainly were.

Politics attracted me from an early age. I longed to be involved, and loathed the thought that I would have no part in making the decisions that would shape my life and times. The thought of a run-of-the-mill job did not appeal; I wanted excitement and the stimulus of the unexpected – although, I was to learn, one can overdose on that. I did believe in public service and public obligation, and if I’d had a double first I would have been attracted to a career in the Civil Service. But I had no wish to be a second-rank civil servant, and my background and lack of paper qualifications would more or less have dictated that fate, irrespective of any talent I might have shown. Being insufficiently educated to advise ministers, I decided early on to be a minister myself, and to harness others’ learning to my native good sense.

Fame is the Spur, wrote Howard Spring. He was right. Political life is stimulated by ambition, and providing ambition is not obsessive, I see nothing wrong in that. Even in these cynical days it is something to be a Member of Parliament, with those precious initials after your name.

I was attracted to the Conservative Party because it did not draw its language from the dark emotions of envy or resentment. It cared for the weak, the poor and the old, but unlike the Labour Party it did not demand a lifetime of adherence to a class struggle. It saw people as individuals, not as political troops. The Conservatism of Harold Macmillan, Iain Macleod and Rab Butler understood and spoke the language of compassion. Compassion is a virtue the best of the Conservative Party has long lived by, and without which it would never have become the broad-based, tolerant party I joined. The tone of Conservatism that appealed to me did not cultivate the envy of the few in order to improve the condition of the many. It argued for the opportunity to build security and ownership and wealth – and it showed the practical way to do so. It was not hidebound by ideology. This philosophy made me a Conservative from the first moment I truly thought about politics.

The life of politics is like no other. It has many joys and excitements, and I would not have missed them. But there is a price to be paid for the fame and the fun, and too often it is paid by family and friends. Politics at the top is all-consuming. Every interest is swept up and subordinated to its demands. I tried to guard against this by living parallel lives – politics and private life – which I did my best to prevent merging. In this I was largely successful, preserving my personal friendships and interests, and, I hope, providing a sense of balance for the life after high office.

However, private interests cannot be wholly hidden. Appearances at Lords and The Oval made my love of cricket apparent. Some knew of my affection for soccer, but few of my love of rugby, the cinema, theatre, music, gardening and, above all, books. I did not draw attention to them; I kept them, as far as possible, in the secluded area of my life. While part of me longed for the political limelight, another part demanded privacy.

And for very good reason. Even as my political profile rose and I became ever more public property, I knew this would not last for ever. Senior politicians spend only a limited time in the sun, and I did not want to leave the front line of politics as a husk, bereft of everything but a backward glance to memories of my political noontide. I knew that becoming prime minister at the age of forty-seven would mean being ex-prime minister within two Parliaments, unless something extraordinary were to happen. I intended from the outset to be prepared for the day I left office, since, following it, there would still be a lot of life to be lived.

Twenty years in Parliament, so far, has left me with a high regard for most parliamentarians. There are always a few charlatans in the Commons, concerned for self rather than country or party, and a few rent-a-quotes, avid above all for publicity. They strut the stage for a while, but are soon recognised for what they are. This shallow minority has inspired among the public an incomplete view of political life.

Government has changed over the decades. In the middle of the abdication crisis of 1936, Stanley Baldwin spent a month and a half at Aix-les-Bains, phoning Number 10 twice a week for news. Churchill’s ill-health during his last years as prime minister went unreported, and was unknown to most voters. In 1959–60 Harold Macmillan toured Africa for weeks, leaving Rab Butler in charge at home. None of that would be possible today. The prime minister’s instant reactions are demanded daily, and his press secretary provides them. The reporting of politics changed too, as the battle for newspaper circulation grew ever more intense. In the 1980s even The Times and the Daily Telegraph largely stopped verbatim reports of proceedings in Parliament, replacing them with columns by sketch writers. Caricature can illuminate and entertain, but the absence of proper reporting is a loss. I hope that one day it may return.

Even among lobby correspondents, the emphasis changed. There is more pressure to come up with sensational stories, less hesitancy to print speculative ones. In all this, there has grown up an unscrupulousness, a willingness to give credence to rumour, a refusal to correct or apologise, an amnesia about last week’s splash or leading article. ‘Government to do X’, the headlines shriek. The government patiently explains that it never had any intention of doing any such thing. The next morning, the headlines read ‘Government retreats on X’. No doubt this sells newspapers. But it also sells their readers short.

Television has brought immediacy to political events and much greater awareness of them. It has introduced modern politicians to the electorate, warts and all, in a way their predecessors never were. In 1989 I voted against letting the cameras into the Commons, but I now believe I was wrong to do so. Television has also introduced the electorate to their politicians. Even as the voters’ interest in politicians wanes, politicians themselves are absorbed by what people want and feel and do. Up to a point, this is a healthy development.

Television has great power, but its emphasis on brevity does distort. Politics is complex, and reports too often oversimplify. I commented once that an hour-long address on education would earn me one minute on prime-time television news. This would be accompanied by one minute from the Labour leader, who had not read or heard the speech, and one minute from the Liberal leader, who had not understood it. This was a parody, but one with a lot of truth in it. It is equally true that the crude picture of public opinion which the media offers MPs can oversimplify horribly.

At the top level of politics, the words of politicians are pored over to extract every possible nuance beyond their straightforward meaning. An industry has grown up of pundits who interpret what politicians may mean by what they say, and they are assisted by ‘friends’ of the politicians ever eager to explain. Too often these Chinese whispers mean the end product is unrecognisable, but, in an age where perception is all, what was meant becomes less important than what is reported.

The effect of all this has been to add immeasurably to the electorate’s cynicism about politics. I recognised this as prime minister, but I could not break free from it. I regret that. I longed to move away from ‘politician-speak’, but feared misinterpretation. I should have been bolder: it is appalling that we sometimes inflict such nonsense on the electorate as ‘the government’s position is clear’ (when it isn’t); ‘we have exciting new plans’ (when we don’t); and ‘we want a better future for our people’ (which we do, but how patronising that expression is. They are not our people. They do not belong to any political party. They are individuals who are worth more than those who patronise them).

In our age of ‘spin’ the electorate is thrown an increasing volume of pap. Every day it becomes harder to obtain widespread currency for ideas or beliefs without retreating into soundbite or cliché. I would not have recognised a ‘soundbite’ if it gripped me by the windpipe. I only hope my meaning sometimes, if fitfully, transcended my words.

As a young MP I did not court journalists, but as I rose through ministerial ranks, I came to know a few of them. Some I trusted, others not, and I kept well clear of those with a reputation for political fiction. Generally in the early years I had a friendly, perhaps even an over-generous, press, and no personal reason to mistrust them.

After I became prime minister this was to change; and so swift had been my climb up the greasy pole that I was unprepared for the onslaught. Party leaders are treated differently, prime ministers even more so. They are praised to excess or damned to perdition, sometimes both at the same time. I cannot claim to have enjoyed this, because no one could. I have yet to meet a politician with a hide like a rhinoceros. Those legendary thick-skinned beasts are said to exist, but if they are not extinct, or mythical, they are very rare. I learned to disregard the more obvious untruths and absurdities in the media, but yes, they stung, and those who say they do not deceive themselves.

But politics offers many rewards to offset these pinpricks. It is exhilarating to be at the centre of great events. It is satisfying to unravel a problem that seems insoluble. It is rewarding to help people who look to you for assistance. There are friendships that flourish amidst the rivalries as colleagues jostle for the same prizes. Cabals, gangs and partnerships are formed. The shared intentions, the hard work, the planning, the plotting, the highs and lows of joint campaigns create bonds that can be unbreakable and shared experiences that will never be forgotten. Nor is this surprising. Politics is about ideas, convictions, passions and ambitions, and MPs have these in abundance. It would be extraordinary if this did not lead to vivid exchanges and lasting relationships of friendship or, sometimes, enmity.

I found this especially true in the Whips’ Office, where there is one collective mind – the Office view arrived at after discussion – and one objective, which is to protect and advance the interests of the government. Nothing leaks from the whips. I often thought of their office as the most secure place in Western Europe.

Of course there are regrets. I shall regret always that I rarely found my own authentic voice in politics. I was too conservative, too conventional. Too safe, too often. Too defensive. Too reactive. Later, too often on the back foot. I inherited a sick economy and passed on a sound one. But one abiding regret for me is that, in between, I did not have the resources to put in place the educational and social changes about which I cared so much; I made only a beginning, and it was not enough.

I do not regret breaking the cycle of inflation. Or beginning the peace process in Northern Ireland. Or the health and education reforms. Or introducing a national lottery which would fund the arts, sport, heritage and charities more generously than ever before. I am proud to have introduced public-sector reform to protect the consumer and, by winning the 1992 election, to have enshrined the reforms of the preceding thirteen years, and forced Labour to accept what hitherto had been anathema to them. I was pleased to keep Britain in Europe and to prevent the Conservative Party from splitting. To do so I took a lot of criticism that the old pro-European Harold Macmillan would have understood. Selwyn Lloyd, once Macmillan’s foreign secretary, recalled him saying on his sickbed in 1963 that ‘Balfour had been bitterly criticised for not having a view on Protection and Free Trade. Balfour had said the important thing was to preserve the unity of the Conservative Party. He had been abused for that. But who argues now about protection and free trade? When was the last time the conventional arguments were exchanged? 1923? Whereas the preservation of great national institutions had been the right policy. Lloyd George might have been clear-cut on policy, but he destroyed the Liberal Party.’ The day may come when a similar judgement is made on the single currency.

When I talked of a classless society I wanted to say that the people who pushed wheelbarrows when I mixed cement for a living were human beings worthy of respect. They are as much in ‘God’s lively image’ as a nobleman with sixteen quarterings. I was in earnest about classlessness. I wanted to say that the subtle calibrations of scorn in which this country rejoices, the endless puttings down and belittlings, so instinctive that we do not notice ourselves doing them, are awful. They are so awful they stop us seeing men and women whole.

Class distinction is to me exactly the same as racial distinction. The utter repulsiveness of racial prejudice is something that I have sensed since I was a child. I loathe the language of contempt or hatred. I expect always to be colour-blind and class-blind, and not to spurn or despise anyone on those grounds. Contempt is first cousin to hatred. It is best replaced by understanding.

What I believe in – and I make no apology for being unscientific about it – is a rough-and-ready decency. I should have advocated it more often and made a virtue of it. But to many politicians and onlookers today a rough-and-ready decency is not enough. They demand an ideology, intellectual mentors, a political template by which to judge every circumstance. I reject that. Most people simply do not think in that way. Of course there must be broad principles and recognised values to underpin political decisions, but to believe that decisions can only be in the national interest if they conform to the ideology of some guru must surely be nonsense. Let us have convictions by all means, but not the sort of convictions that are the flip-side of bigotry. A politician’s responsibility should above all be a readiness to do what is best in all the circumstances to deal with the issue at hand.

My politics was quiet politics. I disliked brash populism. I distrusted bitter conflict. I was at ease with the knitting-up of conciliation. It may have been boring to some, it may have been seen as grey, but it had its points. In Can You Forgive Her?, the first of Anthony Trollope’s great political novels about the Palliser family, an aspirant candidate muses upon the duties of being an MP. He is duly elected, and serves his party and his country well. His name, I recall, was John Grey. And perhaps I should have reminded my critics of what the Impressionist painter Camille Pissarro wrote in a letter to his son Lucien, also a painter: ‘Never forget to make proper use of the whole dazzling range of greys.’ Hallelujah.

This book is not a history of our time. It is a personal odyssey that covers successes and failures but which ended in a crushing rebuff on May Day 1997. We – I – made mistakes. We paid for them. But we had successes too. On the day I became prime minister interest rates were 14 per cent, inflation 9.7 per cent, and unemployment 1.75 million, on its way to three million. When I left Number 10, interest rates were 6 per cent, inflation 2.6 per cent, and unemployment 1.6 million and falling. It was the healthiest economy any government had handed to its successors for generations. How we lost, despite this economic turnaround, is part of this story. In it I will not concede possession of the recent past to the mythographers of left or right who have every self-interest in retouching the history we made. For New Labour a Year Zero view of politics conveniently covers up the follies and errors of Labour’s past and denies the advances of good Conservative government.

Nor do I concede the Year Zero philosophy of some on the right. Conservatism was not discovered only in the 1980s, nor was it lost in the 1990s. Such a view is absurd. The 1980s were indeed great years of achievement and I was proud to have been a small part of them. But a proper respect for those achievements is not enhanced by rewriting history and denying the successes that preceded them, or those that have followed. Continuity matters to Conservatives. Some ideologues on the right forget that.

My great predecessor as Member of Parliament for Huntingdon, Oliver Cromwell, cautioned the painter Lely as he began a portrait of him: ‘Remark all these roughnesses, pimples, warts, and everything as you see me, otherwise I will never pay a farthing for it.’ He wanted an accurate portrait. So do I, and I have tried to achieve one. Politics, like life, is not all black and white. Sometimes it is grey, and in this story I have tried to colour in all its shades.

CHAPTER ONE The Search for Tom Major

I KNEW VERY LITTLE ABOUT my antecedents until I began writing this book. The search for my family provided many surprises.

As a boy, I soaked up the atmosphere of my parents’ unconventional life. When my father, Tom, was old and ill he would entertain me for hours with stories of the extraordinary things he had done. He painted vivid pictures of his boyhood in nineteenth-century America and of his own father, a master builder. He spoke of his years in show business and brought great entertainers like Harry Houdini and Marie Lloyd to life for me. He had a tireless fund of evocative stories and a formidable memory that stretched back well into the last century. He was a wonderful raconteur and I learned to be a good listener at his bedside.

No doubt my father could embroider for effect, but I never knew him to lie. Much was left out, as I was to discover, but whenever he exaggerated or embellished my mother hurried in to try to damp the story down. I grew up with his tales and accepted them without question, though his wayward life left little evidence for us to confirm what he said. After I joined the Cabinet in 1987 and the press began to delve into my past, an impression was sometimes given that I was withholding information. Not at all. I knew so little myself. But at that time my family, too, began to delve. The burden initially fell on my brother Terry. Later, when I started this book, we worked together. We had to piece together a life without documents that had begun 120 years before. It was a fascinating adventure. In the search for Tom Major, we unearthed a remarkable, idiosyncratic life.

His roots lay in the West Midlands. My great-great grandfather, Joseph Ball, was a prosperous Willenhall locksmith; his son, John Ball, born at the end of the Napoleonic Wars, was licensee of the Bridge Tavern, just outside Walsall. It still exists today. John and his wife Caroline had six children, of whom the second, Abraham Ball, born in January 1848, was my grandfather. He married a young Irish girl, Sarah Anne Marrah; illiterate, my grandmother signed my father’s birth certificate with an ‘X’. I never met her, of course, but I still have a photograph, taken not long before she died in 1919, of her feeding chickens at my father’s house in Shropshire. She looks a formidable lady, a not improbable mother of an adventurous and restless son. And my father certainly was that.

He was born in 1879, and christened Abraham Thomas Ball. But he was always known as Tom, and never Abraham. ‘Major’ was the stage name he adopted as a young man. Had he not done so, I would have been John Ball, sharing the name of the leader of the Peasants’ Revolt against the poll tax.

Tom was Abraham and Sarah’s only natural child, and I had always believed he had been brought up alone. He was not. In one of the many surprises I had while researching this book, I learned of an older adopted son, Alfred, born to a destitute bridle-bit maker. My grandparents, his neighbours, took Alfred in, and it was only when he married that he learned he was adopted. My father never spoke of him to me.

Brought up as brothers, Tom and Alfred did not spend long in the Midlands. When my father was about five my grandparents emigrated to America, and settled in Pittsburgh. They must have hoped for a better life. They sailed on the SS Indiana from Liverpool to Philadelphia, and were appalled by conditions on board. The Indiana was a primitive two-masted steamship belonging to the American Line, built for stability rather than speed or comfort. The journey took three weeks; poorer migrants, travelling as deck passengers, were fed, so my father told me, with salted herrings from a barrel – much like sea lions in a zoo. He was lucky, and travelled in better circumstances. In America, my grandfather soon found work as a master bricklayer, building blast furnaces for the Andrew Carnegie Steel Works in Philadelphia.

I know little about my family’s time across the Atlantic. No photographs or records survive. If they wrote or received letters, they are lost. But Abraham apparently prospered, and my father had a happy and comfortable American upbringing. Perhaps something of his classless, independent background was to rub off on me.

My father often spoke of living in Fall Hollow, in the foothills of the Allegheny Mountains in Pennsylvania. He used to tell me he had found Indian arrowheads in the woods behind his house. I could find no place named ‘Fall Hollow’. Panic. Was his – and my – story true? Terry, with the aid of the Pittsburgh Post Gazette came to the rescue. Fall Hollow, near Braddock, did once exist, just as my father said.

I would know more if I still had the dented travelling trunk in which he kept old documents and cuttings about his time in America and his work as a trapeze artist. The trunk ended up in a dusty alcove in the cellar at 80 Burton Road, Brixton, my parents’ last home, and was left there when my sister Pat and her husband Peter moved out. I remember investigating it as a child. I saw the oversize evening suit and top hat my father wore in his publicity postcards, photographs (including one of him wearing his trapeze costume), and scores for a music-hall band.

The new owners of the bungalow in Worcester Park, Surrey, where I lived as a boy, found a number of remarkable items from my father’s life in their loft: a make-up box, a clown suit, shoes, wigs and scores of sheets of old music-hall songs, many signed by the composers. It was the residue of a music-hall life on the move.

My father began his career as a performer in America. He used to say that as a child he joined a local fife-and-drum band in Pennsylvania, became skilled at twirling a baton, and twice performed as a young drum major in front of President Grover Cleveland. I cannot prove this, but I do remember my mother swinging a baton of her own on our lawn at home (to the astonishment of our neighbours – it was not the sort of thing one did in Worcester Park) and telling me Father had taught her, so there is some circumstantial support for the story.

Soon my father was performing in the circus ring. He taught himself acrobatics in the cellar of his father’s building workshop, and by the age of eight, he claimed, he was the top man in a four-man pyramid. As a teenager, he said, he performed on the flying trapeze without a safety net – to attract a larger crowd and earn a bigger fee.

I can’t be certain exactly when or why my grandparents returned to England but by 1896, when Tom was seventeen, he and Alfred and their father were back in the West Midlands. The two young men were active members of the Walsall Swimming Club, and in the late 1890s their names appear repeatedly in local newspaper reports of swimming galas, taking part in an odd array of events, from canoe races in comic costume and aquatic ‘Derbys’ (with the swimmer as a horse carrying a ‘jockey’), to life-saving exhibitions, swimming races in fancy dress (Tom winning a prize as a ‘new woman’ in bloomers) and water-polo matches.

By the turn of the century, press mentions of my father cease. He may have moved away from Walsall; certainly less-newsworthy things now occupied his time. One of them became a family secret, unmentioned, something which again I did not discover until I was researching this book. As well as an adopted uncle, I had another brother.

In July 1901 a young dancer, Mary Moss, married to a musician named James Moss, gave birth to a son in Wigan. They called him Tom and registered his birth on 25 July, but the details they gave were untrue: the baby’s father was not James Moss but my father, Tom – then a twenty-two-year-old bachelor. James Moss brought the boy up as his own; indeed he may never have known he was not the father. But Tom Major did not lose touch with his son, and the child – my half-brother – was to enter my life many years later in Brixton, in circumstances no one could have imagined.

It is not hard to guess how my father met Mary and James Moss, for he was now a professional stage performer. The first of his variety shows that I can trace was ‘The Encore’, put on at the Grand Theatre, Stockton-on-Tees, in August 1902. Tom Major appeared on the bill as part of a double act, ‘Drum and Major’, with his future wife, Kitty.

Five years my father’s senior, Kitty was already married to a masseur, David Grant, when they met. The appeal of a life with a masseur must have worn off, for she soon formed a permanent professional partnership with my father which took her away from her husband, and she married Tom after Grant’s death, in 1910.

Kitty and Tom – ‘Drum and Major’ – were in regular work. September 1902 saw them on stage in Portsmouth; December took them to Hastings; and in the first half of 1903 they appeared in turn at Camberwell, Birmingham, Middlesbrough, Bolton, Manchester, Birkenhead, Plymouth, Stockton and Wolverhampton. Only political party leaders perform in a more bewildering succession of venues.

It was a peripatetic existence, but they must have loved travelling because they did not stay long in Britain. In July 1903 the pair sailed from Southampton, and did not return for almost a year. An advertisement in the Stage announced that they were ‘Touring in South America’; which was brave of them, since neither spoke Spanish. While they were there, I learned from my father, they spent time on a cattle ranch in Argentina. He used to tell me tales of the gauchos and their way of life. He also claimed that in Buenos Aires he had worked in a millionaires’ club, looking out for card-sharpers and winning back their gains. As an old man he was still an avid card-player.

And he crossed the River Plate – at least according to family legend – stumbling into a civil war in Uruguay, and was forced to enlist briefly in a local militia. Perhaps the name ‘Major’ confused someone. Tom used to recount how he had a white band pinned to his arm and had been ordered to march a group of undesirables out of town. He claimed that the white band denoted his status as an officer, but in fact, as my brother has subsequently discovered, at the time of his visit Uruguay was hotly divided between two political clans, the Blancos and the Colorados – the Whites and the Reds. Even a small piece of clothing of either colour committed you to one side or the other. Probably inadvertently, my father had joined the rebellious Blancos in their failed challenge to the Colorado party.

Their revolutionary phase behind them, Tom and Kitty returned to England in April 1904 to a thriving career. A fortnight after docking they were on stage in Blackpool, and they toured the country continually until the outbreak of war in 1914. They must have appeared in almost every big theatre in Britain, but life was not easy for music-hall performers. Contracts were cancelled without notice; shows were moved from theatre to theatre without compensation; and some theatres demanded that artistes play daily matinees but take payment only for evening shows. Individually, most performers were at the mercy of management. Collectively they believed they could protect themselves, and decided to do so.

A conference was called of leading stage figures, which Tom and Kitty attended, and on 18 February 1906 the Variety Artistes Federation was formed at the Vaudeville Club in London. Everyone present joined that same evening, and queued to pay the subscription of two shillings and sixpence. Tom and Kitty were Founder Members Numbers 97 and 98; my sister Pat still has our father’s white-and-green membership badge. I cannot recall, however, mentioning to the Huntingdonshire Conservative selection committee that my father was a pioneer trade unionist.

By 1914 Tom and Kitty were running a successful touring company. Tom had developed a heart condition which disqualified him from active service in the First World War, but they continued to appear on stage, their entertainments doubling as recruiting drives. My family still has an autograph book in which Tom collected the signatures of soldiers in the audience who had been decorated for their valour.

The end of the war saw the music-hall business return to normal. Throughout 1920 and 1921 Tom and Kitty travelled Britain, never stopping anywhere for more than a month, performing sketches and revues such as ‘Stop Press’, ‘Ginger’, ‘Fantasy’ and ‘After the Overture’.

And now, as I found out to my astonishment while researching this book, a surprise half-sister joins the family troupe. At about this time my father had an affair with one Alice Maude Frankland. She became pregnant, and a daughter, Kathleen, my father’s second child, was born in October 1923. Alice soon disappeared from the scene, but Tom and Kitty adopted Kathleen just a month after her birth. While they criss-crossed the country with their shows, the baby was boarded with a foster-couple. In about 1927 or 1928, they decided to bring her home. ‘The Majors want to take Kath away,’ her foster-parents were told – a heartbreaking moment. Sense prevailed, and Kathleen stayed where she was, though my father continued to provide financial support.

I have yet to reach 1930 in my family’s story, and already we have stumbled across an unrelated ‘uncle’, a wayward father, illiteracy, adultery, remarriage and two previously unknown half-siblings. Childhood memories have left me with a rock-solid respect for the traditional basics of family life and family duty; but if, unlike some Conservative colleagues and supporters, I have always taken with a pinch of salt the myth of a past golden age of conventional families, splendid education and national virtue, then I, and millions of my compatriots, have reason to. Life in Britain has never been simple, and never will be.

Kathleen was not to enter my life until after I had left Downing Street. Although she always knew of my family, I was not aware of her, and she was startled when in 1990 her half-brother became prime minister. She could have sold her story to the press for a small fortune. Instead, she kept the secret. Only after the 1997 general election did I learn that I had a half-sister, alive, well and living in England.

It was lucky for young Kathleen that she stayed with her foster-family, for a catastrophe would soon cost Kitty her life. While she was rehearsing on stage, a steel girder from the safety curtain came loose, fell, and struck her on the head. She was terribly injured, and though she lingered on for months with her mind impaired, she died in June 1928, perhaps mercifully for so vibrant a woman, and was buried at Prees Cemetery in Shropshire. Kitty and my father had been together for over twenty-five years. When she died my father was deluged with sympathetic letters, from everyone from theatre managers to call-boys. She was much loved.

After the accident Kitty had been comforted and nursed by a young dancer who had joined my father’s show six years earlier, at the age of seventeen. She was one half of ‘Glade and Glen’, a speciality act – and a cheeky, teasing, self-willed girl, often in trouble for misbehaviour and pranks. But she charmed her way out of every scrape, and had been a favourite of Kitty’s. A year after Kitty’s death, she married her boss, Tom, twenty-six years her senior, and cared for him for the rest of his life. Her name was Gwen, and she was my mother.

Gwen’s past held surprises for me, too. In 1991, one of my constituents with an interest in family history wrote a letter to me in which he suggested that I might have shared more than my job with Margaret Thatcher. My mother’s family had roots in the Boston district of Lincolnshire, not far from Margaret Thatcher’s home town of Grantham, and research suggests that it is likely – though not certain – that through my mother Margaret Thatcher and I have common ancestors in eighteenth-century Lincolnshire.

As the 1920s ended and music halls gave way to cinemas, my father left show business. It was the right decision, for his profession was dying, but it must have hurt. His 1929 marriage certificate shows his occupation as ‘builder’, but I have no reason to believe he ever was one – though he may have financed the building of bungalows. Certainly he was soon in a different trade, modelling animals and garden ornaments. My parents moved from Shropshire to a bungalow in Worcester Park, and children soon came along. A son, Thomas Aston, was born in 1929, but sadly lived only a few days. Then came Pat, born in 1930, and Terry, in 1932.

In the course of his life, my father once told me, he had made and lost fortunes several times over. What he meant by a fortune I don’t know, but for him the 1930s were good times. He became the first car-owner in the area; Pat and Terry were sent to fee-paying schools; and my mother had domestic help while she worked to build up my father’s business. All this changed with the outbreak of the Second World War. My father was sixty. His workforce joined the services and, as he had foreseen, the market for his ornaments collapsed. The car went. Pat and Terry were withdrawn from their private schools. Pat, the more academic of the two, won a scholarship to Nonsuch Grammar School for Girls, but Terry went to the local state school. My father became a Senior Air Raid Warden, and my mother began work in the local library, supplementing the family income by giving dancing lessons at home.

She had hoped for another child, but did not expect one. In late 1942 she began to suffer persistent heartburn and went to her doctor, a salty-tongued medic with a sharp bedside manner. ‘Don’t be bloody silly, woman,’ he boomed at her. ‘You’re pregnant.’ It was not an easy pregnancy, and my birth was dramatic. My mother collapsed in the kitchen with double pneumonia and pleurisy, and was rushed to St Helier Hospital, Carshalton, where she nearly died. I was born a few hours later, on 29 March 1943. Within days I, too, was perilously ill with a virulent infection. I only just survived, and to this day bear scarred ankles from the many blood transfusions.

My mother returned to her job in the library, taking me with her in my pram. When a German flying bomb landed in a nearby street, it killed ten people and shattered hundreds of windows. Glass splinters fell into my cot which, mercifully, was empty. Forty-seven years later I was to hear the sound of breaking glass when the IRA launched a mortar at Downing Street. For my mother, the flying bomb was too much. The family moved to Saham Toney in Norfolk for the rest of the war, returning to Worcester Park in 1945.

My first memories are of a small bungalow with four rooms, a bathroom and a kitchen. Our garden was long and narrow, dotted with sheds in which my father worked. We had a lawn just large enough for ball games, and two ponds: one shallow with a few goldfish, the other a deep iron tank sunk into the ground. There were rockeries, fruit trees to plunder and larger trees to climb.

Money, though, was an irregular commodity. Mostly we were comfortable but not well-off. Our neighbours were friendly and we were relaxed and at ease in our community, but I soon realised my parents were more exotic than those of my friends. For a start they were much older – when I was born my father was nearly sixty-four and my mother a few weeks short of thirty-eight. Gwen, clad in straight-up-and-down 1930s sports garb, raised eyebrows even from friendly neighbours by exercising and throwing her Indian clubs in the garden. My father, in the early days, could be spotted with his batons, as could Pat, doing acrobatics. When I think of this scene, I’m reminded of the families of circus performers described by Dickens in Hard Times:

The father of one of the families was in the habit of balancing the father of another of the families on the top of a great pole; the father of a third family often made a pyramid of both those fathers … all the fathers could dance upon rolling casks, stand upon bottles, catch knives and balls, twirl hand-basins, ride upon anything, jump over everything, and stick at nothing. All the mothers could (and did) dance, upon the slack wire and the tight rope, and perform rapid acts on barebacked steeds; none of them were at all particular in respect of showing their legs …

They all assumed to be mighty rakish and knowing, they were not very tidy in their private dresses, they were not at all orderly in their domestic arrangements, and the combined literature of the whole company would have produced but a poor letter on any subject. Yet there was a remarkable gentleness and childishness about these people, a special inaptitude for any kind of sharp practice, and an untiring readiness to help and pity one another, deserving, often of as much respect, and always as much generous construction, as the everyday virtues of any class of people in the world.

I remember my father as a stern old man, but kind. My mother idolised him and cared for him in every way. She must have known of his earlier dalliances, but nothing was ever said, at least not in our hearing. Our father’s word was law, and he never had to raise his voice to keep order. In his prime he had been a truly striking figure, ‘a great and stylish Edwardian actor,’ one biographer of mine has written, ‘over six feet tall, athletic in build and expansive in his gestures.’ Now ill and prematurely aged, he was still master in his house.

But it was my mother who brought up the family and ran the home. My father made the decisions. She carried them out. She was a Peter Pan figure who never quite grew up. The sprite of mischief was always with her. Loving and beloved, she was a magnet for lame ducks. I remember sitting at the table about to eat my lunch when a cold and hungry gypsy knocked at the door. He was invited in and my mother served him my meal, leaving me hungry. She did not ask me to do the washing up – she would not have considered that fair. But neither did she ask the gypsy to do it.

Gwen had a straightforward philosophy. Share what you’ve got. Be polite to others. Think of their feelings. Make allowances for them. Stand up for yourself but don’t cause unnecessary offence. Don’t show your own feelings. It was a simple code. She believed it and she lived it.

At the age of five I went to Cheam Common Infants’ School, which was around half a mile from our home in Longfellow Road, graduating to the Junior School in the autumn of 1950. I was taken to school at first, but it was an easy journey, and I was soon walking there and back on my own.

Sometimes I was given small amounts of pocket money on a rather haphazard basis – or earned it by doing small tasks. With this I often bought presents for my mother. My father did not approve. ‘That is not why we give him the money,’ I overheard him say to my mother. ‘Why does he do it?’ He was angry and I didn’t understand why. His view was that they had given me some of the little they had, and he did not think I should spend it on them. But I often did. I liked giving presents and my mother loved receiving them.

I liked receiving presents too, and except for one occasion when there was no money, Christmas and birthdays always brought something. Footballs, Meccano sets, pens and pencils for school, and classic books: Ivanhoe, Quentin Durward, The Black Arrow, Tom Brown’s Schooldays, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Knights of the Round Table, the Greyfriars stories – all of these and many more were favourites. Thus began my lifelong love affair with books.

Books introduced me to a world I’d never known, and people I would never meet. My parents encouraged me to read, although my father was too active and physical a man to be a great reader himself. He had too much else to do. But later, after he began to lose his sight, he derived great pleasure from the ‘talking books’ sent to him by the Nuffield Centre for the Blind, which came in large pouches and were fragile records like the old 78s of the time. They kept introspection at bay when his dreams crumbled. I would sit with him and listen to them for hour upon hour. We often talked of books. The authors he remembered from his youth were Rider Haggard, Jack London and Arthur Conan Doyle – and not only, he said, for the Sherlock Holmes stories.

‘Have you ever read The White Company?’ he asked. I hadn’t, and nor did I until the 1990s, when Stephen Wall, my Private Secretary at the Foreign Office and later at Number 10, and subsequently our Ambassador to the European Union, gave me his own precious copy.

My mother didn’t read much. She was too busy running the family, cosseting my father and helping lame ducks. I don’t think my brother Terry was much of a reader either, but I could be wrong, because he has surprised me all my life. I’m never quite sure what he’ll do next – and neither, I suspect, is he. He seems to enjoy allowing the world to underestimate him while he chuckles at it.

My sister Pat did read – a lot. Academically, she was the clever one of the family, and an astute judge of character. After I became prime minister she would phone me up and say, ‘Don’t trust him. He’s up to no good.’ She was almost always right.

For me, books were an escape and an education. Some became lifelong friends. Fame is the Spur, A Horseman Riding By, How Green was my Valley, Trollope – Phineas Finn and Phineas Redux were never far from hand. Biographies and histories joined Agatha Christie, Neville Cardus, Thomas Costain and many more, not forgetting Mrs Henry Wood’s East Lynne. I loved Jane Austen and Dickens – especially The Pickwick Papers, A Tale of Two Cities and Great Expectations.

I learned that there is as much to be learned from durable, well-written bestsellers as from more serious offerings. For me, these books were more than mere entertainment. They became companions and tutors, cherished friends to be picked up again and again, the true furniture of the mind. I did try more heavyweight reading when I began studying in my late teens. I read Kafka and Voltaire, Spinoza on ethics and Aristotle on politics. I even read Nietzsche, to try to see why his writings had become textbooks of the Nazis. I dipped into Colette, Hardy and Voltaire, and added them to my collection. Most of these books remain on my shelves today.

I can remember none of my friends from primary school, but I cannot have been unpopular for I was elected captain of the football team. We won most of our games and were good enough to reach the final of a local schools’ knockout competition, but lost 2–1 after I gave away a silly goal. I was inconsolable. I also learned to play cricket. Once I was given out lbw first ball, when I knew I had hit the ball smack in the middle of the bat. ‘But I hit it,’ I protested, confident that my explanation would persuade the umpire to put right his mistaken decision. It didn’t. ‘You’re out,’ he said, waving his hand in dismissal. ‘Now off you go.’ It was the first time I realised that adults were fallible and that, if on shaky ground, they could become even more assertive than if they were right.

I had a few fights at school, mostly with boys who were throwing their weight around, and it led to trouble. I was winning one when a teacher dragged me away from the scrap, slapping me painfully around my head and shoulders and visibly losing his self-control. I was contemptuous of him from then on. I thought he was unjust. But I wasn’t a natural troublemaker. I worked quite hard and was as keen to please as most small boys. When we were asked to produce a painting for an exhibition I misunderstood and took in one that my elder sister, Pat, an excellent artist, had painted. I was mortified to overhear a teacher saying I had brought in a painting, but ‘his sister did it’. I felt like a cheat and slunk away.

At home I had pets. I bred mice and sold them to friends, with a slice of fruitcake thrown in as an inducement to buy. My white doe angora rabbit, Frisky, was given an assignation with a blue bevan buck rabbit owned by a friend. We watched and waited with interest, and were not disappointed. A litter was produced, though not all survived. We had a dog, too, a white bull terrier called Butch. He was a wonderful companion and curled up on my bed each night, before returning to the lounge as soon as he thought I was asleep.

I pause, writing this. Everyone must have such stories from childhood. But perhaps it is worth illustrating that prime ministers are no different. From the pages of some politicians’ memoirs the statesman seems to spring perfectly formed, almost from the cot, without all the trivial things that matter so much to a child. But some of the memories which writing this has brought back are every bit as strong and as moving to me as the headlines about my life which were to come.

Outside school my fun was largely self-created, apart from visits to Saturday-morning cinema, where the films always ended on a dramatic note to encourage you to return the following week. It was my sister Pat who encouraged my interest in cricket. She took me to the local sports club to see Worcester Park play. We studied books on how to bat and bowl, and I spent hours practising when I could find no one to play with me, chalking up stumps on the garage door to bowl at. In the winter I turned the garage into a goal against which I dribbled a football, shot and took penalties without number. If other boys were around I would play with them. When they were not, I was quite content to play alone.

I also ran. Longfellow Road abutted on to Green Lane, and formed a block about half a mile long. I ran around it for hour upon hour and raced against anyone and everyone – and always myself. I ran so much that an interfering neighbour told my mother I would injure myself, and for a while running was forbidden.

A brook ran along Green Lane and I used to jump across it to climb the trees on the far side. Once I fell out of one and returned home covered in blood – but I soon recovered. Worcester Park then was less built-up than it is now, and there were open hayfields and hedgerows full of birds’ nests behind Longfellow Road. I brought home eggs that didn’t hatch and ducklings that didn’t survive, and learned that nature was best left to her own devices.

At home we talked of many things, but never politics or religion. I know from my brother and sister that my father was much against the socialists, and Mr Attlee was never forgiven for defeating Mr Churchill in the 1945 general election. My parents were believers, I’m sure, and their values were more Christian than those of many people who call themselves such; but going to church in their Sunday best and looking pious was not for them.

‘She’s got religion,’ Mother would say disapprovingly of a neighbour, as though it were measles; and we kept clear for fear of catching it. So we never went to church on Sunday. Perhaps my parents had got out of the habit when they were travelling the country, though my mother, despite her open heart, had a puritanical side – probably, in part at least, because of my father’s earlier philandering. Yet her God was a forgiving God, and I imbibed her values, although I always had a yen to take church more seriously than my parents did. That yen was largely unfulfilled. The Church appealed to me, but it never reached out to me.

I learned Christian values by example, but in no other way. And though I was baptised into the Church of England I was never confirmed – and had I been in later life, when I had become a public figure, I worried that it would lead to comment about my motives. For my parents the Church was something rather quaint, an honoured but distant institution that other people attended but we did not – except, of course, for fêtes and jumble sales. Chance and circumstance left me a believer at a distance; but a believer nonetheless.

In the 1950s the eleven plus examinations determined whether or not you went to grammar school. The names of the successful candidates were announced by the teacher in class, and as he intoned ‘John’ I felt my back being patted by the boy behind me. But the teacher went on to say ‘John Hunt’. I thought I’d failed, and I remember the huge relief when my name was finally called out. So I left Cheam Common School in 1954 and went to Rutlish, a grammar school about three miles away in Merton. It was our first choice, and I looked forward to going. I liked the uniform, and the school played rugby, which I felt sure I would enjoy. They also played cricket, and set aside one term a year for athletics, which was unusual at the time.

Passing the examination to Rutlish led to furious rows with my parents. My birth certificate records me simply as ‘John Major’, although at the font my godmother, a librarian friend of my mother’s with the unlikely name of Miss Fink, slipped in a ‘Roy’, to my father’s fury. He hated the name, and wasn’t too fond of Miss Fink, an exotic lady who had painted fingernails and who smoked Passing Cloud cigarettes. But my father had used two names in his life. Although he was christened ‘Abraham Thomas Ball’, he used ‘Tom Major’ as his stage name and generally thereafter. My elder brother Terry had been registered with ‘Terry’ and ‘Major’ as his Christian names and ‘Ball’ as his surname. Pat was the only one of us to be both christened and registered as ‘Major-Ball’. Now, as I prepared to go to Rutlish, my parents decided to inflict this hybrid name on me. I bitterly objected. It was not my name, and, even worse, it was bound to cause trouble at school.

My mother and father thought it would put me more in tune with the school. I disagreed. My parents were usually kind and biddable, but on this occasion they were intransigent. In battles like this in the 1950s the adults won. And so – in the only cruel act of theirs I ever knew – I became John Major-Ball.

I have often wondered how much this decision affected my attitude to school. A great deal, I think. I got it all out of proportion. It meant I approached Rutlish with a wary unease. I believed I would have to excel at sport and be prepared to use my fists to earn the respect of my peers. Forty years later that may seem an odd judgement, but it was all too real for an eleven-year-old boy mortally embarrassed at sailing under false colours.

At the time my parents were under great strain. My father’s health was poor and his eyesight was failing. I remember him falling off a stool in the kitchen when I came into the room as he was putting in a lightbulb, and from that day on I watched him deteriorate. Irrationally, but in the way a small boy can, I felt personally responsible for this. My mother’s health was also worsening, with asthma and bronchitis her constant companions.

My father’s garden-ornaments business was in difficulties, too. In 1950 or 1951 he made plans to sell it, pay off his debts and emigrate with us to Canada. His failing eyesight, spotted by a wary doctor at his second medical interview for Canada, put paid to this scheme. In urgent need of capital, he entered into a business deal with a widowed lady. She wanted a job for her sister’s boyfriend and invested £3,000 to install him as my father’s partner. The boyfriend began to learn the business, but disliked it. Soon he began to dislike the widow’s sister too, and they fell out and parted company.

The widow demanded her money back. In his typical my-word-is-my-bond manner, my father hadn’t bothered to legally formalise the deal. Nor did he have the money. He’d spent it. And he was unable to take the matter to court. He was not fit enough, financially or physically, and his case was weak. Why had an experienced man of the world like my father not legalised the deal? He was advised that the episode could be presented as one of a designing businessman out to fleece an innocent widow.

My sister, then only twenty-four, took over, negotiating with the widow and agreeing to repay the money over time, in a vain effort to save our father from having to sell the house. But the debt was many times my sister’s annual salary, and my parents were faced with the loss of all they had. This must have been shattering for them and, I am sure now, explains my parents’ impatience with my protests about changing my name. A few months after I went to Rutlish my father sold our bungalow in Worcester Park for £2,150. My parents seemed to age before my eyes.

We moved to a new home in Brixton in May 1955, when I was twelve. It was a sad comedown, part of the top floor of a four-storey Victorian building in Coldharbour Lane. We had two rooms for the five of us, plus Butch and a pet budgerigar. Dad, Terry and I slept in one room, and Mum and Pat in the other. This second room was used as a dining room and lounge during the day. We shared a cooker on the landing with the other top-floor tenant, a middle-aged bachelor. The lavatory, two floors below, was used by all the tenants. There was no bathroom. We washed at the sink or in a tub.

The house was home over the years to a rich collection of characters. The floor below us was occupied from time to time by three Irish boys who returned home to Ireland whenever taxes were due to be paid. They were huge fun. They played football with me in the street, and one of them, Christie, suggested Pat should run away with him. Another, Michael, actually proposed to her one morning as she left for work, but she wasn’t really listening – a most convenient gift she has always had. Only later did she realise what he had said. It hardly mattered. She was convinced that they would end up with eleven children each. And anyway, she was determined to marry her long-term boyfriend Peter, which she eventually did.

Other tenants included a middle-aged cat-burglar. He was charming and lived with a beautiful girl of about nineteen, who disappeared when he was sent to jail. She used to walk around in her underwear, which was something of a novelty in the 1950s but added pleasurably to my education. The cat-burglar gave me his bets to place on racehorses with a local bookie who operated illegally in the tunnel at Loughborough Junction station. Once he offered me half a crown to see if there were any policemen around before he went out of the house, since he was anxious not to meet any. I agreed to scout for him, but high-mindedly refused to take the money. It probably wasn’t his anyway.

Two other tenants were a Jamaican and his white girlfriend, an unusual liaison for the era, even though there was already heavy West Indian immigration into Brixton by then. He, too, was eventually jailed – for stabbing a policeman.

Life in the flat was very cramped. My father distrusted electricity, and would turn off the radio if there was lightning, or if water was dripping in the room from the ceiling. On wet weekends there was not much to do. I played Subbuteo for hours, running my own imaginary football leagues. Sometimes I would walk down the road to a large bakery and buy bread direct from the ovens. The smell was heaven and the bread warm and tasty.

Very occasionally I would stride up Denmark Hill to Dulwich Village and walk around, looking at smart houses with a warm glow through their curtains. I still remember looking through one window at the comfort inside, and seeing two young children playing board games with their mother. Such a life seemed very different from mine.

One winter evening on such a prowl, when I was thirteen, I was set upon by a gang of boys, and the word ‘Mark’ was cut into my thigh with a razor-blade. I told only my sister, who tended the wound with iodine, and kept my secret. I did not want my parents to know about the incident, and they never did. The branding has long since gone.

I was mystified by our relationship with our landlords. The house was owned by Tom, a man about twenty years younger than my father, and his wife Ann, always known as Nan, a tall, handsome woman with long blonde hair who had three children, Carole, Tom Junior and Nicholas. It was clear that they were not strangers to my parents, and they had offered us a roof when we needed it. When I asked my mother about Tom and Nan she became evasive. It was clear that my questions were unwelcome. She never answered them properly.

Tom was ‘Uncle’ Tom and Nan was ‘Auntie’, a common way for children to address adults those days. They occupied the ground floor and the basement. Their daughter Carole moved out soon after we arrived, and Nicholas was much younger than me, but Tom Junior was my age, and we became firm friends. Later in life he went to work in America, and for years we lost touch, but during the 1992 election he reappeared, unannounced and unexpected, and worked for me throughout the campaign.

Like my parents, Uncle Tom had been on the stage. He was a singer with a magnificent voice and the portly build of the classic tenor. For years he appeared with his sister, Jill Summers, who in her later years achieved fame as Phyllis Pease in Coronation Street. He had toured the halls – sometimes under the stage name of Signor Bassani – and had rarely been short of work.

Tom’s last job in the theatre was to understudy Harry Secombe as Mr Pickwick in the West End. Alas, not for the first time, he drank too much, fell down some stairs and was sacked. He never sang professionally again, although he did sing at home, his voice beautiful and effortlessly wide-ranging. These were unforgettable evenings in Brixton.

It dawned on me that it was not chance that had brought our family to Brixton, but blood ties. Tom’s surname was ‘Moss’, and though that meant nothing to me at the time, I had a hunch about his background. Now I have been able to confirm it. ‘Uncle’ Tom was the baby registered by the musician James Moss and his young wife Mary back in 1901.He was my half-brother. I would have thought it indelicate to put any such suspicion to my parents, and they would certainly have thought the enquiry unpardonable. I was sure I was right, and so were Pat and Terry. The reason we were living there was no longer such a mystery.

My memories of our six years or so at Coldharbour Lane are patchy. Certainly there was never much money in the household. Often the larder was bare until Terry received payment in advance from one of my father’s most regular customers, the marvellous Mr Spiers of Margate, for garden ornaments he had not yet made. And, although I did not know it at the time, Aunt Nan often came to the rescue with loans.

For a while Terry lived in the garage he was working in, because there was so little room at home and he did not wish to spend hard-earned money on lodgings. That stopped as soon as my mother found out. Pat repeatedly put off her marriage to Peter as she and Terry worked to support the family, keep me at school and repay my father’s debts. They were determined that my father should not go bankrupt.

The indignity of our situation affected my parents deeply, although they lived through setback and disaster without ever referring to their distress or ill-health. Not for nothing had they spent years in the theatre. They could act. But my mother was ageing fast, and my father retreated ever more into the past. They were never crabby or miserable, but fought adversity in their own way, laughing joyfully at minor triumphs, apparently certain that things would get better; outwardly optimistic and forever hoping for a future that for them, alas, would never come.

They were stoical in the face of all adversity. As my father became more blind, I became his eyes. I would take his arm when he went to collect his pension. In Coldharbour Lane that meant negotiating several flights of stairs, some steep outside stone steps from the door to the pavement and 150 yards of road to the post office. I learned to watch out for uneven paving stones, unleashed dogs, traffic turning into side roads and all the hazards whose avoidance is routine to the fully-sighted. It was good training for a future Minister for the Disabled.

Too stiff and proud to acknowledge ill-fortune, my father saw his troubles, his health, his blindness, as temporary setbacks from which he would somehow emerge triumphant. My mother, seemingly impervious to every blow, brushed them away as of no consequence, defended and cared for my father and was always unvanquished before a sea of troubles. If I found her with wet eyes often enough, I never found her without hope. If the rain came through the ceiling, as it did – well, the water could be mopped up and the ceiling repaired. If the bills piled up, they’d be paid eventually – no one could doubt that. If their health worsened, it would surely improve. There was always tomorrow, full of wonderful possibilities.

Especially, they thought, for me. I was to achieve what they had not. I was to put right what was wrong. My mother was confident of that. And since I had stayed at Rutlish after we moved to Coldharbour Lane, they were sure I had the best possible start. I knew that this confidence, too, was ill-founded, but I never told them.

Living in Brixton meant I had one and a half hours’ travelling each way six days a week, since Rutlish had Saturday-morning school. I travelled by train from Loughborough Junction, first to Merton South and later, when I moved to the third year, which had different classrooms, to Wimbledon Chase. It was on these journeys that I picked up an addiction to morning newspapers – the Daily Express in those days – which I would not break until halfway through my tenure of Downing Street.

I would turn first to the sports pages – it was the time of Surrey’s great run of seven County Cricket championships in a row, from 1952 to 1958 – and then to the news. I still remember my incredulity at the trial and execution for murder in July 1955 of Ruth Ellis, the last woman to be hanged in Britain. I could not believe her death penalty would not be commuted, and the experience turned me into a lifelong opponent of capital punishment. I remember, too, the dreadful Munich air disaster of February 1958, in which so many wonderful Manchester United footballers died, and the long saga of whether their manager Matt Busby would recover from his injuries. I remember them better than I remember Rutlish.

Our school uniform was expensive and could only be bought from one shop, Ely’s in Wimbledon. My first blazer and cap were new, but as I grew, later uniforms were second-hand. Fortunately Rutlish jumble sales were a source of larger blazers, with the embossed buttons from the outgrown blazer carefully preserved and saved, since they cost two shillings and sixpence each from Ely’s. Whenever my mother bought a jumble-sale blazer she ordered me to stay out of sight – she didn’t want anyone to know for whom it was intended. She always bought them too large for me, in the belief that they would last longer as I grew. She must have thought nobody would notice.

She was wrong. Once, when I had lost two buttons from my sleeve, Mr Winsor, the school secretary, called me to see him, and offered me five shillings from the school fund to replace them. It was a sensitive and kind act, and I thanked him for it. But I couldn’t accept, and my parents would have been horrified had I done so. They would have made me take the money back, which would have been even more shaming. In any event I felt abashed at the well-intended gesture and humiliated at the need for it.

Rutlish and I were not getting on. Some masters, like Bobby Oulton, the deputy head, and Harry Hathaway, who taught maths, remain clear memories, but most have long since been pushed from my mind; although we were not mortal enemies, we were certainly not good friends. I avoided after-school activities because it took too long to travel home. The Combined Cadet Force did not appeal to me – even apart from the cost of the uniform. And the lure of wearing a boater in the upper forms was certainly resistible. It all seemed rather pretentious to me.

My name did lead to squalls at school, though fewer than I had feared. A scrap or two and an early aptitude for rugby soon enabled me to settle well enough among my fellow pupils, and in my first year I was even appointed captain of rugby and told to pick teams for trial games. This was such a welcome task that it took precedence over all academic work. Mr Blenkinsop, the headmaster, was unimpressed when I ignored his valuable Latin tuition to concentrate on rugby trials, but he was too wise to take the responsibility away from me. Anyway, he had probably given up trying to teach me Latin.

Rutlish introduced me to foreign languages and the sciences (all draughty laboratories and odd smells), but the acquaintance was only casual. History and English were more bearable. Such homework as was necessary I did on the train, where an empty carriage provided a better opportunity than two crowded rooms in Brixton.

At school I did as little work as possible. I thought of the place as a penance to be endured. I kept myself to myself and cooperated only so as to keep out of trouble. I just didn’t engage. I never took school interests home or bothered my parents with talk of extra-curricular outings or holidays; I knew they could not afford them.

At about this time, I discovered I was short-sighted. I could read comfortably and play games without difficulty, but – sitting at the back of the class to keep out of harm’s way – I could not easily see the blackboard. In the days of blackboard teaching this was a real problem. No one noticed.

It has been said that I was bullied at school. That is not true: I was too good at sport to be a likely candidate for bullying. I was a member of the cricket and rugby teams for my house, and enjoyed my happiest hours playing those games. It was the best part of school. I even won a certificate from the Evening Standard for taking seven wickets for nine runs against Royal Masonic – including a hat trick. I once won a bet with my team-mate, Tony Weymouth, by hitting a cricket ball through a school window. It wasn’t the window I was aiming for, but it was thought good enough.

Sport was a large part of my out-of-school life as well, and I formed a lasting attachment to Surrey County Cricket Club and Chelsea Football Club. I saw Chelsea play for the first time in 1955, the year they won the championship. They beat Wolves 1–0 with a Peter Sillett penalty, and I was hooked for life. I have spent many happy afternoons at Stamford Bridge, and many frustrating ones as well, as Chelsea demonstrated their legendary unpredictability. I can still smell the cheroot smoke and roasted peanuts of a sunny Easter afternoon in the sixties when they beat Everton 6–2, and Jimmy Greaves scored five goals. Such a result had rarity value, quite apart from the odours of the day. Supporting Chelsea over the years has been a rollercoaster ride, but it has been a great aid in developing a philosophical view of life.

Individual sports have never had the appeal for me of team games – except for athletics. I still remember the wonderful evening Chris Chataway, the great English middle-distance runner, beat Vladimir Kutz, the seemingly invincible Russian champion. ‘Chataway went thataway!’ chanted the delirious crowd, and so he had.

But cricket is my first love. Clement Attlee once referred to cricket as ‘a religion and W.G. [Grace] next to a deity’. He put an old fashioned tickertape machine into Downing Street so he could keep up to date with the cricket scores, and it was still there in my time.

Playing cricket gave me some of the happiest moments of my life – not that I was ever very good, but then many of those who love the game are indifferent performers. I had my moments, though they were pitifully few. My seven for nine at school was my zenith, although seventy-seven not out (against poor bowling and fielding in Nigeria) is another cherished memory.

Our home in Brixton was less than a mile from The Oval, home of Surrey. The great Surrey team of the fifties that won the County Championship for seven successive years was equipped for all conditions. They bowled Lock and Laker if the wicket took spin, Bedser if the ball would swing, and Loader if the wicket was quick. May, and later Barrington and Stewart, scored the runs, with Fletcher, Clark and Constable in support. Their fielding was superb. Lock was like a cheetah sighting prey in the leg trap, and Surridge took amazing catches with his telescopic arms – I used to believe he was the only man alive who could scratch his ankles while standing upright. It was a wonderful team of all the talents, and I never expect to see its equal.

I almost lived at The Oval during the school holidays. Armed with sandwiches and a soft drink I sat on the popular side in perfect contentment. If the weather was fine and the crowd large (as it often was) I would sit on the grass just outside the boundary rope, a delight long since forbidden by nannyish safety regulations. I suppose I was spoilt by the wonderful cricket I saw then, but those early days provided imperishable memories. The mind does play tricks, of course, but what I recall is that Surrey always seemed to win, and that in the early evening The Oval was always bathed in sunshine and shadow.

I was enraptured by the literature of cricket, which has a treasure trove no other game can match. For me Neville Cardus, C.L.R. James and E.W. Swanton stand before all other writers on the game. Cardus was the poet of cricket; his prose had a romance to it that swept the mundane aside. The first piece by Cardus I ever read was a pen-portrait of Denis Compton, in which he wrote of the infamous knee: ‘the gods treated him churlishly. They crippled him almost beyond repair.’ I never saw Compton again without that thought coming to mind.

I did suspect that Cardus stretched the truth a little as he fleshed out his affectionate portraits. Were cricketers really such characters, or was their charm enhanced in the poetic eye of a besotted beholder? Even if it was, it didn’t diminish my enjoyment. Cardus, again on Compton, illustrated the point. He once asked two boys why they were not watching the cricket. ‘Because there are no more Denis Comptons,’ he reports them as saying. It is a marvellous tribute to the unique charm of Compton’s batting, but would a small boy really have said that? I doubt it, but when I read it I loved it. And it may have been true.

C.L.R. James’s masterpiece Beyond a Boundary sets out better than anyone before or since how cricket affects character and illustrates the better virtues; it undermined all my prejudices that such a lyrical love of the game should flow from the pen of a committed Marxist

Jim Swanton is the doyen of modern writers although, for reporting the game, he would give the palm to his good friend John Woodcock. Both men have seen much of the greatest cricket played in the last three-quarters of a century. Jonathan Aitken, a great admirer of Swanton, once gave me a set of all the Swanton books I did not already possess, and they are a prized part of my collection.

I have often sat watching cricket with Jim Swanton, and it is an education. His memory is phenomenal: he once said to me of Donald Bradman’s 234 at Lords in 1930, which the Don thought was his greatest innings, ‘He hit the first two balls he received for four; they went …’ Jim stretched out his arm to point ‘towards that advertisement hoarding over there.’

I have found that other old cricketers and cricket watchers have the facility for total recall as well. Alf Gover, the old Surrey and England fast bowler, brought to life a tour of India in the 1930s under the captaincy of Lord Tennyson. Alf was running up to bowl the first ball of the match when a vengeful curry from the night before began to make its presence known. Sensing disaster, he did not deliver the ball when he reached the wicket but, to general astonishment, sprinted past the stumps and straight off the pitch into the pavilion. A few minutes later, as he sat wretchedly in the washroom, Lord Tennyson knocked on the door. ‘Alf,’ he enquired, ‘can we have the ball back please?’

It is difficult to capture the special fascination of cricket. It is unique. It has grace and charm and athleticism. It is unpredictable. It can change the mood of a spectator from lazy contentment to excitement within moments. A game can last up to five days, but the outcome may be uncertain until the end; changing weather conditions can up-end the state of a game. Above all, with occasional lapses, cricket is played with a generosity of spirit that is as refreshing as it is unfashionable. It is, I think, a very English game, that still encapsulates old values.

From the very start, cricket bred characters that the literature of the game has kept alive. Cricket lovers can talk for hours about the virtues of players they never saw, and the greatness of matches long ago. If I ever get to the Elysian Fields I intend to watch Trumper, and Grace, and Ranji, and so many others.

Cricketers are often very modest about their achievements, never realising the admiration they provoke among cricket lovers who do not have their skills. A few years ago, when Harold Larwood, the great old English fast bowler, was awarded his MBE, which was too little for all he did, and too late by several decades, I phoned him up in Australia, where he had lived for many years, to congratulate him. His granddaughter answered the phone but within moments the old man, now blind and frail, was speaking to me. I congratulated him and he thanked me for the award. And then he began to talk not of his exploits, but of his hero, Jack Hobbs, and innings he had played on sticky, treacherous wickets. Harold’s memory was of seventy years earlier, but was as vivid to him as any contemporary event. This was no vainglory, just admiration of another man’s great skill.

Nor is this bashfulness unique to Harold Larwood. I remember being with some former England and Australian international players discussing Bradman’s last Test innings when, to general astonishment, he was bowled for nought second ball by Eric Hollies. Only later when I looked up the match in Wisden, the cricket lover’s bible, did I recall that Arthur Morris, who had taken part in that conversation, scored 196 in that innings. Arthur had not mentioned it.

I would have loved to have been good enough to play cricket at the top level, but the basic skills were never there. I would have improved with practice, but never enough. It often seems to me that top-class sportsmen live their lives upside down. They are at their most famous when young, and end their playing careers at an age when most people in other professions are just beginning to reach positions of influence. Their reward though can be the bliss of fame and fortune and youth together, and the joy of doing something they love supremely well. It is an unbeatable combination, which is why few cricketers I have met ever regret their playing days, even if, for some, life must seem mundane ever after.

Politics is almost a mirror-image of cricket, in that fame and fortune often come with age, and it always surprises me that so few sportsmen carry their fame into public service. Chris Chataway did became a Conservative Minister, Sebastian Coe was a Member of Parliament while I was prime minister, and Colin Cowdrey serves in the House of Lords, but they are comparative rarities.

At school, I found that little was memorable in the classroom. If you worked hard at Rutlish you were encouraged. If you did not, you were ignored, unless you were disruptive; so I retreated to the shadows and stayed there, inconspicuous. Only once was there a price to be paid for not working. At about the age of thirteen or fourteen an opportunity arose for me to sit an entrance examination for Charterhouse. I was keen, but my school was not – only their top academic pupils would sit; they wanted no failures. Nor were my parents happy with the idea: what was wrong with Rutlish? And probably – though they never said so – they were worried about the extra cost a place at a leading public school would entail. I understood this, and the opportunity drifted away.

The years passed forgettably, and I have only sketchy recollections of them. GCE ‘O’ levels in 1959 approached without drama. My parents’ struggle to hide their bad health and poor finances absorbed all their strength, and they did not push me at all. They assumed I would pass my exams as easily as my academic sister had passed her school certificate a decade before. But I had not worked, and I passed only three ‘O’ levels – History, English Language and English Literature.

Although this was self-inflicted failure, there was little reproach from my sick parents. They were, as ever, stoical, but I knew they were hurt and disappointed. They had hoped for so much, and I had achieved so little. I had let them down. And in their hurt I saw with sudden clarity the pleasure it would have brought them if I had produced the results for which they had hoped. It was a moment of deep shame.

I knew I would now have to work harder, but I saw no likelihood of doing this at Rutlish, and went to the headmaster to tell him I was leaving school. He seemed to bear my impending departure with fortitude, and did not object. Nor did he ask whether my parents approved – which was fortunate, since I had not informed them. When I told them later that the headmaster was content for me to leave they did not protest. They had too much else to worry them.

And so Rutlish and I parted around my sixteenth birthday, and I took stock. I had wasted my time at school, and had rarely been happy there. I left with no ambitions, other than a vague wish to go into politics. This had been heightened when I met our local Labour Member of Parliament, Colonel Marcus Lipton, at a church fête. He had talked to me about politics and, seeing my interest, kindly arranged for me to hear a debate in the House of Commons (he probably did not imagine I would turn out to be a Tory).

I fell in love with the House of Commons the first time I saw it, sitting in the gallery watching the committee stage of the 1956 budget. Harold Macmillan, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, briefly came into the Chamber, and after that I knew I wanted to get into the House of Commons, and that I wanted to be chancellor. I could not bear to have other people telling me what would happen to my life – I wanted to make the decisions for myself. I came from a background where you were dependent so much on other people. I wanted to be self-dependent – not just within my own family, my own lifestyle, but self-dependent in helping to determine the sort of life I lived and the sort of country I lived in. That feeling is still there.

My ambition to enter Parliament never wavered, although at the time it seemed an impossible dream. I wrote around for a job, and found one as a clerk at an insurance-broking firm, Price Forbes, near London Bridge. When the interview ended I wasn’t certain of the salary they had offered: was it £250 a year, or £150? Fortunately it was the higher sum, and I was launched into working life.

I bought a suit and opened a bank account. I paid one pound ten shillings a week into the family kitty, and the rest was taken up by travelling expenses, clothes and other routine expenditure. There was nothing left for frivolity. I sallied forth into the world as my father retreated from it.

I can see him now. Thick, overlong grey hair swept back, stern features, shirt and Fair Isle sweater under a tweed jacket, stepping out for the post office as fast as he could, without hesitation, using his walking stick to lever himself upright. He did not stroll – he marched. Near-blind he may have been, but he was devoid of self-pity. He taught me so much: not to be deterred by obstacles, not to give in to fate. For him, triumph and disaster were passing moments, to be enjoyed or endured. When they had gone, he moved on without regret. All this he taught me.

CHAPTER TWO From Brixton to Westminster

THE WORLD OF WORK was a new experience, but I soon realised that insurance broking was not life-enhancing. The rudiments of the profession, however, were simple enough, and I was prepared to accept the boredom of the routine, if there were opportunities to claw my way up the ladder to some serious responsibilities.

It was not to be. Several incidents pointed the way to a new career. When I overhead a senior manager extravagantly praise a thoroughly idle colleague because ‘he comes from a good family’, I wondered whether Price Forbes promoted on merit. If not, I had no chance. That day I was put under the tutelage of a man with a face like a fish and brilliantined blond hair. This was another mark against the company. Finally, on a day when I’d risen at 5 a.m. to study, far from being given worthwhile work to do, I was despatched to the store room to search for files, because ‘You can climb like a monkey, I’m sure!’ It was time to move on, and in any case a new opportunity beckoned, at the mouth-watering salary of £8 a week.

Terry was still making garden ornaments, but he needed capital. When one of his customers, a retired naval officer, Commander David, offered to buy the business, Terry accepted. Commander David wanted a second member of staff, and I joined Terry. I knew very little about garden ornaments, but Terry soon taught me.

In August 1959 we moved from Coldharbour Lane to a flat in a house on the Minet Estate at 80 Burton Road, Brixton. The only other tenants in the house, Bob and Enid, were a newly-married couple in their thirties. We had the basement, the ground floor and a bathroom on the first-floor landing. There was even a small front garden, and life was much improved. As ever, my mother attracted friends with the speed of light.

Working with Terry was fun. We left home early in the morning and cycled to Caldew Street, near Walworth Road, where we had a small workshop. After two hours building up an appetite, a local transport café provided the best breakfasts I’ve ever had. I was the labourer and Terry the craftsman. Years later he wrote a book and, with tongue in cheek, described how garden ornaments were made. It amused the sneering classes no end that a future prime minister had made gnomes, but it was honest, manual work, and I have never been ashamed of it or regretted it.

In 1959 I joined the Young Conservatives after a plump young man named Neville Wallace knocked on my door one evening canvassing for members. My mother had already met Marion Standing, the Brixton Conservative agent, and was all in favour of my joining – but, as politics fascinated me, I needed no urging. It’s entirely probable that my mother asked Marion Standing to send Neville around – but she never admitted it.

The Brixton YCs were then a merry and growing band, and as I had a few friends, I began to bring them in as new members. We took our politics seriously, and worked hard – but we played harder. One of the side effects of enjoying ourselves so much was that we found we had attracted to our number two members of the Dulwich Young Socialists. When this was discovered they admitted their (not very strong) allegiance to socialism, but charmed us by saying our social life was better. As one of them could drive and the other played the guitar quite well, no one cared very much.

We were a very mixed bunch. Tim Bidmead, who was addicted to Nat ‘King’ Cole’s music; Maria, whose father spent the weekends fortifying himself for slating roofs throughout the week; Maureen the artist, who went to Liverpool Art College and married there; Sonia and Ann, two cousins; red-haired Jean, who married her boss; Derek Stone, Clive Jones, the two Alans, Penny, Malcolm, Delphine, Carol, Geoffrey, Margaret – and so many more. At the end of most evenings we adjourned to local pubs and plotted how to change the world. We didn’t fancy being spoon-fed by the state and having our lives directed for us; we wanted doors to be opened so that we could make our own future. We were natural Conservatives.

It was Derek Stone who encouraged me to stand on a soapbox and speak to the passing public outside our association offices and in Brixton marketplace. Derek was married, a little older, and rather more worldly-wise than the rest of us. Engaging and fun, he played the devil’s advocate. ‘Go on, do it. Why not?’ was his creed, and he lived it as well as preached it. He turned up one day with a microphone and a soapbox, and we were off and running. It was fun. No one paid much attention, but no one complained either. It was good training, and taught me a lot about the tolerance of the British.

We canvassed, enrolled new members, helped in political campaigns, held dances and tennis mornings, went on outings, published our own magazine, heckled local Labour MPs and thoroughly enjoyed ourselves. An elderly association member was scandalised when she found one of our members straining printers’ ink through her stockings. Girls took off their stockings for one reason only, she thought. She was right: we needed the ink strained.

Meanwhile, in early 1960 Terry married his girlfriend Shirley – a marriage still going strong thirty-nine years later – and moved a few miles south to Thornton Heath; but we continued to work together. My mother’s health was still poor, but she battled on. The YCs were wonderful to her. She loved them all, especially Derek Stone and Clive Jones, later to be my best man, and made our house an open house.

But my father’s body was wearing out and he rarely left his bed, though his mind was clear and active to the very end. He died at home in bed at Burton Road, early in the morning of 27 March 1962. I was eighteen and he was eighty-three, and the bond between youth and age was very strong. He went as the sun rose. I was with him when he died. We knew he was dying and the family had been sitting up, in rota, overnight. I was sitting by his bed holding his hand. It was very peaceful. He was drowsy, half asleep and, I think, his mind had gone on ahead of his body. I did not know the exact moment he died. He was breathing so shallowly I wasn’t sure. I felt the warmth leave his hand. For a man of the theatre, who loved the dramatic, it was a peaceful end. There was no collapse. No last words.

My father, the man who had given me life and love, was dead.

There were family tears and comforting words for my mother, who sat there with her cheeks wet, reliving a lifetime of memories. When I held her she clung on to me as though she would never let go. Then the dreadful rituals began. The doctor came to sign the death certificate. The vicar, J. Franklin Cheyne, a lovely old boy who had interviewed Dad for the parish magazine as ‘one of the characters of the parish’ only days earlier, came to offer solace. Neighbours came and went, the kettle boiled, tea was offered and the surreal atmosphere that follows death settled on the house.

I went for a walk, and to this day I do not know where I went. Life would not be the same, but there was much to do.

I found it hard to come to terms with the finality of death. Dad’s death was the first time in my life that something had happened which I didn’t believe I could put right in the future. It made a reality of what he had often said to me: make of life what you can, and take your chances, because they may never come again.

So far, I had not made much of my life. School – a failure; career – I had none; sport – not good enough; politics – I was only playing at it. I needed a career and qualifications.

I began studying more ‘O’ levels by correspondence course, and left my brother and Commander David to seek out something more promising to do. No sooner had I done so than Mother fell quite ill and, as Terry and Pat were earning more than I would be able to, it was economically sensible for me to be the one to stay at home and care for her.

This I did, but when she was well enough to be left, I found I couldn’t get a job. I was unemployed – unemployable, I feared – from July to December 1963. Years later, when I was prime minister, some Labour Members of Parliament mistakenly claimed that I had never been unemployed. I think it was the Daily Mail which found corroborative evidence to prove that in fact I had. I was young and single, and had a brother and sister who were both in work, but I did get a glimpse of what it must be like as an adult with family responsibilities, unable to find a job. The Labour Party’s intention was to suggest that Conservatives had no experience of unemployment, and didn’t care about the unemployed. I should have taken more note of their tactics; Labour were to do this kind of thing again later, on a much wider front.

I found my situation degrading. I had ambition, but no prospects. I applied for jobs, signed on at the employment exchange, collected the dole, but could find nothing worthwhile. I was willing to lower my sights until I’d passed more examinations, but even that failed: I was turned down as a bus conductor because I was too tall. Eventually, just before Christmas 1963, I gratefully accepted a job offer from the London Electricity Board, and went to work at their offices at the Elephant and Castle.

It was a cheerful, happy place, with a cosmopolitan staff, but the routine was mind-numbing, and I was only to remain there for eighteen months. I asked if I could work four days a week and study on the fifth (with an appropriate pay reduction), but this was refused. The LEB did not provide me with a career, but it was an important staging post in building up my self-belief that I could do better.

Politics continued to fascinate me, and in the spring of 1964, when I had just turned twenty-one, I contested my first election for Lambeth Council. Larkhall was a hopeless ward for the Conservatives, but I fought it as if it were a marginal, canvassing for support at every spare moment. I lost heavily – they might as well have counted my votes and weighed the Labour votes – but the experience whetted my appetite. The count at Lambeth Town Hall was hugely exciting, crammed with joyful people in red rosettes and resigned good losers in blue. Labour seemed impregnable in Lambeth in 1964, but that was soon to change. Not, however, at the general election in October that year, when Harold Wilson narrowly defeated Sir Alec Douglas-Home and Labour squeaked back into government after thirteen years in opposition. In Brixton, Marcus Lipton, the sitting Labour Member, comfortably saw off Ken Payne, the Conservative candidate. I worked hard for Ken, who warmly encouraged my own ambitions and offered to help me find a better job, but the result was never in doubt. Ken would have made a good Member of Parliament, but sadly he was never to get there, and comforted himself with a distinguished career in local government.

After my own diversion into local elections, I thought long and hard about my future. Politics beckoned more each day, but I knew that if I were to have a good chance of being selected as a Conservative candidate for Parliament, I had to obtain a professional qualification as well as a political profile. The profile was coming along quite nicely, but the career not at all. I could not now go to university, since I had no entry qualifications and no means of support even if I got there. I could not become articled to the law or chartered accountancy, since neither would provide any income for years.

It was going to have to be evening classes – which would wreck political activities – or a correspondence course which would wreck my sleep. That choice was easy. I could not give up politics. But what to study? Accountancy? Possibly. Insurance? No. Banking? Yes. I settled for banking, because it offered more choices of employment, the chance of travel, promotion (I hoped) on merit, and I could study at home.

I joined District Bank in May 1965, at the magnificent salary of £790 a year. I began studying immediately, rising each morning at 4.30 or 5 a.m., when the mind is uncluttered and the brain fresh. To this day I follow that pattern if I have something taxing to get through. For the first time in my life I enjoyed the process of learning, and I widened my reading as well. I studied in the morning, worked at the bank by day, enjoyed my politics in the evening, and read late into the night. Within sixteen months I comfortably passed the five papers of Part One of the Banking Diploma. It was tremendously exhilarating to feel I was getting somewhere.

I began to receive invitations to speak at Conservative meetings in and around London, and accepted every one I could. The audience was often small, but the experience was invaluable. The Young Conservatives in Lambeth used to play a game, challenging each other to speak for a minute on a subject suggested at random. I acquired habits then which remain with me still. I would go to the Minet Library in Brixton and research the subject, then scribble the facts I wanted to use on a piece of paper, jumbling them up in little circles until an argument developed in my mind.

I have always been able to soak up a lot of detail and recall it without difficulty – show me a page of figures and I can remember them. While I have never found it easy to win an unexpected argument, I discovered very early on that when I was buttressed by knowledge I didn’t lose. I operate by knowing the facts better than the other person, so that I am confident in what I say. I felt uneasy with flowery froth and idle oratory. I couldn’t deliver a speech that, when looked at in the cold light of early morning, meant nothing. I needed to have my feet on firmer ground. I can overcome this instinctive caution if I have direct contact with an audience, such as I got speaking on the soapbox or – on occasion – in the House of Commons. But often I needed to be provoked, to have my back against the wall, to give my best performances.

The hardest parts of a speech are the first and last paragraphs. When writing a speech you can start anywhere – even with the conclusion. I used to turn over the points I wanted to make until they formed a pattern, and then the rest would fall into place. That’s why I find it hard to read speeches written by others. As those who have worked with me know, I could be hell to be with before a big speech, marching around and overreacting – mental preparation for the event. When I was prime minister my staff would often be in despair because they had produced a beautifully written speech that I would move all around because they weren’t my words.

In the mid-1960s my sister Pat, her husband Peter and my mother left Burton Road and moved to Thornton Heath, within a few streets of where Terry and Shirley lived. I did not go with them. Some time earlier, at a church fête, I had met Jean Kierans, a teacher who lived opposite us in Burton Road. Jean was dark-haired, attractive and fun, and we had taken to one another immediately. My mother liked her – it was impossible not to – until it registered with her that Jean, despite her youthful looks, was twelve years older than me, was divorced, and had two young children, Siobhan and Kevin. My mother did not approve. Nevertheless, I moved in with Jean, who did all she could to earn my mother’s approval, although it was a doomed enterprise from the start. She thought our age gap too wide, and never shifted her view. Jean encouraged my studying, and shared my politics.

In early 1966 I noticed an advertisement from the Standard Bank Group offering the chance of banking abroad, with large overseas allowances to supplement the salary. I applied, was accepted, and joined their home staff with the intention of applying for overseas service as soon as possible. I had not given up my political ambitions, but I saw the chance to travel, broaden my experience, save some money, improve my CV – and I had itchy feet. I was bored.

My chance to travel soon came. The Standard Bank of West Africa was one of the largest banks in Nigeria, and when fighting broke out in Biafra – a bitter and cruel conflict that was to become a full-scale war – they invited single men to volunteer for service there on a temporary basis. It was perfect. I applied immediately, and flew on secondment to Nigeria in December 1966.

I was lucky in my posting. I was sent to Jos, a plateau in the north of Nigeria, the scene of hard fighting some months earlier, but by then well away from the real privations of the war. Jos was thousands of feet above sea level, and had a glorious climate. I shared a flat with a Liverpudlian about my own age, Richard Cockeram, a member of the bank’s permanent overseas staff. A young Hausa, Moses, was employed as steward/cook/valet and general factotum.

The Jos branch of the bank was managed by another Liverpudlian, Burt Butler, although much of the office revolved around a Ghanaian accountant, who reputedly had several wives. Certainly the wife who attended bank cocktail parties was not the same lady we met elsewhere. He helped me settle in, knew the routine of the office backwards, and let me master the extra responsibilities I was given.

Nigeria was a world away from all my previous experience. The glorious dawns, the high sky, the feeling of immense space, the remoteness, were all new to me. It was easy to see how Africa gained such a hold over people. The centre of social activity for the expatriate community was the Jos Club. It introduced me to curry (served with a vast array of side-plates of nuts and fruits), to outdoor film-shows beamed against white walls, to snooker, to lazy Sundays by the swimming pool, to a calmer, more comfortable and more reflective way of life than I had known. I enjoyed the privacy and peace, but perversely missed the bustle and speed of London life. Nigeria was an enjoyable interlude, but I was homesick within weeks.

Cameo memories of my time there are very strong. Reading Papillon and Michael Foot’s biography of Nye Bevan, listening to the few records I could buy in Jos (most memorably Elvis Presley’s Blue Hawaii), travelling to outlying branches of the bank in the cash wagon, getting to know the grave and respectful Nigerians and exchanging banter with the expatriate miners, bankers and administrators.

At Christmas, when I had been in Nigeria for less than three weeks, Richard asked Moses to buy a chicken from the market for our lunch. That morning we sat on the balcony of our flat like lords of the universe. But Moses didn’t appear, and neither did the chicken.

We were not concerned. The power supply was unreliable and the stewards often shared kitchens – obviously Moses was working elsewhere. When lunchtime arrived, lunch did not. Richard, several Christmas drinks to the good, went to investigate. Moses appeared.

‘Where’s the chicken?’ demanded Richard rather snappily.

‘Downstairs, sah.’

‘Downstairs? It must be ready by now. Bring it up.’

Moses looked doubtful. But off he went, and returned with a chicken which was far from oven-ready, chirpily looking around as Moses led it into the flat attached to a piece of string. It pecked around the tiled floor looking for seeds.

‘Moses,’ said an exasperated Richard, ‘we wanted to eat it, not take it for walks.’

Moses protested: ‘Sah, you did not tell me to kill it.’ He picked the chicken up and reached for its neck as he tucked it under his arm: ‘Shall I do it now?’

Richard blanched. Christmas lunch was very late that year, but we ate well on Boxing Day.

I disliked the institutional racism of colonial life, the lack of respect for the Nigerians, their low pay and poor prospects compared to the inflated pay of the expatriates. So much of the racism was just unthinking. The expatriates were not hostile to the Nigerians but they were careless of their feelings. It did not seem to occur to many of them that their Nigerian employees, whether bank staff or messengers or stewards, had their own responsibilities to their own families and, if they were listened to rather than talked at, they had their own ambitions as well.

My father, brought up in America in the latter part of the nineteenth century, often displayed the same attitude, whereas my mother, believing no one superior or inferior, had a wholly different view. She would go out of her way to befriend someone in a less fortunate position than herself. I sided with my mother, and it was one of the few subjects about which I ever argued with my father.

If the local staff were resentful of the incomers, as they occasionally were, it was unsurprising. I was saving £120 a month, a vast sum to me then, but more than a year’s salary to most of the Nigerians. The expatriates were fiercely patriotic to the country they chose not to work in, and the greatest celebration during my time there was an impromptu party thrown by Scots working for the mining companies after Scotland beat England 3–2 at Wembley. Everyone got horribly drunk, including me, and it was not until I tried to stand up and kept hitting my head on the ceiling that I realised I had gone to sleep under a table. I was not alone – but then, I suppose, Scotland do not often beat England at Wembley.

I had hoped to stay in Nigeria for about a year and a half, but fate intervened after only five months when I was involved in a serious car accident. I cannot recall the prelude to the crash. I vaguely remember watching a film at the Jos Club while Richard was playing snooker. Other accounts – notably in Anthony Seldon’s comprehensive and well-researched biography – suggest that I had attended a roving party for departing expatriates. What is certain is that Richard drove me home in his brand new Cortina, rather erratically – expatriates did not need driving tests in Nigeria at the time, he told me. I sat beside him, tired and sleepy, but certainly aware that he was not fully in control of the car.

I remember no more until I regained consciousness at the side of a road. We had crashed, and I could not move. Richard was sitting beside me on the grass, his head held in his hands, weeping and shocked. I tried to sit up – and couldn’t. There was blood on my face and arms and spilled down the front of my shirt. My trousers were ripped to shreds and my left leg was grotesquely twisted. Even half-conscious, I realised my kneecap was smashed and my leg badly broken. ‘I’ve done it this time,’ I thought, and then lost consciousness. I don’t know now long Richard and I were by the roadside, but he never spoke, and seemed to be in shock. I was in great pain.

Eventually a passing car stopped – hours later, I was told – and I was lifted gently into the back of a station wagon. My next memory is of lying on my back in an operating theatre, full of doctors and nurses in gowns and caps, with a blazing light shining in my face and my leg held aloft while plaster bandages were wrapped around it from toe to thigh.

I woke next morning in the Jos mission hospital, staffed by Nigerian Catholic nurses, to be told that my leg was broken in several places, the kneecap crushed beyond repair. ‘Our X-ray equipment is very old, so we’re not sure how bad the damage is,’ they said. ‘But we can’t treat your knee. As soon as you’re well enough to travel you must go home to England.’ I was too ill to object, and the idea of home seemed very welcome.

But I could not leave immediately, for I was too ill to travel. Jos treated me as well as they could, but no one was sure how badly injured I was. I asked when I would be back on my feet, but there was no reassurance that I would ever walk normally again. When I called out in pain one night, a nurse who spoke no English brought me fresh, cool water and folded back the mosquito net, believing I was too hot. The mosquitoes fed well, but it was a small irritation compared to my other injuries.

When I was fit enough to fly home I travelled by light plane from Jos to Kano – my plastered leg propped up against bulging post-bags for comfort – and then onward to Heathrow sprawled over several seats and accompanied by a Barclays expatriate who was kind enough to travel with me. Mercifully I remember very little of the journey, but I was met by an ambulance, my mother, my sister and Jean.

I was taken to Mayday Hospital in Croydon. When I arrived I was very sick. I lay in bed in a corner, with pop music blaring as chattering nurses cleaned up the ward and changed the beds. Suddenly, the whole atmosphere changed. The Sister had arrived on the shift and seen what a poor state I was in. The noise ended, peace and silence reigned. I was washed, given painkillers and sleeping tablets, the bed was plumped up and thankful oblivion carried me off.

I have never forgotten that Sister, or the relief her discipline brought to the ward. While I was very ill she seemed always to be there; as I recovered, her attention moved on to more deserving cases. She was small, neat, utterly dispassionate, a thoroughgoing martinet, and if every sick person had her to hand they would be very lucky indeed.

My leg did not heal easily. I needed several more operations, without any real knowledge of my prospects of recovery. At times I lay in bed, dispirited, wondering if I would be a cripple for life. The reluctance of the nurses to talk about my injuries made me fear the worst. I realised that my rugby, soccer and cricket days were now over, but I accepted that cheerfully enough, hoping only that I would not lose my leg, and that I would be able to walk normally one day.

Standard Bank were wonderful. Members of their personnel department visited me regularly. I received increases in pay and bonuses; my job was kept open for the many months of my treatment and convalescence, and I could not have been better treated. I shall always be grateful to them.

As I began to feel better I returned to reading. I read everything Agatha Christie wrote – some good, some bad, some indifferent, all inventive – and became proficient at picking out her villains (years later when I saw The Mousetrap I soon guessed the guilty party). I read history, politics, Churchill on the Second World War, Neville Cardus on cricket, R.F. Delderfield, Howard Spring, books on banking – anything I could lay my hands on. My long months of convalescence were not wasted.

I left hospital in August 1967, painfully thin and still unwell. My leg was terribly wasted, and when the plaster-cast was removed it was appalling to look at as the scars continued their slow healing. Jean took me in, and I went back to live with her in Brixton. She nursed and cared for me as I began the long road to recovery. She had more warmth to offer than I deserved, and she rebuilt me mentally and physically. I was very fond of her. I loved being with her, but always – pushed to the back of my mind – was our age difference, and the belief that this could not last. I was not sure it was fair of me to stay, but I was wrapped in such affection that I did.

When I was fit enough to care for myself I moved to a tiny flat owned by Pat and Ted Davies, two friends of Jean’s, and returned to studying for my banking diploma. That September I passed Monetary Theory and Practice and returned to the bank – and to local politics in Lambeth. As my slow recovery continued I was approved, in October, as the Conservative candidate for Ferndale Ward in the local elections that were to be held the following May. It was another safe Labour fiefdom, or so it was thought: candidates for the wards we hoped to win had already been selected. Campaigning was a distraction from studying, but I structured the day to fit in both.

Before I was selected for Ferndale I addressed the Clapham YCs. Hobbling on crutches, I turned up at the Clapham Conservative headquarters, which was the wrong venue for the evening, as the senior association had their own meeting that night. I passed their guest on the stairs – a distinguished Queen’s Counsel who would be speaking on law reform. We did not speak, but I was told he was Sir David Renton, the Member of Parliament for Huntingdonshire.

My mother was still worried about my health and my relationship with Jean, and in order to keep an eye on me, she accepted my invitation to come to a Brixton Conservative Supper Club. The guest speaker cancelled in mid-afternoon, and at two hours’ notice I stood in for him. It was the first and only time my mother ever heard me speak to an audience.

I saw her sitting there, accepting the kind words from her neighbours, and I did not need to ask what was in her mind: if only Tom were here. If only … But he wasn’t, sadly, and never could be now. But my mother nearly burst with pride, and the warm tears, so often near the surface in her gentle personality, flowed unstoppably. I felt very close to her that evening.

The pace of politics was beginning to accelerate. I drew on my experience, the people I had met and the things I had done, my work in banking and all I had done across Brixton and Lambeth, in getting myself known. To my advantage was the fact that I worked twice as hard as anyone else. I attended Young Conservative meetings and functions, canvassed, supported people in elections – I was just there. I was determined never to fail again through lack of effort, as I had at school. I was prepared to fail through lack of ability, through bad luck even, but never again through not having done what I was capable of.

That school failure haunted me, and I felt it very strongly. When I was making garden ornaments with Terry, I didn’t see myself doing that for life. I looked around and thought, what skills do I have? What have I got to offer? I felt I had something, and decided I had better prove to other people that that was the case. That was why I started working so hard. Drive is as important in life as intellect.

I became a regular speaker for Conservative Central Office, was elected Treasurer of the Brixton Conservative Association, and gave evidence at a Central Office inquiry into a dispute with the formidably right-wing Association Chairman, an officer from Brixton Prison who had fallen out with our agent, Marion Standing, and wanted to have her removed. It was an unhappy incident, and I can’t now remember the details, except that I was an ardent supporter of Mrs Standing. Although she came out of the inquiry well, she left the association soon after, as did the Chairman. In the midst of all this I continued to study.

I expected to lose in Ferndale Ward, but thought that contesting it would build up my curriculum vitae. I canvassed, hobbling around, and got a far better reception than I expected. Indeed, we were doing better across Lambeth than we had hoped. Barbara Wallis, one of our candidates in an unpromising ward in Vauxhall, reported a good doorstep reaction. So did Sir George Young in neighbouring Clapham. But I disregarded George’s reports: George was 6'4" and canvassed with his Irish wolfhound, Cerberus, in tow. Cerberus looked even bigger than George: it was no surprise to me that everyone offered him support.

We were optimistic about gaining seats in the council elections. Harold Wilson’s Labour government was very unpopular. It had devalued the pound the previous year and seemed unable to shrug off the difficulties it faced. Even so, winning Ferndale was not considered likely.

Then fate took a hand. On 20 April, three weeks before the local elections, Enoch Powell made his notorious ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech in Birmingham, warning of the dangers of immigration. It stirred emotions and fears, and turned a favourable Tory drift into an avalanche that changed the political landscape. Ted Heath sacked Enoch from the Shadow Cabinet. Quintin Hogg and Iain Macleod denounced him. But millions felt he had voiced their fears. The dockers marched in his support. There was political pandemonium – and everyone took sides.

I thought Powell was wrong and his speech inflammatory – Ted Heath was right to dismiss him, and I said so. But in Lambeth, Conservative politics was divided over his speech. Some council candidates, including my friend Clive Jones, strongly supported Enoch, and some issued ‘We Back Enoch’ leaflets as part of their election campaign. Barbara Wallis and another friend, Laurie Kennedy, opposed him. So did Bernard Perkins and Peter Cary, the two most senior local Conservative figures. Many white people in Brixton thought Powell was articulating their fears. The black residents felt threatened, though I did not know many of them to talk to about it. Those I did know shied away from speaking about Powell, because often they couldn’t be certain if they were talking to someone who agreed with him or not.

I did not share the view that Powell was personally a racist, and I recognised that he was expressing genuine fears. But I was sure he was mistaken. Years later, in the Commons, when I came to know this strange and brilliant man, I saw at close quarters the spell he could weave. I did not often agree with him – he carried his arguments too much to extremes for my taste – but he was a remarkable parliamentarian. In 1968 he conjured powerful political magic. The Labour government slumped in the polls as Enoch caught the public mood. The local election results that year were catastrophic for Labour, and provided unimagined political riches for the Conservatives.

We won Lambeth in a landslide: fifty-seven of the sixty seats fell into our hands. The town hall count was alive with disbelief and excitement as seat after seat fell to the Tories. The new councillors were a mixed bunch. Reg Allnutt and Jean Langley, who joined me as the Ferndale victors, hadn’t really expected to be elected, and were excited to make it, even if only by a handful of votes. Barbara Wallis, George Young, Clive Jones and many other friends romped home in other wards. They were political professionals. Barbara, short, red-haired, fiery for moderation (though in later years the moderation would slip), was later to become my constituency secretary in the Commons and at Downing Street. George Young served in my Cabinet. Clive Jones, amiable, large, a second son to my parents, was to be my best man and a friend for many years.

On the way home from the count I tried to wake up our Association President, Mrs Evans, an elderly Welsh lady, to tell her the news. She was fast asleep, having gone to bed expecting to lose, as usual, and did not answer her bell. Undaunted, I was hoisted up a lamp-post with my damaged leg held gingerly to one side as I lobbed pebbles at her window. Suddenly, my companions fell very silent and I became conscious of another figure standing on the pavement. It was a policeman. ‘And what are you up to?’ he asked, reasonably enough. We explained our election win. He walked off shaking his head at the lunatic behaviour of the sort of young people who went in for politics, and Mrs Evans slept on.

There were one or two squalls as I settled in on the council. Bernard Perkins and Peter Cary made it clear that the new Conservative council would have no part in anti-black propaganda. I strongly agreed with this and fought my own battle against constituency activists who had opposing views. A few weeks after my election the Town Clerk, John Fishwick, gently took me to one side to query my eligibility to have stood as a councillor in Lambeth. I was living between three flats at the time, but the address on my nomination form was for a fourth address, at which I had never lived. Mr Fishwick had discovered this and was puzzled.

In fact, I did have a residency qualification for Lambeth. I was still living partly with Jean and should properly have registered as a Lambeth elector from her address – but, for reasons of discretion, I did not wish to do so. In order to ensure a residency qualification I had taken two rooms in nearby Templar Street, but had not been able to move in by the October deadline for inclusion on the electoral register. As a council candidate this left me in a dilemma, so I registered with the address of an old friend of my mother, Mrs Olifent, also in Templar Street, opposite the rooms I had rented. John Fishwick was highly amused, and I heard no more about this innocent deception until Panorama unearthed it – only partly accurately and to the great distress of Mrs Olifent, who was tearful and upset at the repeated questioning – twenty-five years later.

The greatest problem in Lambeth, then as now, was poor housing. Much of Streatham and Norwood was attractive, and small parts of Kennington were already being gentrified. But Clapham was declining, and large parts of Brixton were slums, overcrowded and insanitary. They were breeding grounds for discontent and misery. The ‘swinging sixties’ did not swing in Lambeth. Land prices were soaring, and owner-occupation was dying. The population was growing, and so were council costs. Many immigrants, mostly from the West Indies, who had come to England in search of a better life, found themselves unemployed, without hope, living in deprived and miserable conditions as fear of real conflict rose around them. In the midst of this powder-keg, Enoch Powell’s speech reverberated – reassuring the whites that their private fears were not overlooked, and terrifying the black population.

Lambeth was overwhelmed. The solution to the housing problem was to build more houses. Yet even as that was done, it created other problems. Remaining streets of owner-occupation disappeared. The population mix narrowed ever more to those in need. The pressure on education and other services rose. High expenditure forced up local rates and forced out small local businesses, thus worsening unemployment. A cycle of deprivation faced Lambeth.

And yet, somehow, Brixton battled on. Tenant groups, church groups, all manner of special-interest groups tried to improve local conditions; if this sometimes led them into conflict with a local authority that would not meet all their demands, that was unsurprising. Yet despite its problems, Brixton was always vigorous and vital. Brixton market was its epicentre: cosmopolitan, bustling, bursting with stalls and traders shouting their bargains, music overlaying the chatter, the scent of spices mingling with hot dogs and South London and Caribbean accents on every side.

The dominant figure on Lambeth Council was Bernard Perkins, the leader of the Conservatives, who knew local government inside out. By profession, he was a senior local government officer in next-door Wandsworth. He devoted all his free time to Lambeth. He was supported by Peter Cary, the deputy leader – a Nigel Lawson-like figure who was a specialist in housing. I was lucky. Bernard appointed me to the Finance and Housing Committees. I could have asked for no more, and threw myself into the necessary learning curve.

Politics began to take over more of my life. I left work each day and headed either for the Conservative Association, where I remained Treasurer, or the town hall for committees and other meetings. If I had none of my own to attend I listened in on others to learn all that was going on. My early-morning banking studies had to share the time with preparation for council meetings. I continued to pass the examinations, but my progress was slower than before.

At the end of 1968 the Brixton Association agreed with neighbouring Clapham and Vauxhall to link together as the North Lambeth Conservative Group, and to appoint Jean Lucas, the formidably efficient agent for Clapham, as joint agent. Jean was to become, and remain, a great friend and ally. She gave me tremendous encouragement as I agonised over whether I would ever achieve my ambition of being elected to Parliament, and was to play a crucial role in bringing that about. Jean had a trainee agent with her, Peter Golds, whom I knew. He too would more than once play a crucial role in my future.

In January 1969 I became Peter Cary’s deputy as Vice Chairman of the Housing Committee, and two months later, Vice Chairman of the Brixton Conservative Association. Lambeth Council was well served with officers. John Fishwick was an old-fashioned Town Clerk. Ted Hollamby was an enthusiastic Director of Planning, impatient to demolish the slums and build decent houses. He would drive around the borough waving his arms to point out monstrosities, apparently oblivious of the need to keep some control of the steering wheel.

The prince among them was Harry Simpson, the Director of Housing. Harry had begun his working life, aged fifteen, with the London County Council, and became a rent collector. He rose to be one of the most respected housing administrators in the country, and after leaving Lambeth, became Director of the Northern Ireland Housing Authority and, at the end of his career, of the Greater London Council (GLC).

I learned a great deal from this amazing man, and it was his drive and Bernard Perkins’s leadership that earned Lambeth a high reputation in local government circles. Before and after meetings I would join Harry in his office and we talked housing – often late into the night. He was the best tutor there could be, both in housing and in the decent, civilised conduct of public affairs.

I also took an interest in my own housing, and bought my first home: a two-bedroom flat in Primrose Court, Streatham. It cost £5,600, and I was a reluctant purchaser, persuaded to buy by a fellow councillor, Geoff Murray, who already had a flat there. My hesitation was simply because I was too busy to buy, but he chipped away at me until I agreed. Later, a third Lambeth councillor, John Steele, also moved there, and Primrose Court became an annexe to the town hall – and my flat was often crowded with younger members of the council. I remained friendly with Jean, but our relationship had cooled.

That year I visited Russia, where Lambeth was twinned with the Moscow suburb of Moskvoretsky. Only the year before Russia had invaded Czechoslovakia to snuff out the Prague Spring of Alexander Dubcek, and I was interested to see for myself what our Cold War enemy was really like at close quarters.

The visit was a mass of contradictions. The Mayor of Moskvoretsky, a man called Chilikin, exercised his power ruthlessly, not least in his responsibility for housing. ‘It’s cold in winter without a flat,’ he told me, smiling, and I did not think he was joking. We were entertained royally, and I saw my first opera, Queen of Spades, at the Bolshoi Theatre and my first ballet, Swan Lake, at the Palace of Congresses, with Natalia Bessmertnova dancing the lead. I preferred the ballet, little knowing that I would soon meet someone who would introduce me more comprehensively to the delights of opera. The Russian system delivered political power with age, and Chilikin was fascinated that I was thirty years younger than the rest of our delegation. After the ballet he plied me with drinks until the early hours of the morning to see if I could stand the pace. As my father’s remedy for toothache for young children had been neat whisky (it took away the toothache but left a sore head and a sleepy child), I was well able to cope. Chilikin was impressed.

But I was not impressed with the new buildings he showed me. If this was communism, it was appalling. Hospitals had electrical wiring sticking out of the walls; houses and flats were built to a very low standard, with no attempt at landscaping to produce an attractive environment. Only mud and rubble lay between the housing blocks. It was a lesson in what to avoid, but a later study trip to Finland, where the quality of building was very high, left no room for complacency about what we were doing in Lambeth.

That year Lambeth faced a dustmen’s strike over ‘totting’, a practice in which the dustmen ransacked the bins to identify items for resale. We had negotiated the end of totting, but the dustmen went on strike to reclaim the right. We resisted. The strike continued, and the outlook for public health and cleanliness was grim. The Conservative councillors, with voluntary help, decided to collect the rubbish themselves, and commandeered the dustcarts. It was strike-breaking in a unique way. Almost every councillor helped. The action created headlines around the world, but they concentrated mostly on Sir George Young and his wife Aurelia, also a Lambeth councillor. George is a baronet, and the sight of him and Aurelia driving the dustcart and collecting bins was irresistible: ‘My old man’s a dustcart, Bart,’ chortled the press. But the councillors’ response was successful: a settlement was agreed, and Lambeth faced no more industrial action during the Conservative years.

In February 1970 I became Chairman of Housing, and the following month Chairman of Brixton Conservative Association as we began to prepare for the GLC elections on 9 April, and the expected general election. I had been asked whether I wished to contest the GLC elections for Hammersmith and Lambeth, but decided I had my hands full.

The GLC elections were held that year on a borough-wide basis, with four candidates being elected from Lambeth. One of the Conservative candidates was Diana Geddes, who on polling day was working out of our Brixton Road headquarters. Peter Golds brought a friend with him to help bring in the votes. I saw them as they arrived. She was slender, a little above average height, with mid-brown hair, shining brown eyes and a beautiful, curving, glamorous smile. Dressed in a beige checked suit, fawn blouse and white, knee-length boots, she was stunningly attractive.

‘Hi,’ said Peter. ‘This is Norma. She’s come to help.’

She was Norma Johnson, ‘mad on opera’, said Peter, adding that she’d been known to sleep outside Covent Garden all night to get tickets for Joan Sutherland. Within minutes I discovered she was a teacher with her own Mini, her own flat – temporarily living at home because she’d rented it out – not very political, but Conservative, and that she also designed and made clothes.

The demands of election day drove us apart. Norma and Peter went out in her Mini to collect and deliver voters to the polling station. I canvassed, cajoled workers, kept in touch with candidates, filled in wherever necessary and arranged for Norma to attend the count at Lambeth Town Hall. Although the Conservatives won control of the GLC that night, we did not win the seats in Lambeth. But I had found Norma.

A few days later she phoned. She was having a party – would I like to come? Parties weren’t much my scene then, and I wanted Norma alone, not in a crowd. I declined, pleading another engagement. She phoned again several days later. She ‘happened to have a spare ticket for a gala at Covent Garden’. Was I interested? I was.

The gala was a tribute to Sir David Webster, the retiring administrator at Covent Garden. It was a long programme and it overran. The opera house was hot and oppressive, and the music too somnolent for someone who had been reading council papers until 2 a.m. and writing banking essays from six in the morning. As Joan Sutherland closed the gala singing the mad scene from Lucia di Lammermoor, I fell asleep.

I knew from the moment we met that I wanted to marry Norma. Ten days later we were engaged. Norma was an only child. Her mother, Dee, had been widowed as a twenty-two-year-old in 1945 when her husband Norman – who served in the Royal Artillery throughout the war – had died in a motorcycle accident days after it ended. Four months earlier Dee had lost her baby son, Colin, at only six days old, and with Norman’s death she and three-year-old Norma were on their own. When life treated Dee harshly she fought back. For much of her life she held down two or three jobs at the same time to ensure that she and Norma lacked nothing. Norma went to boarding school from the age of four, and had grown up very independent and practical.

My mother was back in hospital with yet another bronchial and chest infection, and I took Norma to see her. For once there was no caution, no holding back, no reservations. She was as certain as I was that this was the right girl.

Meanwhile, in Brixton, a mini-crisis was brewing. The Conservative candidate for the general election was James Harkess, personally charming but strongly right-wing, with Powellite views on race that he expressed vigorously and openly. He and I were never going to agree. He saw the problems of immigration. I saw people trying to better their lifestyle. Nor did it seem to me that implying that half of his electorate were unwelcome in the constituency was a vote-winning platform.

At the AGM of the association Harkess made a wild speech that was strongly anti-immigrant. I was appalled at his intolerance, and embarrassed too, especially as we had a new West Indian member present, who must have been mortified. I replied angrily from the chair, rebutting Harkess’s remarks, and the atmosphere turned sulphurous. I knew that relations between us were soured beyond repair. The ramifications were considerable. Jean Lucas, the group agent for Lambeth, strongly backed me, as did Lady Colman, President of the association, and widow of the former Conservative Member for the seat who had been defeated in 1945. Others in the association felt the same.

Gradually it became apparent that the consensus was that James Harkess’s views would damage race relations in Brixton, and with them the Conservative cause. I took soundings, and spoke to Harkess about our concerns, but did not receive any positive response. Finally I went ahead with a motion for the executive to consider selecting a new candidate. It would certainly have been approved, and I had Diana Geddes in mind as his replacement. Then Harold Wilson called the general election, and the meeting to discuss whether the candidate should be replaced instead endorsed him, dutifully and without enthusiasm.

It was an odd election campaign, in blazing weather. Opinion polls gave Labour a huge lead, but they proved inaccurate. When the votes were counted the swing to the Conservatives across the country was apparent from the first result. By the end of the night, to everyone’s surprise but his own, Ted Heath was prime minister with a comfortable majority.

There was never any doubt that Colonel Marcus Lipton, the Labour candidate, who was an excellent constituency MP, would be comfortably re-elected in Brixton. In nearby marginal Clapham, Bill Shelton, the Conservative candidate, comfortably took the seat vacated by its Labour MP, Mrs Margaret MacKay, from the recently adopted Dr David Pitt, a black Labour candidate, but without raising the race issue. The swing in Clapham showed what a potent force that issue was, and how inflammatory it could have been in Brixton. We had been fortunate. Labour’s huge opinion poll lead and Marcus Lipton’s long incumbency as the Member meant that James Harkess was considered to have no chance of winning. Passions were stilled by the certainty of his defeat, and he soon moved on from Brixton. Clive Jones lost in neighbouring Vauxhall. On Lambeth Council, the Conservatives were aware that we were probably only short-term tenants at the local level, and that Labour was likely to regain control at the next council elections in 1971. Too many of our majorities were tiny for us not to realise that even a small swing of the political compass would have a serious impact.

We thought our best chance was to mount a real attack on poor housing conditions, and set to it with a will. Bernard Perkins as leader and Peter Cary as Chairman of Finance gave me their full backing as we set about the task. We continued our building and slum-clearance programme. We drew up schemes to sell council houses and to build houses for sale in an attempt to revive owner-occupation and encourage skills and employment in Lambeth. We established registration schemes to tackle overcrowding. We set up arrangements with Peterborough New Town for families to move there into jobs and good housing (I little knew that eight years later many of them would become my constituents in Huntingdon). We encouraged ministerial visits so that we could show the new government our problems as we sought more help and finance.

I remember showing Peter Walker, the new Environment Secretary, the squalor of life in the Geneva Drive – Somerleyton Road area of Brixton, where there was mass overcrowding in dilapidated homes with poor facilities. We met one West Indian on the third-floor landing of one of these monstrosities.

‘Where do you live?’ I asked him for the Minister’s benefit.

‘Here,’ he said, puzzled.

‘No,’ I pressed him, ‘which room?’

‘I don’t have a room,’ he replied. ‘I live here.’

And he did, on the landing.

It was problems like that that encouraged us to open the first Housing Advice Centre in London. The concept was simple. Anyone with a housing problem, of any sort, could go to the Advice Centre for help and advice, free of charge. Soon it was so popular it was packed.

There was another aspect of life in Lambeth that struck me forcibly. Some people in need were aggressive; but very few. Most were frightened of bureaucracy, of government, of their powers to tax, to put up rents, to give or withhold planning consent and, above all, to house them in council flats or not. Moreover, councillors and council officials were too often hidden away. To the public they could be anonymous figures, but nonetheless figures whose decisions could blight or improve their lives. This was particularly true of the decisions to rehouse following slum clearance and new building, and the often artificial restrictions on council tenants even if they were rehoused. At tenants’ meetings the resentments voiced against these anonymous figures were fierce.

I decided to take the Housing Advice Centre on tour, with the main council officials accompanying councillors at public meetings, to face the people directly, answer their questions and explain our policies. There was, at first, a lot of resistance to this revolutionary idea, but with strong backing from Bernard Perkins and – among the officers – Harry Simpson, it was soon agreed. The meetings were a huge success, often attracting audiences of many hundreds that overflowed the halls we had booked. I chaired the meetings, with the Chairman of Planning and Social Services invariably in attendance as well as the local councillors for the ward. More importantly to the public, the Directors of Housing and Planning were there, with other officers, and especially the Lettings Officer, who allocated council houses and flats.

These meetings were generally good-natured, but with the occasional rowdy and angry intervention. I loved them, and thought they were a valuable safety valve. I regretted then – and still do – the fact that such meetings were not a regular practice for all councils. I believe they should be.

Some incidents still stick in the mind. Once, a man held up a rat he’d found in his house. What was I going to do about it? he demanded. I asked where he lived. He told me, and after a whispered consultation I was able to tell him that he lived over the border in Southwark. It was a Southwark rat – and he should take it to Alderman Ron Brown, brother of the former deputy leader of the Labour Party George Brown, and a leading member of Southwark Council. For my pains, he threw the rat at me – happily he was a very poor shot.

At a meeting in Kennington a young, strikingly attractive woman dressed from top to toe in shiny black leather rose to ask a question. The audience looked at her with more than passing interest.

‘I am the wife of the Vicar of …’ she began, but got no further, as the unlikelihood of this registered and the hall erupted in raucous amusement. We did get her question eventually, but I can’t recall what it was. Later she became a Labour councillor.

At the end of these meetings I would hang around, usually with Harry Simpson, who had given me a lift to the hall, to gauge reaction. Even those members of the public who hadn’t liked the answers they’d received enjoyed the meetings. It was politics made real, and not hidden away in committee rooms. These meetings made a profound impression on me: politics seemed so far removed from electors, and they rarely expected to meet the decision-takers. They were accustomed to poor service, remote officials and a system run for government and not for the public. I promised myself that, if I ever had the chance, I would try to open up government and make it more accountable.

I spent every spare moment I could with Norma. She learned about politics, while I began to understand opera. Norma’s mother Dee set herself to planning a big wedding. Then, in mid-September, just over two weeks before the wedding, the phone rang at four o’clock in the morning. I picked it up with foreboding. It was my brother Terry, very upset.

‘Mum’s dead,’ he said, ‘a few minutes ago. In Mayday.’

I had not expected this. My mother’s ill-health had been a constant feature of my life ever since I was a child, but she always battled through. She had been determined to come out of hospital for my wedding. Now she would not, and my heart broke for her. She had lost her last fight with just sixteen days to go.

I lay in bed after Terry’s call, reliving memories of the woman whose fondest hopes had always been for others: firstly my father, and then her children. As the youngest, more hopes had been poured into me, and I had always taken it so much for granted. The smallest gesture cheered and lifted her; the greatest blow would never crush her. My father may have dominated our family, but my mother was its heart. When she died, lame ducks lost a saint. Strangers found in her an instant friendliness. An hour’s acquaintance made a friend for ever. All her life she had been gregarious and, even in her last illness, had become so friendly with everyone at the local corner shop that it closed on the day of her funeral. She was open-hearted and open-handed. But her generosity of spirit was to her family and those in need. She could be an implacable foe when she chose, but in those near to her she inspired the same love she gave so generously. A few days after her death, Mum was cremated at Streatham Vale crematorium, and her ashes were laid beside Dad’s.

I wondered whether we should postpone the wedding, but I knew that my mother would have thoroughly disapproved of such a gesture. Besides, Pat and Terry insisted that we go ahead. The day before the wedding I slipped and fell in a corridor in Lambeth Town Hall, when my suspect left knee gave way. It swelled up like a balloon, and Clive Jones helped me home, where I lay in the bath with an ice-pack wrapped around my knee.

‘Eat your heart out, young Lochinvar,’ grinned Clive as he sipped a whisky beside the bath. ‘I suppose you could always hop down the aisle.’

Saturday, 3 October 1970 was crisp, clear and sunny, and in the morning I could hobble pretty well. My main worry was that the wretched knee would collapse under me as Norma and I walked back down the aisle. But the whole day went perfectly. Norma was acceptably late, and looked lovely. St Matthew’s Church in Brixton was packed. Clive had the ring. June Bronhill – the petite and lovely Australian soprano who had sung Lucia at Covent Garden and starred as Elizabeth Barrett Browning in the West End production of Ronald Millar’s Robert and Elizabeth – sang ‘Ave Maria’, and her wonderful voice echoed around the church. Norma had known June for years, made dresses for her, lived with her as temporary nanny to her daughter, Biddy, and they were close friends. I clutched Norma’s arm as we walked back down the aisle, and we made it safely to the door. ‘I thought you were supposed to support her,’ was Clive’s comment.

After a honeymoon in Ibiza we returned to Primrose Court, and Norma turned it from a bachelor flat into a home. Writing in the late nineties, it is hard to remember how life was in 1970. Our combined income was around £3,000 a year, and £8 a week sufficed for the housekeeping. But week by week our flat took on a new face. Corners were filled, rooms were painted, books and records appeared, and astonished friends marvelled at the transformation of my spartan pad.

Life and politics resumed in Lambeth. In January 1971 I was shortlisted for the vacant parliamentary candidacy at Norwood, but this was Bernard Perkins’s fortress, and he was selected. We prepared for the council elections in May, and I was selected for Thornton Ward in Clapham, which was thought to be a much safer bet than Ferndale. On 28 March, the day before my twenty-eighth birthday, Norma told me she was pregnant, and in May, despite all our efforts, the Conservatives were soundly defeated in Lambeth as Labour regained its fiefdom. Ken Livingstone succeeded me as Housing Chairman, and Tony Banks also became a councillor.

I barely knew either of them before they were elected, although Ken’s emergence as a Labour council candidate caused quite a stir in Norwood, where his mother was an active member of the Conservative Association. Both of them were already identifiably the characters who later became so well known, and Tony Banks was soon involved in controversy as allegedly the moving spirit behind an attempt to ban the Queen’s portrait from the council chamber. (After the 1997 general election he was photographed taking the loyal oath with his fingers crossed behind his back.)

Moving to Thornton Ward did me no good at all: I lost by 411 votes. I was disappointed by the reversal of our fortunes in Lambeth because we were generally thought to have done a good job. Years later Ken Livingstone was very flattering about what our Conservative council had achieved. But there was still so much more to do. I was philosophical about my own defeat. The role of councillor in opposition did not appeal very much.

I decided it was time to try to move onto the national stage. To do so I needed to pass the selection procedure to get on the Conservative Central Office list of approved candidates. Jill Knight, the MP for Edgbaston, who lived in Lambeth and had heard me speak, sponsored my application, and by early June it had been submitted. Then fate, in the shape of Peter Golds, intervened.

Peter was a firm believer that I should be in Parliament. He had mentioned this to a fellow agent, Tony Dey, and took me to see Tony and Bob Bell, the affable President of the St Pancras North Association. It was suggested that I apply for the seat. No one was remotely bothered that I was not an approved candidate. St Pancras North was a safe Labour seat, with Jock Stallard as a well-established local Member. There was little chance of winning, but it was perfect for me: a London constituency, convenient to where I lived and worked, affordable, even on my average income, and the best I could hope for aged twenty-eight.

I had continued studying, and in September 1971 I finally sat and passed the Accountancy and Practice of Banking papers that completed my Banking Diploma. It had taken me six years to pass ten examinations, all of them at the first attempt, as politics, Nigeria, recovery from the car accident and marriage had competed for the limited hours of every day. I was delighted to have passed, even though the qualification was less a tool for a banking career than an element of building up the necessary curriculum vitae for politics. I applied for the vacancy at St Pancras North, was invited for interview with thirty others, and was shortlisted with only one rival.

That summer Norma and I enjoyed a glorious holiday in an old chantry with a secluded garden. We lazed through the long summer days and planned the future. Norma’s pregnancy was nearing full term. She had never been fitter or happier, and she bloomed with health. It was fortunate that she did so, because Elizabeth was in no hurry to make her first entrance. Then, early one November evening, she finally announced her impending arrival.

I saw both my children being born, and am glad I did so. In 1971, when Elizabeth was born, it was quite revolutionary to allow fathers to be present, but King’s College Hospital in Camberwell had no qualms about it at all. Elizabeth was a full-term baby, but her birth was interminable. After fifteen hours I was sent away to lie down – ‘This is all very tiring, dear,’ said the nurse. A few hours later the doctors took me aside and told me Norma needed an epidural. The risks were explained to us, but Norma agreed, and after thirty hours, in the early hours of 13 November 1971, a plump and chubby Elizabeth bounced across the delivery table and lustily announced that a new force had arrived.

There are some moments in your life when every second is implanted indelibly in your mind. Perhaps most parents feel this at the birth of their child. I certainly did. And when I held Elizabeth for the first time I knew my life was changed. She was warm and comfortable, vulnerable and dependent. Here was a baby who – whatever else happened – would for ever be loved, and who one day, I hoped, would tell her grandchildren about Norma and me.

It was after 2 a.m. when I left the hospital to walk home, for the buses had stopped and there were no taxis around at that time. I didn’t so much walk as float. Anyone about the streets that November night would have wondered, who was this lunatic who ran, walked, skipped, turned round in circles, hopped, stepped, jumped up and down and cheerily sang to himself out of sheer exhilaration?

I planned the future and, more immediately, wondered how early I could phone Dee, Norma’s mother, with the news. I needn’t have worried about that. As I stepped into our flat the phone rang. It was Dee. She was very agitated. ‘She’s had the baby, hasn’t she?’ she said. ‘I know she has. I haven’t been able to sleep. Is she all right?’

I told her. She sighed and hung up without a word. Moments later she phoned back.

‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘I was so relieved. I knew, just knew she was having the baby. Now tell me all about it.’

So I did. And if the world ever contained a more relieved and pleased grandparent – well, I can’t imagine her.

At first Elizabeth was going to be called Jane. But that didn’t last. When I visited Norma in hospital the following day she was cuddling a plump and contented baby.

‘I don’t think Jane is right,’ said Norma. ‘She looks like an Elizabeth.’ And so Elizabeth she became.

Later that month I was selected as the prospective parliamentary candidate for St Pancras North after addressing the interview panel and answering their questions. I had received an enthusiastic response, and was told I had won comfortably. ‘Some voted for you and quite a few for Elizabeth,’ as Joan Couzens, soon to be my press officer, put it. Joan was one of a number of characters in the association, and certainly the most vivid. She loathed the Labour Party she saw in London, which brought out in her some outrageously right-wing instincts which were held in check by her common sense. She enjoyed flirting with them, however, and often wrote me draft press releases in poetry, based on her instincts, not her common sense, which we both knew could never be used, but which gave us great fun. She was a fine artist as well, and she and her husband Bertie became firm friends.

St Pancras North may have been unpromising political territory for the Conservatives, but my three years as its candidate, which embraced both the February and October general elections of 1974, taught me a huge amount about the party and the volunteers who ran it at local level.

Tony Dey, the agent, was laconic and efficient. Bob Bell, the President, and his wife Edith, Francis Klein, the Chairman, Dennis Friis, Roland Walker and so many others worked tirelessly for little political reward other than to uphold Conservative principles. They weren’t ideological warriors. They believed in the Conservative cause. They grumbled sometimes about some of the leaders and some of the policy, but they loyally battled on.

I worked hard for them in St Pancras. Between my adoption as prospective candidate and the February 1974 election I worked the seat as if it were a marginal, visiting it nearly every evening and every weekend. Margaret Jay, who succeeded Tony Dey as my agent, worked me hard – and herself as well. Norma joined me whenever she could. It was hard work but it was a lot of fun too, although it became harder as Ted Heath’s government ran into difficulties.

Ted had been elected on a strong centre-right platform, but events had forced him off it. Trade union power forced up wages and prices and brought about an incomes policy that upset many in the party and even caused discontented murmurings amongst the St Pancras North loyalists. Ted took Britain into the Common Market, an inevitable, correct and courageous decision, but one that was very controversial, too.

Then came the miners’ strike over a pay claim that would have given some miners up to a 50 per cent rise. The National Coal Board had offered 13 per cent, which was rejected, and an overtime ban began. The miners were led by Joe Gormley, a traditional Labour figure, but not a militant. His interest was in the miners’ well-being and not in attacking the Conservative government. Other miners’ leaders, though, such as Mick McGahey and Arthur Scargill, did see the chance of confrontation and bringing down the government.

The strike worsened. Implacable positions were taken and Ted Heath was forced into a box. Many Conservatives, mostly but not exclusively on the right, wanted to ‘take on’ the miners. ‘Who governs the country?’ they asked. Others recognised the sympathy and respect in which the miners were widely held by the British people. Some of their leaders might be militant, but the British sense of fair play knew that the miners did a job that few would care to do. The public admired the miners and liked the common sense they often heard from rank-and-file NUM members. But they did not like the militants.

Crisis beckoned, and the three-day week was imposed from 31 December 1973 as stocks of coal fell. Pressure mounted. Ted Heath had a dilemma. If he negotiated a settlement because of the economic effect the strike was having, he would be accused of weakness, especially from within the Conservative Party. If the strikes continued the economy would suffer, and gradually public opinion would turn against the government. The third choice, a huge gamble, was a general election to reinforce the government’s authority. Little thought was given to what would happen if the government was re-elected, but the strike itself went on.

Ted Heath went for broke and called the election on the theme of ‘Who Governs Britain?’ At the time I was delighted, and the early opinion polls were favourable, as was reaction on the doorstep, even in St Pancras North. But a one-issue election is dangerous. Midway through the campaign complex evidence on miners’ pay suggested that they were earning even less than the NUM had declared. Harold Wilson claimed an election had been called over an ‘arithmetical error’. Sympathy swelled for the miners.

The public mood changed. Unhappy Tories voted Liberal, and Labour crept home as the largest party. Ted Heath was out and Harold Wilson, to his surprise and everyone else’s, was back in Downing Street, at the head of a minority administration. One bright spot was that George Young was elected to Parliament with a small majority at Ealing, Acton. In St Pancras North Jock Stallard was alarmed by the strength of support I had in some streets, but overall he won comfortably.

A second general election later that year was inevitable. The St Pancras North Conservative Association generously told me I could seek a better seat with their blessing, but could recontest St Pancras if I failed to find one. I did not try very hard, although I was shortlisted for marginal Paddington, where I was narrowly defeated by Mark Wolfson, later MP for Sevenoaks. I also applied for Portsmouth North, where I was assailed with questions about flogging and hanging, which the questioner favoured – whether sequentially or alternatively I wasn’t sure – and I didn’t. That was the end of Portsmouth North, who picked a well-known businessman, John Ward, who would later become my PPS when I was prime minister.

After this setback, I decided to stay in St Pancras North, and contested it again in the second general election of the year in October. The constituency was of little interest nationally, and the only publicity we received was for my new agent, Sue Winter, the youngest in the country and very pretty. It made no difference. Again I lost, after a rather bitter campaign and an unpleasant count, with jeering Labour activists. Jock Stallard’s majority increased. Labour gained seats nationally, and had a very narrow overall majority of only three seats. Soon they would need to rely on Liberal support to stay in government.

By now Norma and I had sold our flat in Primrose Court and bought a modern end-of-terrace house, West Oak, in The Avenue, Beckenham. Elizabeth was growing, and we needed more space. West Oak was a small estate in lovely wooded grounds, full of mostly young married couples, and we were very happy there. Among our neighbours were David Rodgers, a former aide to Iain Macleod, and his wife Erica, who had been National Vice Chairman of the Young Conservatives.

Norma was pregnant again, and James was born in January 1975. I was again present at the birth, and he arrived much more speedily and with much less drama than Elizabeth. We had no difficulty over his name: he was James, if a boy, from long before he was born. He was a fit, contented baby from the very start.

Politics moved on, and in February 1975 Margaret Thatcher defeated Ted Heath to become leader of the Conservative Party. I had never met her, and little guessed how much our paths would cross in the future.

No one expected another early general election – public and politicians were battle-weary – but as seats were advertised or fell vacant I applied for them. I received rejection after rejection without interview, and was puzzled and despondent. It was Jean Lucas, by then the agent for Putney, who solved the puzzle after I applied for the vacant candidacy there. She telephoned and asked whether my biography needed to be jazzed up, and then noticed that the biography sent to Putney by Central Office was not mine. She made enquiries. The answer was comical. There were two John Majors. One, me, on the approved candidates list for Parliament, and the other on the list of would-be candidates for the GLC. Someone at Central Office had transposed the biographies, and was sending out my namesake’s – which was pretty thin – to all the seats for which I had applied. Unsurprisingly, I had not been invited for interview.

After Jean’s intervention I was invited to Putney, interviewed and shortlisted. I was led to believe I was the front-runner and likely to be adopted. But, as their selection process rumbled on, a by-election was called at Conservative-held Carshalton, and I was interviewed and reached the last eight. I withdrew from Putney, and an unknown barrister was chosen: his name was David Mellor. ‘He is very clever and one day will make a real name for himself,’ predicted Jean Lucas.

At Carshalton I was preceded for interview by a confident young man carrying a briefcase with the initials ‘N.F.’ prominently displayed. I asked who he was, and was told his name was Nigel Forman. I had a premonition that he would be selected; he was, and comfortably won the ensuing by-election.

I continued to apply for a seat. Sevenoaks did not interview me. At Ruislip Northwood I disagreed sharply with a member of the selection committee over housing and was not invited for further interview. At Dorset South I reached the second round of interviews and was waiting with the others for my ordeal when I saw the selection committee rise respectfully as a well-built young man with dark hair entered the room. One of the other candidates scowled: ‘That’s Lord Cranborne – he owns the constituency.’ That was not quite true, although he certainly owned a lot of land. He was selected, and twenty years later I was to appoint him to my Cabinet as leader of the Lords, and he was to run a crucial campaign for me to save my premiership. Self-evidently, Robert had great ability, so perhaps owning the constituency didn’t matter.

After the two general elections I contested, Standard Bank had realised I was set on a political career, but remained supportive. Roy Mortimer, one of the senior executives, and Peter Graham, the managing director, were unfailingly helpful, even though they knew the bank was second in my working affections. By 1976, Tony Barber, who had been Chancellor of the Exchequer in Ted Heath’s government, was chairman of the bank, and took me with him as his personal assistant to the International Monetary Fund Conference in Manila. That was the year sterling hit trouble and Denis Healey had to turn back from Heathrow Airport to deal with the crisis.

As a result, Tony Barber, his predecessor, was bombarded with press and interviews at Manila, and I dealt with many of them on his behalf; it was my first exposure to high-profile politics, and it lived up to my expectations. I worked eighteen hours a day but it whetted my appetite for the drama of politics. I returned home even more eager for a political career.

When a vacancy for the Huntingdonshire constituency was circulated to all approved candidates I applied immediately, but was not hopeful. It was a rural seat with a large Conservative majority, and it seemed an unlikely home. Norma disagreed. ‘It is for you,’ she insisted. She knew the area because she had been sent to stay with her great aunt in nearby Bourn for summer after summer during her childhood, while her mother Dee continued to work through most of the school holidays. She was confident about Huntingdonshire from the start.

About three hundred candidates applied, including Peter Brooke, Chris Patten, Michael Howard and Peter Lilley, so I knew the competition would be tough. I contacted Andrew Thomson, the agent, and he generously answered all my questions about the association and the constituency.

The first interview merely involved the candidate giving a twenty-minute speech on a Saturday morning, followed by questions. It went well enough, and Andrew Thomson phoned me the next morning to tell me I had reached the last eighteen. Another interview followed, which went better, but against stiffer opposition I was not certain of progressing further. I followed Peter Lilley, and after I had finished, found him sitting on a bench at Huntingdon station waiting for the train to London.

‘It was fine,’ he said, responding to my enquiry, ‘but you never can tell.’ But I thought he looked despondent. Months later Peter was given a lift by a young agent, and was speculating ruefully on why I had been selected for Huntingdonshire. Who was I, he asked, and what had I done to earn such a gilt-edged seat? He seemed aggrieved. The young agent thought Peter was criticising me, and read him a lecture on my virtues. It was Peter Golds – my first trainee agent in Brixton.

After a third interview I was shortlisted. As Huntingdonshire was such a secure seat there was some interest in the final contestants. ‘Crossbencher’, the political column of the Sunday Express, said I hadn’t a chance of selection. Given Crossbencher’s forecasting record, this was good news. That same morning the phone rang. It was a member of the selection committee, Anne Foard.

‘I shouldn’t be phoning,’ she said, ‘but I am – so this must be private.’ She then gave me advice. Be yourself. Show humour. Bear in mind that half the constituency, and the electorate, are big-city overspill. ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘and by the way, the district council meet on Wednesday. It would be good for you to be there to listen. And to be seen.’

It was wise advice. Andrew Thomson had already said pretty much the same thing. Being used to the political activity of Lambeth, Huntingdon District Council was a pleasant surprise. I was almost the only spectator, and the object of as much interest, nudging and winking, as the agenda. And the debate puzzled me. It was fierce, and all about ‘local pyromaniacs trying to burn down our county’, as one councillor put it, to the accompaniment of much support. It seemed like a serious crime wave. Then sturdy, outdoor figures with weatherbeaten faces defended the pyromania, and the truth dawned: they were talking about stubble-burning. It was urban man against rural, and a real eye-opener into the issues that stirred the community. That visit to Huntingdon was one of the best investments in time I ever made.

On the way to the final selection meeting I was preparing myself mentally for another disappointment. I couldn’t get my head around the fact that I might be selected for one of the safest seats in England. Norma had no such inhibitions. She was confident we would win. As our second-hand Austin 1300 estate chugged towards Huntingdon she asked me if I had remembered that ‘Friday is an anniversary’. I hadn’t, but it was.

‘It’s five years to the day that you were selected as the candidate for St Pancras North,’ said Norma. ‘Tonight you must do it again.’

I am superstitious, and that seemed a good omen. The selection meeting was in the Commemoration Hall, Huntingdon, and the final opposition was tough. I learned later that Jock Bruce-Gardyne, formerly MP for Angus, had under-performed, having a foul cold. Lord Douro was thought to have had one piece of good news already that week, having become engaged to the Kaiser’s granddaughter. Alan Haselhurst, later Deputy Speaker, spoke brilliantly, and was the runaway favourite when I spoke, last of the four. It went well, and, the ordeal over, Norma and I returned to the holding room and then to the local pub to consider our chances as the balloting got under way.

The Commemoration Hall as we returned was a scene of pandemonium. A decision had obviously been made. Wild applause and cheering could be heard, and as we hurried to the holding room I peered through the glass windows in the door of the main hall and saw Anne Foard, my telephone confidante of Sunday, standing on a chair whooping, with her hands clapping above her head.

Moments later Archie Gray, the Chairman of the association, entered the holding room. We all stood, tense and expectant.

‘You’ve all done magnificently,’ he said. ‘It was hard to choose, but Mr Major has been selected.’ Smiling, he walked over and shook my hand. As he did so I knew the course of my life had been determined.

From the start Huntingdonshire fitted me like a glove, although a few of the older members were startled to have a candidate from Brixton and an agent from Glasgow. They soon mellowed. Norma and I immediately decided to move to the constituency and put West Oak on the market. Unfortunately for us, subsidence of a neighbouring house in our terrace reduced its value and made it more difficult to sell. It took months, and throughout that time I commuted between my home in Beckenham, my job in the City and the constituency in Huntingdon. We found a lovely house in St Neots but, to my fury, we were gazumped by a partner in one of the local estate agents. Eventually we found a conventional four-bedroomed detached house in the beautiful village of Hemingford Grey, and moved in just before Christmas 1977.

By this time I was already getting to know the huge constituency and its rich variety of interests. From the outset, I was treated as the Member-in-waiting and not the candidate. It was assumed that I would win, though ‘not by as many as Sir David’, as I was regularly informed, though never by Sir David. He saw the constituency changing, and had no fears for the majority. Sir David Renton, QC, KBE, MP was an immense support. He had been elected in 1945, still in uniform, as Major Renton, and he and his wife Paddy were as firmly entrenched in Huntingdonshire as any Member could be.

David and Paddy had a handicapped daughter, Davina, and both worked tirelessly for charities, especially the National Society for Mentally Handicapped Children. David began to involve Norma in this work, and her association with Mencap, as it became, was to grow through the years. I began to get used to mentally handicapped adults, whose minds had not aged with their bodies, holding Norma’s hand or cuddling her with all the affection of children. We came to understand how so many volunteers work so devotedly for this cause, and years later we were able to put the famous addresses of 10 Downing Street and Chequers to good use in raising funds for this and other charities.

David and Paddy Renton were kindness itself, and there was never the slightest friction between us. They entertained us at their home, supported us throughout the constituency and eased us into the mainstream of Huntingdon life. I shall always be grateful to them and hope, one day, to be as gracious to my successor as David was to me.

And this support mattered. A long incumbency attracts a great deal of loyalty, and if Sir David had muttered uncomplimentary remarks, or hinted at criticisms, even in private, they would have been voiced abroad and caused difficulties. It is human nature to cast doubt over one’s successor to bolster one’s own sense of experienced superiority, but David never did so. Over the years I found in him a wise adviser and a political friend and confidant whom I could trust completely and who never let me down. In 1998, in his ninetieth year, David, now Lord Renton, was still active in the House of Lords, and I had the pleasure of speaking at several of the events to mark his landmark birthday. On one occasion Margaret Thatcher and I both spoke at Lincoln’s Inn. Margaret, as Margaret Roberts, had sought, and received, David’s help as a young barrister.

David’s joie de vivre never dimmed. In his eighties I called on him one Sunday lunchtime to find him in tennis shorts shaking his head sadly.

‘I’ve been playing with Jeffrey Archer,’ he said, ‘and, you know, his game’s going off. And he’s so young.’ Jeffrey was in his late forties.

Other senior members of the Huntingdonshire Conservative Association welcomed us warmly. Maurice and Doris Twydell and Tony Finch-Knightley introduced us to ‘old’ Huntingdon, while Mike and Beryl Robertson – the best judges of how the vote was going locally – did the same for us in the overspill estates.

Archie Gray, a retired naval commander, was chairman, and his writ ran. But, like so many Conservative associations, Huntingdonshire was largely an amazonian enterprise. Many of the guiding forces were women. The President, Mrs Jo Johnson, was a Scot, one of many active in the association. Jo was one of the wisest ladies I ever knew, and a huge support. She was no fair-weather friend. Nor was Emily Blatch, later Baroness Blatch and a senior member of my government, or Olive Macaulay, whom I later gave away in her marriage to Eric Baddeley. As for Anne Foard, she placed a bet at a hundred to one that I would be Chancellor of the Exchequer within ten calendar years of my election to Parliament – and she won.

The farmers were prominent in the constituency. Roger Juggins took me in hand and explained farming. The Juggins family had been in Stukeley for centuries, and had a political commitment to match the Cecils or the Churchills. Ted Smith added to my farming education, as did Joe Pickard, who once remarked, ‘They tell us you know nothing about farming, but Sir David tells us you’re all right.’ Sir David said I was all right! I needed no other endorsement for the farming community.

Old Mr Skinner introduced me to pigs. He loved his pigs, and no luxury was too good for them. With the wind behind them the pigs could make their presence known over a wide area, but no one complained. They all liked Mr Skinner and his pig farm was state-of-the-art.

The non-farmers were just as helpful. Mike Bloomfield, Ivor Ross Roberts and Mike Harford, all successful businessmen, introduced me to the business community and, like many others in Huntingdon, became firm friends.

Andrew Thomson, my agent, was another Scot. Sometimes controversial, he was determined to bring in the new voters in the overspill areas outside Huntingdon and Peterborough, and worked me mercilessly to do so. Meet people. Meet people. Meet people. That was his motto. And it worked. I knew the constituency and it came to know me, and it was a happy relationship. Some MPs see their constituency only as a vehicle to get into Parliament, and something of a cross to be borne. I was lucky. I never did. From the very first, Huntingdon became a home, the source of many friends and a political fortress.

I left nothing to chance. Over the months I came to know Rotary Clubs, business groups, charities, schools, tenant groups, sports clubs and everything else that was active in the constituency. I knew the election could come at any time. Jim Callaghan, the Prime Minister, had formed a Lib – Lab pact to stay in government, but it looked very fragile. Each morning as I commuted from Huntingdon to King’s Cross I wondered how long they’d last. And returning home each evening I hoped it wouldn’t be long.

But stagger on they did. And on. And on. An election looked inevitable in October 1978 when Jim Callaghan announced that he was making a prime ministerial broadcast, but all he said of note was that there would be no election until the spring. After two years’ hard slog as the prospective candidate for Huntingdonshire, and seven years since my first candidacy at St Pancras North, a further delay was dispiriting. A long, hard winter lay ahead, but it was longer and harder for the Labour government as the Winter of Discontent set in.

Eventually, a dramatic defeat by one vote on a Confidence Motion brought down the Callaghan government on 28 March, and the following day the election was called. It was the best birthday present I ever received.

The Huntingdonshire machine swung into action. It was a Rolls-Royce operation compared to anything I had experienced before. By day I canvassed, visited pubs and clubs, market squares, railway stations and retirement homes, gave interviews and filled every moment with activity. Each evening I held three public meetings at 7 p.m., 8 p.m. and 9 p.m. in different villages. Almost all were packed out, with standing room only, and the reception was almost always very friendly. There was little opposition, but I was leaving nothing to chance. The Liberal candidate was Major Dennis Rowe, a well-known local figure, and the Labour candidate a young man named Julian Fulbrook. Years later, in the Blair campaign of 1997, I saw Fulbrook trotted out to praise Labour as if he was a neutral who had fallen in love with the New Labour Party. The age of the spin doctor had arrived.

A few hecklers followed me around. One, a Labour supporter, was a persistent nuisance, and one evening I responded pretty sharply to his comments. He rose from his seat, snorted disapproval and stalked out in high dudgeon. Unfortunately for him he was so intent on registering his disgust that he walked into the broom cupboard rather than out into the night air. The audience watched fascinated, then burst into laughter and applause as he emerged. Red-faced and embarrassed, he slunk out and did not reappear. I missed him – he had provided many a light-hearted moment during the campaign.

Election day, 3 May 1979, dawned crisp and bright. It looked as though we were set to win nationally, although, curious to relate today, many wondered if Britain really would elect a woman as prime minister. But I was confident locally, and Andrew Thomson was super-confident. I drove around the huge constituency with Archie Gray, starting in the south and visiting polling stations and committee rooms. Norma and Andrew Thomson performed a similar odyssey, starting from the north. We planned to meet in the middle.

As Archie and I reached the village of Brampton, I was astounded to see long queues of RAF personnel from the local air station patiently waiting to vote. Archie purred. ‘Look at that. They’re not going to put a Labour government back in office. You’re going to win, my boy.’ So saying, he produced a bottle of champagne.

‘A little early,’ he went on, ‘but we have something to celebrate.’

We pulled into a layby and cheerily drank half the bottle. Thus fortified we pressed on.

At each committee room the mood was buoyant. A high turnout, a Conservative lead and, in some areas, very little sign of opposition. It was a joyous day of pleasurable anticipation and growing excitement. As the polls closed I went to the club at ‘The Views’, the association headquarters, where Emily Blatch had some more news.

‘I’ve done a straw poll,’ she said, ‘outside a few polling stations. Based on that, you’ve romped home. I think you’ve won by twenty thousand!’

Everyone chortled. Good news probably, was the consensus, but not that good.

Because Huntingdonshire was such a large rural seat it did not count the vote until the next day, so Norma and I sat in front of the television as the national drama unfolded. It was soon apparent that there was a swing to the Conservatives. Many who were to become good friends were elected. Robert Atkins won Preston North, John Watson was in at Skipton, Chris Patten at Bath, Matthew Parris at West Derbyshire, Nick Lyell at Hemel Hempstead, Graham Bright at Luton – and then Brian Mawhinney won back Peterborough from Labour. From that moment I had no doubts. If marginal Peterborough was comfortably won, how could neighbouring Huntingdonshire be lost? At 5 a.m., with the certainty of a Conservative government and the happy anticipation of supporting it in the House of Commons, I went to bed.

The count at St Ives was well under way when I arrived the following morning, and the result was soon clear. There was one glorious moment: as I looked at the line of tables holding counted votes for each party, the ‘Votes for Major’ tables stretched way ahead. A huge pile of freshly counted votes appeared, and I waited for them to be added to my opponents’ totals – but they weren’t. They were all Conservative votes, and more tables were levered into place to hold them. Emily Blatch had been right, and the result far exceeded our expectations. The candidates were bussed back to Huntingdon, where the result was traditionally announced by the High Sheriff from the balcony of the courthouse overlooking the packed market square. I had polled over forty thousand votes, and had a majority of 21,563. At last I was a Member of Parliament.

Later that afternoon, after much celebrating in the Conservative Club, Norma and I went home in delight, to find our front doorstep festooned with cards, flowers, chocolates and champagne. I had found my political home.

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