1993 – Back to Basics Campaign Immediately Wanders Off Course

John Major Calls for Return to Victorian Values, Cabinet Consults Victorian Definition of Values

Back to Basics Campaign Immediately Wanders Off Course

John Major Calls for Return to Victorian Values, Cabinet Consults Victorian Definition of Values

In October 1993, John Major stood before the Conservative Party conference in Blackpool and launched a campaign called Back to Basics — an appeal to traditional values, personal responsibility, and the kind of social order that the phrase traditional values reliably conjures without requiring anyone to specify precisely which values, in which tradition, applied by whom, and in what circumstances. It was, as political slogans go, a spacious one. It was spacious enough, it turned out, to contain a very large quantity of irony.

The Back to Basics campaign had been conceived as a response to the social anxieties of the early 1990s — rising crime, family breakdown, educational standards, the general sense that something had gone wrong with public and private behaviour since a notional golden era in which things had been considerably better. Major intended it as a policy agenda rather than a moral crusade — a commitment to the basics of good governance, sound education, and effective public services rather than a commentary on the private lives of his ministers.

This intention was, within weeks of the conference speech, thoroughly irrelevant. The press had heard the words traditional values and personal responsibility and had drawn the obvious conclusions about what those words meant in the context of a government whose members’ private lives were, as it turned out, providing material of considerable journalistic interest. The gap between the stated values and the demonstrated behaviour of a significant number of Conservative politicians became, through 1993 and the years that followed, the defining narrative of the Major years — not Black Wednesday’s economic humiliation, but the slower, more corrosive humiliation of being caught failing to practise what one has specifically and publicly preached.

The Cast of Characters, Assembled for Maximum Embarrassment

The sequence of revelations that followed Back to Basics had the structure of a farce in which new characters enter at regular intervals, each one adding a fresh dimension to the central comic situation. David Mellor had already resigned as Heritage Secretary in September 1992, before Back to Basics was launched, following revelations about an affair that had been conducted with a creative intensity that the tabloids reported with the thoroughness it deserved. His departure was significant not because an affair ended a ministerial career — these things happened — but because the combination of the affair’s details, the manner of its reporting, and Mellor’s subsequent attempt to manage the narrative produced a template for the political-personal scandal that the decade would deploy repeatedly.

Tim Yeo resigned as a junior Environment Minister in January 1994, having fathered a child outside his marriage — a personal matter that would not have been a public issue had the minister not been associated with a campaign that emphasised family values in terms sufficiently specific to make the contrast between rhetoric and behaviour a legitimate story. The timing, coming months after the Back to Basics speech, was catastrophic and suggested that Major’s government had not conducted, before launching the campaign, the basic audit of its members’ personal lives that the campaign’s content made advisable.

Stephen Milligan, a junior Foreign Office minister, died in February 1994 in circumstances of such specific peculiarity that the reporting of his death produced in Fleet Street a combination of professional duty, personal sympathy, and the specific difficulty of describing accurately what had happened without either excessive clinical detail or excessive euphemism. He was forty-five and had been regarded as a rising figure in the party. The reporting of his death — conducted with rather less restraint than might have been ideal — added to the accumulating impression of a government whose private lives were conducting their own separate and considerably more interesting agenda from the public one.

Cash for Questions: The Institutional Corruption

While the personal scandals provided tabloid headlines, the systemic corruption revealed by the cash-for-questions affair provided something rather more serious — evidence that the boundary between parliamentary democracy and commercial interest had been crossed by members of the governing party in ways that went beyond individual hypocrisy to institutional corruption.

Neil Hamilton, a junior Trade minister, and Tim Smith, a Northern Ireland minister, had accepted payments from Mohamed Al Fayed, the owner of Harrods, to ask parliamentary questions on his behalf — a practice that combined the venality of the arrangement with the specific insult of using the mechanisms of parliamentary democracy as a commercial service. The Guardian’s investigation and subsequent reporting, and Fayed’s eventual public disclosures, produced a story that the Conservative Party’s initial denials and legal threats did not suppress but amplified.

Hamilton’s subsequent legal action against the Guardian — the libel case that he pursued while the parliamentary investigation was pending, and that he eventually and catastrophically lost — became one of the most expensive exercises in defamation law in British newspaper history and produced, in the figure of Hamilton and his wife Christine, a double act of such brazen self-presentation in the face of the evidence against them that they became, paradoxically, figures of a kind of popular entertainment that the seriousness of the underlying corruption did not justify.

Major’s Government: The Texture of Terminal Decline

The Back to Basics disasters were not the only difficulty of 1993. The government was managing the aftermath of Black Wednesday without the economic credibility that had previously made its difficulties survivable. It was managing the Maastricht Treaty — signed in February 1992 and requiring parliamentary ratification through a process of such sustained rebellious drama that it produced a parliamentary session of extraordinary length and exhausting complexity — against a backdrop of Conservative European scepticism that had been radicalised by the ERM experience and was no longer containable within the party’s traditional management mechanisms.

The Maastricht rebellion — the group of Conservative MPs who voted against the government on the treaty’s ratification throughout 1992 and 1993 — established the template for the party management difficulties that would define the remainder of the Major years and that prefigured, with considerable accuracy, the Conservative divisions over Europe that would define British politics for the following three decades. Major called the rebels bastards, in a comment he made to an ITN journalist that he did not realise was being recorded and that, when broadcast, provided the decade’s most memorably candid prime ministerial self-expression.

He was not wrong about the bastards. He was wrong to say it in circumstances where it could be recorded. This distinction — between the accurate assessment and the imprudent expression of it — captures something essential about Major’s political predicament: a man of genuine intelligence and considerable decency, governing in circumstances that required more luck than he had been allocated and managing a party that was conducting its internal argument through him rather than with him.

The Nolan Committee and the Architecture of Honesty

The accumulation of sleaze — personal and institutional — produced, eventually, a constructive response. Major established the Committee on Standards in Public Life under Lord Nolan in October 1994, in response to the cash-for-questions affair and the broader question of whether British public life had adequate mechanisms for enforcing the standards it claimed to hold. The Nolan Committee produced the Seven Principles of Public Life — selflessness, integrity, objectivity, accountability, openness, honesty, and leadership — that have governed the ethical framework of British public life ever since.

The principles were good. The document was good. The committee that produced it was good. It was the specific achievement of a government that had demonstrated, through the Back to Basics episode and its sequels, that good principles articulated in the wrong context, by the wrong people, with insufficient attention to the gap between aspiration and practice, produce not an improvement in public standards but a public performance of the gap between aspiration and practice that is more damaging than no aspiration at all.

Back to Basics was the slogan that kept giving — every new revelation a fresh instalment, every fresh instalment a fresh reminder, and every fresh reminder a fresh demonstration that the distance between what politicians say about values and what they do about them is a distance that the voting public measures with great accuracy and remembers for a very long time.

Auf Wiedersehen, amigo!

John Major launched the Back to Basics campaign at the Conservative Party conference in Blackpool in October 1993. David Mellor had resigned as Heritage Secretary in September 1992 following press revelations about an extra-marital affair. Tim Yeo resigned as a junior Environment Minister in January 1994 after fathering a child outside his marriage. Stephen Milligan, a junior Foreign Office minister, died in February 1994. Neil Hamilton and Tim Smith were identified as having accepted payments from Mohamed Al Fayed to ask parliamentary questions; both resigned from the government. The Committee on Standards in Public Life, chaired by Lord Nolan, was established in October 1994 and produced the Seven Principles of Public Life. Major’s government lost the 1997 general election to Labour by a majority of 179 seats.

ORIGINALY PUBLISHED: 8 October 1993 (London, UK)

Alan Nafzger

Alan Nafzger was born in Lubbock, Texas, the son Swiss immigrants. He grew up on a dairy in Windthorst, north central Texas. He earned degrees from Midwestern State University (B.A. 1985) and Texas State University (M.A. 1987). University College Dublin (Ph.D. 1991). Dr. Nafzger has entertained and educated young people in Texas colleges for 37 years. Nafzger is best known for his dark novels and experimental screenwriting. His best know scripts to date are Lenin’s Body, produced in Russia by A-Media and Sea and Sky produced in The Philippines in the Tagalog language. In 1986, Nafzger wrote the iconic feminist western novel, Gina of Quitaque. He currently lives in Holloway, North London. Contact: [email protected]