THIS book is united with Margaret Thatcher’s 1993 The Downing Street Years in one tiresome respect In neither case would a combination of the publishers and the serialising newspaper allow copies to be released to reviewers in time for even the fastest and most insomniac of readers to get even halftaay through the books before they were in the shops In the case of the Thatcher book a feeling that it might be best for it to be reviewed unread may well have been a subsidiary motive for such restrictiveness For John Moor’s book this would by contrast be an undeserved fate As a partial but rational chronicle of events it has a gently compelling quality It may as Major semi-modestly suggests in the foreword be a symphony in the “whole dazzling range of greys” (Pissarro not Mrdor) but the result is an easy-flowing narrative which puts It well within the higher range of political pidces justificative It is often self-critical and rarely boastftil although I would not have chosen the title of The Autobiography It is a good one but it does not stand alone like The Parthenon or The Bible Major rose from the most unpromising early circumstances with the possible exception of James Callaghan of any Prime Minister since the beginning of the ofllce It was an amazing rise due to JOHN MAJOR: The Autobiography (HarperCollins £25) ROY JENKINS great willpower and an exceptional gift for making himself amenable and acceptable He had a large chip on his shoulder yet had the robustness to use it as a pulley to exceptional success and not as an excuse for resentftil failure — although this does not mean that resentment is entirely absent from his nature He had big deficiencies to overcome When for instance he became Foreign Secretary in 1989 he had never been to the United States and very rarely out of England not even to Scotland which latter deficiency showed in some of his ill-judged constitutional rigidities He writes of his early years and the bizarre ramifications of his extended family with honesty and sensitivity although with occasional touches of sentimentality He then takes us at a spanking pace through his Conservative apprenticeship first with the social attractions even in Lambeth of the Young Conservatives in their heyday then through a short apprenticeship in local government and two fairly hopeless parliamentary candidatures in St Pancras until the first of his jackpots came up In 1976 at the age of 33 he was adopted as candidate for Huntingdon a con- A aiTOra® stltuency as agreeable as it was safe and in which he appears in spite of his south London background to have quickly made himself both popular and at home And only 11 years after that he had been Foreign Secretary was Chancellor of the Exchequer and had the supreme office well within his sights What however does not emerge from these early chapters or indeed from anywhere else in the book is what made Major a Conservative or — except for an ambition which was the more deadly for being publicly understated — gave him this remarkable self-rising quality I am reminded of a remark by that American political sage Walter Lipp-mann “X” he said "is an agreeable man of no very fixed opinions” As however X was Franklin Roosevelt it may be thought that this analogy is more damaging to Lipp-mann’s judgment than to Major’s performance A more apposite and destructive Exocet missile may have been fired by that Duke of Bedford who was lord John Russell’s father when he said that a Prime Minister of 1827 was "an amiable man with some good qualities but none of them in any way making him suitable to be Prime Minister” However Goderich the target of that remark was in 10 Downing Street only for four months Major was then for six and a half years longer in total than Lloyd George or Attlee or (continuously) than Churchill This anyone place” u shows that while moderate longevity in Downing Street is necessary for a high category premiership it is not in itself a sufficient qualification It is difficult to see the gradual disintegration of Major’s essentially rudderless premiership as other than a tale involving more sympathy and affection than admiration Fortunately he tells it with some verve The chapter dealing with the Maastricht Inter-Governmental Conference of December 1991 when he negotiated with skill and determination to achieve a result which encapsulated every error of Britain's approach to Europe over the past 50 years is a classic of holding the reader’s attention which many fiction writers might envy E sums up his approach in words which are as deadeningly uninspiring as they are patently honest: “While my gut instincts were strongly opposed to a single currency my assessment was that one day it would go ahead and if it proved to be successful an economic low-pressure system over the Continent would suck sterling into it If our economic well-being demanded entry as one day I thought it might then in the end we would go in That was my firm opinion” The great incubus of Major’s premiership comparable with Mr Rochester’s mad wife upstairs in Jane Eyre was his predecessor who thought she had made him Prime Minister but who then devoted almost every subsequent day to undermining his position (Lady Thatcher is currently well on the way to doing the same thing for William Hague’s leadership of the opposition) The trouble was both that she did not like Major’s emol-lience and that she could not really reconcile herself to anyone being in her place In any event she turned against her prot£g& Major himself had a similar experience with his Chancellor except that Norman Lamont eventually became a mosquito round the ankles rather than a brooding spirit on high But the responsibility for Lamont’s mistaken appointment rested far more squarely with Major than did his own election as leader of the Conservative Party with Mrs Thatcher Never appoint anyone to a serious office whose chief claim to preferment is as a whipper-in of votes must be a good rule Yet if a choice is to be made not only on grounds of decency and modesty but also of veracity and good narrative flow between him and either his predecessor or his embittered sacked Chancellor I prefer Major on all counts This does not I fear affect the fact that Margaret Thatcher’s name will ring down the corridors of history with much more resonance than that of John Mjor She will be Disraeli to his Aberdeen But Lord Aberdeen was a very respectable man