John Major

Context: Major was interested in politics from an early age. Encouraged by fellow Conservative Derek Stone, he started giving speeches on a soap-box in Brixton Market. He stood as a candidate for Lambeth London Borough Council at the age of 21 in 1964, and was elected in the Conservative landslide in 1968. While on the Council he was Chairman of the Housing Committee, being responsible for overseeing the building of several large council housing estates. He lost his seat in 1971. Major was an active Young Conservative, and according to his biographer Anthony Seldon brought "youthful exuberance" to the Tories in Brixton, but was often in trouble with the professional agent Marion Standing. Also according to Seldon, the formative political influence on Major was Jean Kierans, a divorcee 13 years his elder, who became his political mentor and his lover, too. Seldon writes "She ... made Major smarten his appearance, groomed him politically, and made him more ambitious and worldly." Their relationship lasted from 1963 to sometime after 1968. Major stood for election to Parliament in St Pancras North in both United Kingdom general elections in 1974, but was unsuccessful each time. In November 1976, Major was selected to be the candidate for the safe Conservative seat of Huntingdonshire. He won the seat in the 1979 general election. Following boundary changes, Major became the MP for the newly formed seat of Huntingdon in 1983, and retained the seat in 1987, 1992 and 1997. He retired from Parliament in 2001. He was appointed as a Parliamentary Private Secretary in 1981, becoming an assistant whip in 1983. He was later made Under-Secretary of State for Social Security in 1985, before being promoted to become Minister of State in the same department in 1986, first attracting national media attention over cold weather payments to the elderly in January 1987, when Britain was in the depths of a severe winter. Following the 1987 election, Major was promoted to the Cabinet as Chief Secretary to the Treasury. Two years later, in a surprise July 1989 reshuffle, Major succeeded Geoffrey Howe as Foreign Secretary. The rapid promotion surprised many, due to Major's relative lack of experience in the Cabinet. Just three months later, in October 1989, Major was appointed Chancellor of the Exchequer after the sudden resignation of Nigel Lawson. This meant that, despite only being in the Cabinet for little over two years, Major had gone from the most junior position in the Cabinet to holding two of the Great Offices of State. As Chancellor, Major presented only one Budget, the first to be televised live, in early 1990. He publicised it as a budget for savings and announced the Tax-Exempt Special Savings Account (TESSA), arguing that measures were required to address the marked fall in the household savings ratio that had been apparent during the previous financial year. In June 1990, Major suggested that the proposed Single European Currency should be a "hard ecu", competing against existing national currencies; this idea was not in the end adopted. In October 1990, Major and Douglas Hurd, Major's successor as Foreign Secretary, persuaded Thatcher to support British entry to the European Exchange Rate Mechanism, a move which she had resisted for many years, and which had played a part in the resignation of Nigel Lawson. After Michael Heseltine challenged Thatcher for the leadership of the Conservative Party in November 1990, Major and Douglas Hurd were the proposer and seconder on her nomination papers for the leadership ballot. After Thatcher was unable to win enough support to prevent a second ballot, she announced her resignation as Prime Minister and Conservative Leader. Major subsequently announced on 22 November that he would stand in the second ballot. Major had been at home in Huntingdon recovering from a wisdom tooth operation during the first leadership ballot. Thatcher's nomination papers for the second ballot were sent to him by car for him to sign - it later emerged that he had signed both Thatcher's papers and a set of papers for his own candidacy in case she withdrew. Unlike in the first ballot, a candidate only required a simple majority of Conservative MPs to win, in this case 187 of 375 MPs. The ballot was held on the afternoon of 27 November; although Major fell two votes short of the required winning total, he polled far enough ahead of both Douglas Hurd and Michael Heseltine to secure immediate concessions from them. With no remaining challengers, Major was formally named Leader of the Conservative Party that evening and was duly appointed Prime Minister the following day. The UK economy entered a recession during 1990, which deepened in 1991, with unemployment rising rapidly. The Conservatives had been consistently behind Labour in the opinion polls since 1989, and the gap had widened significantly during 1990. Within two months of Major becoming Prime Minister, Major was required to lead Britain through the first Gulf War, playing a key role in persuading US President George H. W. Bush to support no-fly zones. During this period, Major and his Cabinet survived an IRA assassination attempt by mortar attack. The Conservatives managed to regain a lead in the opinion polls after this period, with polls also showing Major as the most popular Prime Minister since Harold Macmillan in the early 1960s. In spite of Labour Leader Neil Kinnock's repeated calls for an immediate general election after Major became Prime Minister, it wasn't until February 1992 that Major called an election for 9 April. Major took his campaign onto the streets, delivering many addresses from an upturned soapbox as he had done in his days on Lambeth Council. This approach stood in contrast to the Labour Party's seemingly slicker campaign and it chimed with the electorate, along with hard-hitting negative campaign advertising focusing on the issue of Labour's approach to taxation. During the campaign, both parties were either tied or within one point of each other in opinion polls, leading to uncertainty over who would win - or whether there would be an outright election winner at all. On the night of the election, exit polls indicated a very slim Labour lead, which most observers predicted would translate into either a hung parliament or a small Labour majority, with Major's best hope of retaining power being with the Tories remaining in government as a minority government or as part of a coalition. Despite these predictions, the Conservatives won the election outright, gaining in excess of 14 million votes, the highest popular vote ever recorded by a British political party in a general election to date. Although this translated into a much-reduced majority of 21 seats in the House of Commons (down from a majority of 102 seats at the previous election), this was enough for Major to return as Prime Minister elected in his own right and give the Conservatives their fourth consecutive victory, although the relatively small majority would go on to cause problems for Major throughout his second term. CANNOTANSWER

Question: What happened during the 1992 election?
Answer: along with hard-hitting negative campaign advertising focusing on the issue of Labour's approach to taxation.