BBC News | UK | The miraculous Major-Balls Friday, May 21, 1999 Published at 14:28 GMT 15:28 UK UK The miraculous Major-Balls The revelation that the former Prime Minister John Major has discovered a half-brother he never knew he had is the latest twist in a colourful family background. It's a revelation made all the more fascinating because all the while that John Major did not know about it, his brother Terry Major-Ball did. John Major is keeping the details of his newfound halfbrother secret - until he publishes his autobiography later this year. All families have a different story to tell, but the Major-Ball family history is particularly rich. Here BBC News Online provides a potted guide. Tom Major-Ball The man who Bruce Anderson described as "one of the most fascinating characters of the century", made an impact on the public for a number of reasons. There was the job as the trapeze artist, the gnome manufacture, and - now - the revelation that the former prime minister had a half brother he didn't know about. And there was always the name - he was known as Abraham Ball, but his stage name was Thomas Major.

He gave his children different variations of the names. Other highlights in his colourful life included playing professional baseball, briefly leading part of the Uruguayan army, and fathering his son John at the age of 62 to his second wife, Gwen. Some reports claimed an old circus poster for Tom Major in Brixton were the inspiration on the young south Londoner David Bowie when writing Space Oddity. Terry Major-Ball Where John Major was endlessly pilloried for his sheer, unashamed ordinariness, elder brother Terry has lived a little more dangerously. In the days when his younger brother would be toiling late into the night on a vital piece of government legislation, Terry was also burning the candle at both ends - at a West End night-club. A banker by trade, Terry's relative fame saw him "mature" into a more convincing heir of the Major-Ball legacy of eccentricity. He appeared to embrace the hedonism of late night clubbing and was once spotted in deep conversation with a topless model at Stringfellows. He lapped up photo-opportunities to be photographed with his beloved garden gnomes showed and took to becoming a "writer".

His most notable work was an autobiography entitled Major Major, which offered an insight into life growing up in the unorthodox Major household. Despite their differences, the two brothers share a strong physical resemblance, and Terry is also adept at giving the sort down-to-earth homespun wisdom associated with John. John Major When he took over as PM, Mr Major's popularity broke records. If this was because of his consensual, unflamboyant manner (quite different from Lady Thatcher's), it soon became a caricature. Spitting Image made him completely grey, and played on his unusual pronunciation of the word "want". Some of the things he will be remembered for are standing on a soapbox in Luton during the 1992 general election campaign, talking about warm beer and evensong, and failing a test to become a bus conductor. True to his family form, though, from time to time he showed he had the ability to shock and act out of character. Getting furious off-camera (but while audio tapes were still running) with Eurosceptics in his cabinet and calling them "bastards" is a good example.

As was shocking the whole country by resigning in summer 1995 and challenging his detractors to stand against him. Norma Major "First ladies" divide into two camps - those who choose to live out lofty ambitions though their spouse, and those who couldn_t give a jot about the fame and power of influence. Norma Major, who confessed to feeling "physically sick with terror" when John was made Foreign Secretary (Foreign Secretary!), is unequivocally in the latter grouping. The former needlework teacher's reluctance to play the "media game" - after John's election as PM she wore the same blue frock two days running - meant she was given a hard time in the Press. "Dull", "dowdy" and "ordinary" were among the adjectives that prefaced her name. But she did achieve celebrity in her own right as the author of the coffee-table book Chequers and as the inspiration for the Norma Major rose. Elizabeth Major A qualified veterinary nurse, Elizabeth Major exhibits her father's calm level-headedness. Which helps explain why her engagement last year, to Luke Salter, a 26-year-old medical student, was a far more low-key affair than that of younger brother James.

Elizabeth has known Luke since she was 17, when she played clarinet in a youth orchestra and he, French horn. The pair, who plan to marry after James's bash, have been living in a rented three-bedroom house in Leicestershire. A keen horse rider, she has a healthy interest in sport and is often seen with her father at cricket matches. James Major Like father, like son? Not in the case of James Major, whose racy lifestyle means he is never far from a tabloid "splash". Gossip columnists were jumping up and down when the former prime minister's son forged a romantic attachment with the game show hostess and ex-topless model Emma Nobel. James's roguish reputation was first forged on the school playing fields where he was shown the red card four times in one football season and given a 35-day ban, allegedly for exchanging punches. He went on to become a managerial trainee at Marks and Spencer but hit the headlines again for his two-year affair with a married woman 12 years his senior. The trudge of retail management did not engage him and he quit to run a night-club in central London, when he met Emma.

He has since set up his own business, Major Entertainments. Perhaps a case of following in his grandfather's foosteps. Hit the headlines again recently in a health scare after he collapsed. Emma Noble Emma Noble will add more than a touch of glamour to the Major family tree when she weds James this year. The blonde, leggy, topless model turned game-show hostess is tailor-made for the tabloids. As a schoolgirl in Sidcup in Kent, Emma dreamt of becoming a hairdresser. But her sultry looks, slender figure and taste for self-publicity meant the 5ft 10ins Emma would always go further. She secured a role on Bruce Forsyth's The Price is Right after appearing in Dennis Potter's TV play Cold Lazarus and became a staple pin-up for any New Lad. Although she became engaged to James after just three-months, both have strenuously denied they are tying the knot for publicity purposes. Un-named mystery Major-Ball brother All that is known about the mystery man is that he is American, and is older than both John and Terry.

John's revelation at finding his half-brother will form some of the pizzazz of his forthcoming autobiography, which could otherwise run the risk of getting bogged down in tales of the Eurosceptic Tory MP rebellion. Bearing in mind the uncanny family resemblace between John and Terry, anyone hunting for the unknown half-brother might be well advised to look for a man with grey hair and glasses. Terry Major-Ball - Telegraph Terry Major-Ball 12:01AM BST 21 Apr 2007 Terry Major-Ball, who has died aged 74, first came to the attention of the nation in November 1990 on the night that his younger brother John became Prime Minister. Reporters gathered outside his house in Wallington, Surrey, hoping for some insights into the life of the new Tory leader who had emerged from unpromising south London beginnings to succeed Margaret Thatcher. He would later recall how furious he was about some of the things the commentators were saying that evening about his father, a former circus clown and garden gnome manufacturer. Yet, when he went outside to speak to ITV's News at Ten in a dazzling pool of light, it was a disaster.

"My face looked bloated and I seemed drunk," he wrote in his autobiography Major Major (1994), ghostwritten by James Hughes-Onslow. "What on earth can people have thought? In fact I hadn't consumed anything stronger than a cup of tea. It was a useful lesson to me that you can't be too careful with the media dragon." In fact, Major-Ball was to become a media favourite throughout his brother's premiership, despite the efforts of the Downing Street press office to curb his eccentricities. The book, too, received an ecstatic reception: "exquisitely funny" wrote Auberon Waugh; "one of the great comic books of the year, or any year" thought John Wells; while Private Eye's reviewer, hailing it as an unquestionable classic, wrote that it "makes you proud to be English. No foreigner could dream of such a masterpiece. It is one of the most distinctive products of our great civilisation, up there with Durham Cathedral, the Elgar cello concerto, Adnam's bitter and the double-decker bus.

When John Major has been quite forgotten this book will, if there is any justice, be shelved between The Young Visiters and The Diary of a Nobody." Major-Ball became a regular at book launches and was generous with quotations when reporters rang. Though diarists were often told by his wife Shirley that he was busy "tiling the bathroom", or engaged in some other home improvement project, he seldom failed to come to the telephone to deal with some piffling query. Despite this he could be scathing about some journalists, writing of The Spectator columnist Paul Johnson that: "It must be terribly frustrating for Mr Johnson that time has moved on, so that we now have a Prime Minister who doesn't listen to him any more. After a lifetime of vacillation he must feel all washed up, rather as I did when the garden ornaments business collapsed." Having seen another journalist on television - "it was Lord Rees-Mogg or Richard Littlejohn" - describe his father as a "failed trapeze artist", Major-Ball consulted Hughes-Onslow. The latter discovered that the journalist in question was Charles Moore, then editor of The Sunday Telegraph.

"James said he was at the same school as Mr Moore and gave me his home number, telling me to give him a hard time." But Moore was out when Major-Ball rang, and his wife so charmed him that he felt unable to complain. Still, he asked: "How would Charles Moore fare on the trapeze, I wonder, if he hadn't decided to pursue a more disreputable profession?" So effusive was he that he described reporters yawning on the end of the line, and said that they would not ring him unless they had half an hour to spare. He pointed out, however, that his brother had once been interviewed for two hours by a journalist for a piece which never appeared. "Two hours, what a waste!" he wrote. "I could have painted a door in that time." But despite his long-windedness he was totally loyal to the PM, and kept to himself some explosive secrets, such as Major's affair with Edwina Currie, his relationship with an older woman who was a friend of his mother, and the fact that their house in Coldharbour Lane, Brixton, was owned by a secret older half-brother.

Terry (he was christened simply Terry, not Terence) Major-Ball was born on July 2 1932 and brought up at Worcester Park, south west London, where his parents owned a bungalow. His father, Tom Ball, called himself Tom Major when he was in a circus, but combined the two names when he started his business. His mother Gwen was a dancer. Having failed his 11-plus, unlike his older sister Pat and younger brother John, Terry attended Stoneleigh East Central Secondary Modern School. "I have no regrets about this, because it turned out to be a good school with an excellent headmaster," he wrote; but he confessed that he was sorry never to have acquired the educational qualifications for lucrative employment. During the war the family was evacuated to Norfolk, where Terry got on well with the older German prisoners of war held nearby. The younger ones were more troublesome: "the final straw came when Mother caught a few of them outside the back door trying to teach baby John the Nazi salute." By the time he left school after the war, his elderly father's health was failing, and Terry spent much time struggling to save the family business when he would have been wiser to seek work elsewhere.

After the collapse of Major's Garden Ornaments, he had a variety of menial jobs, making plastic pipes and reading meters for the electricity board. He met his wife Shirley while working at Woolworths in Brixton. Life never ran smoothly for him, but he managed to maintain a veneer of cheerfulness despite serious bouts of depression which sometimes incapacitated him. There is no doubt that the great excitement of his life was his brother John, who had once been his assistant in the family firm, becoming prime minister. He was fêted by the Evening Standard which, noting that he had never flown in an aircraft, or been abroad except on National Service (in Germany, with the Medical Corps), or stayed in a hotel, organised for Major-Ball to fly first class to New York and stay in Manhattan. He met Liza Minelli in Joe Allen's and found New York cabbies unfailingly obliging. He told John about his adventures. He "listened politely and with genuine interest. Then he said, 'Sorry, Terry, I must go now.

I'm due at a meeting, in the Cabinet Room.' "As he left his flat to go downstairs, I thought once again how very little time for relaxation there is in the busy life of a Prime Minister." Later Major-Ball went to Christchurch, New Zealand, to open a garden gnome festival, and to Melbourne for a flower show. He once told an Australian radio interviewer: "I don't know how people can say I or my brother are grey characters when both our parents were music hall comedians." He visited Utah and Alaska for the Daily Express, to which he also contributed a column, and he made a BBC2 programme, A Postcard to my Brother, about his travels in France, Germany and Poland. When John Major left Downing Street in 1997 Terry would say, only half in jest, that he was yesterday's man, and his vicarious fame dwindled. He remained, however, very fondly regarded by journalists, who found him unfailingly helpful and decent. As the former PM embarked on his autobiography and on global lecture tours, he found that much of the research had already been done by Terry for his book. Major-Ball carried on with his tireless DIY schemes, and occasionally commented in newspaper diaries.

Sometimes, while paving the front garden, he would look up at passing aircraft and say to himself: "I used to be up there once." In 2003 Terry Major-Ball disappeared from the spotlight as quickly as he had appeared, moving to Somerset. There was speculation that he had been removed from the public eye to prevent him from talking to the press. Some thought that horse had bolted 13 years earlier. He was suffering from prostate cancer and died in a hospice at Chard on March 13, though news of his death did not emerge until yesterday. He is survived by his wife Shirley (née Wilson) and by a son and a daughter. Classless society - or just a society with no class?: A CLASSLESS SOCIETY: BRITAIN IN THE 1990S BY ALWYN W. TURNER | Daily Mail Online Classless society - or just a society with no class? A CLASSLESS SOCIETY: BRITAIN IN THE 1990S BY ALWYN W.

TURNER (Aurum £25) By Roger Lewis for MailOnline Published: 13:53 EST, 22 August 2013 | Updated: 04:21 EST, 23 August 2013 When John Major, on taking over the Conservative Party from a dethroned Margaret Thatcher in November 1990, claimed he wanted ‘a genuinely classless society’, ‘a classless society of opportunity’, can he have known what was about to happen? It’s not only that gone would be the days of Space Hoppers, The Clangers, and smoking in cinemas, or that in would come women priests, acid house raves and devil-worshipping rapists (‘I’m sick of cleaning the candle wax off the carpet,’ one complained) - it’s more that, with the Nineties, the age of stupidity had dawned. The heroes of the hour were Harry Potter, Tim Henman and Mr Blobby. Posh and Becks entered the national consciousness - their appeal, says Alwyn Turner in this rich and encyclopaedic survey, being that ‘they were so essentially ordinary’. John Major himself made a virtue of his non-aristocratic background.

The former Prime Minister’s father was a trapeze artist in the music halls who’d moved into the garden gnome market. It was important not to seem elitist - so suddenly the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Chief Rabbi ‘were proud to call themselves Arsenal fans’. If opera was to be heard, then it was Pavarotti singing the theme music for the World Cup. Television no longer meant programmes with costumes, scripts and actors, but fly-on-the-wall reality shows about airports or driving schools, where participants received instant tabloid fame - all heralding Big Brother, which began broadcasting in 2000. Intelligence was despised, along with tradition. Popular comic characters were the mentally defective Mr Bean, ‘a man whose inability to understand the grown-up world caused chaos and confusion’, and David Starkey, whose documentaries treated complex historical events as camp soap operas. In schools, ‘pushy middle-class parents’ were sneered at for wanting their children to be taught things - lessons in World War II, for example, meant knowing how to fry spam fritters. Fine art?

My Bed by Tracey Emin Targets and league tables reduced the standards, so that more pupils could appear to be passing exams, and literacy and numeracy were never to recover. The new A.S. Byatt was People’s Chav Jade Goody, the dental nurse from Essex who became rich and famous for her ignorance. Similarly, in the field of Fine Art, out went proper draughtsmanship skills. In came pickled sharks and unmade beds. Far from being a deterrent, Asbos were prized as the sole qualification a lot of youngsters possessed. The Nineties thus saw the invention of Lads’ Culture, e.g. magazines such as Nuts and Zoo, and sitcoms including Men Behaving Badly, which mainly meant men being socially and sexually inept, drinking lager on the couch and watching satellite porn channel Red Hot Dutch. Laddish cuisine was represented by Keith Floyd, knocking together a stir-fry on a dustbin lid, and by the first appearances of Jamie Oliver, who dressed as if off out for a few beers with his mates. ‘He adopted a new classless persona for the New Britain,’ remarks Turner.

Broadcasters, ‘fearing unfashionability’, replaced old timers like Les Dawson and hired David Baddiel or Frank Skinner. If men became geezers or blokes, who’d watch the films of Guy Ritchie and Michael Caine; women were represented by the Spice Girls, who looked like supermarket check-out staff and who flaunted not feminism but ‘femininity as a positive force’. Their first album sold 10 million copies. The Nineties were generally unsympathetic towards religion. Though The Vicar Of Dibley and Father Ted attracted viewers, ‘never talk about God’ was Alastair Campbell’s advice. The Rev. Green was dropped from the board game Cluedo, as ‘a clergyman was no longer appropriate in the Nineties’, and Harry Secombe’s Highway, in which the former Goon belted out popular hymns while dodging shoppers on the pavement, was summarily axed. The only vaguely theological element left in the public domain was Mystic Meg, who introduced the National Lottery.

All this altered somewhat with the advent of messianic Tony Blair, who’d take his jacket off, throw it over his shoulder, and announce: ‘I’m a regular guy, not a stick-in-the-mud. I like a pint. Why not vote for me?’ Actually, he changed pints of beer into bottles of wine - sales of Australian plonk increased by 4,000 per cent under New Labour. And the faithful were duly taken in - in the General Election of May 1997, the Tories were put to rout. ‘Seven members of the Cabinet found themselves being made unemployed on live television’. As John Major lamented: ‘If I had stood unopposed, I would still have come second.’ Lad's Culture: Martin Clunes and Neil Morrissey in Men Behaving Badly Even Rotarians were initially impressed: ‘Everyone is going to call each other by their first name and wear casual clothes instead of ties.’ Blair pretended he hadn’t been educated at Fettes, Oxford and the Bar, and spoke in a phoney Estuary English. Nevertheless, as Turner points out, the New Labour apostles weren’t jolly and smiling behind the scenes.

Despite the rumour that The Red Flag was to be replaced by The Sun Has Got His Hat On as a potential anthem: ‘Campbell had problems with Clare Short; John Prescott hated Harriet Harman and fell out with David Blunkett; and neither Prescott, Blunkett nor Jack Straw got on with Gordon Brown.’ Meanwhile, upstairs at Number Ten, ‘Cherie Blair hated Brown and all his circle’. A particular pleasure of this wonderful, hilarious book is Turner’s contempt for politicians, who are ‘perverts, liars and conmen’, on the whole. During the Major administration, for instance, when ‘family values’ were promoted, a transport minister had five mistresses, Alan Clark seduced a married woman as well as both her daughters, ‘which gave him enormous lad credentials’, and another MP, who’d said ‘I would like to be Foreign Secretary,’ was found dead, ‘dressed in women’s underwear, with a satsuma in his mouth’.

The nastiest legacy of the Nineties was that ‘touchy-feely Diana-caring’ became coercive political correctness - a priggish orthodoxy that, though it has a funny side (the BBC exercising such self-censorship that during the Kuwaiti War, it banned Roberta Flack’s Killing Me Softly With His Song, The Bangles’ Walk Like An Egyptian and Lulu’s Boom Bang A Bang), the consequences weren’t funny at all. Suddenly, with Blair at the helm, some unspecified global code of ‘human rights’ overrode considerations of a foreign county’s national sovereignty. Hence why we are still up to our necks in Iraq and Afghanistan, and why here at home we hourly fear Islamic terrorist reprisals. Interesting Facts: April 2014 Interesting Facts Because the world is an interesting place we have been collecting Interesting Facts about Interesting Places, Interesting People, Interesting Animals, Interesting Numbers, and Interesting Words. (Double click any word for its definition.) Pages Interesting Fact - Doctors Around two-thirds of Western countries charge patients to see their GP, fees range from 80p in France to £18 in Sweden, with an extra £5 for a home visit.

In the UK it is currently free (see below). (In some countries patients pay for hospital visits or stays, including Germany, and Sweden where they charge around £7.50 per night, and in Portugal you also have to pay £8 every time you go to A&E. According to a poll conducted by Pulse magazine, half of British GPs are in favour of charging patients for appointments - with some wanting to impose fees of between £5 and £25 a time. The problem is that it puts people off seeking medical help. Germany introduced a similar GP charge, but they later scrapped it.) We've been talking about this in the forum . Today 30th April 2014 is National Honesty Day in the US. Allegedly, a man called M. Hirst Goldberg (who interestingly wrote a book about lies), established April 30th as National Honesty Day in an attempt to balance out the beginning of the month, which begins with April’s Fool Day. I think this should go global! Like a great big game of truth or dare.

:) Interesting Fact - Money According to figures from the Halifax, of every £100.00 spent in the UK (not including credit), debit cards account for £28.87, direct debits for £19.90, so-called ‘faster payments’, which covers internet and smartphone transactions, for £12.81, cheques £11.28, standing orders £7.82 and 'other' methods of paying bills £1.34. (This means that only £17.99, is spent in cold, hard cash, down by £3.03 on a year ago, So maybe the death knell is already ringing for the money in your pocket. +Andrey Orlov - It's funny how sometimes people ask me a question in a session, and then it crops up in the news. :) ) Today 29th April 2014 is One Day Without Shoes Day. I won't wear my shoes around the garden and house, but sorry, I will be wearing them to take the dog for a walk.

Interesting Words - Gainful Employment In legalese, "gainful employment" is defined as work that a person can pursue and perform for money or activities intended to provide an income to a person. (This is where wording can have a huge effect, as Tony Hakki, a professional poker player, who allegedly refused to pay child support for his children, has won a legal fight to keep all his poker winnings. Court of Appeal judges agreed that Tony Hakki's winnings were not from "gainful employment" and so did not meet the regulations governing the payment of child support. This is what I would call "getting off on a technicality".) 28th April 2014 is Ed Balls Day. A day to celebrate Ed Balls accidentally tweeting his own name at 4:20pm, on 28th April, 2011. Interesting Fact - Fortified Schools The UK government has announced plans to spend £85m building a secure college in Leicestershire that will hold up to 320 young people in custody.. (This should go under "sad facts", because it's in reaction to the number of deaths in custody over the last 10 years.

During that time, 163 young people under the age of 24 have killed themselves in prison in the UK The secure college is planned to be the first step towards several other so called "fortified schools" that will eventually cater for the vast majority of young offenders.) According to the World Tourism Organisation, nearly one in ten international tourists worldwide is now Chinese. (There were 97.3m outward-bound journeys from China in 2013, of which around half were for leisure. Chinese tourists spend most in total ($129 billion in 2013, followed by Americans at $86 billion) and per tax-free transaction ($1,130 compared with $494 by Russians). More than 80% say that shopping is vital to their plans, compared with 56% of Middle Eastern tourists and 48% of Russians. The Chinese are expected to buy more luxury goods next year while abroad than tourists from all other countries combined. However, only around 5% of China’s population actually own passports.) Tom Major was the father of the former Prime Minister of the UK, John Major.

He was a trapeze artist, music-hall entertainer and the owner of a garden gnome factory. (In his book, "The Old Man", John Major writes: Tom spent nearly 30 years on the road as a music-hall artist, for much of that time the proprietor of his own show. He cut his teeth working in circuses and travelling galas, but in 1902 formed a double act with a singer and dancer called Kitty Grant, whom he later married – performing acrobatics, baton-twirling, patter, comic duets and comedy sketches. They became known as Drum and Major, and topped the bill at big halls such as the Leeds City Varieties. Forty years later, Major was the name on his son's birth certificate. But Kitty wasn't John Major's mother. That distinction fell to Gwen Coates, a Lincolnshire girl who joined the company as a dancer. She stepped into Kitty's shoes when a steel girder from a safety curtain struck the unfortunate woman on the head. On her death bed, Kitty asked her to look after Tom and Gwen married him a year later.

Who would have thought the grey man of politics could have had such an interesting upbringing?) You've heard of the Welsh, the Irish and the Scots, well say hello to the Cornish. (Not the pasty, the people. Cornwall has won recognition as a national minority. Flag - St Piran Language - Cornish Nationality - Cornish In the census of 2011, 84,000 people declaree themselves “Cornish”, but only 557 people claim that the Celtic dialect is their main language, although there are now dual-language street signs throughout the county. I don't think you can call yourself Cornish, if you can't speak Cornish. There should be a test.) Oh look! There is! Can you tell the difference between Dothraki and Cornish? According to a survey by the TV Channel Gold, men turn into their fathers at the age of 38. (The top signs that this might be happening to you are:- 1. You fall asleep in the living room. 2. You have ‘a chair’ 3. You enjoy Dad dancing 4. You spend time in the shed 5. You tell jokes that only you find funny 6.

You don't know any artists in the top 40 7. You are spending longer on the toilet 8. You keep an eye on the thermostat 9. You get excited about white good sales 10. You enjoy embarrassing younger members of the family Oh dear - apart from number 3 and number 7, I think I'm turning into my dad!) According to research from UCLA (University of California, Los Angeles), a person who grows up in an average, reasonably positive home is told "no" over 148,000 times before they hit their 18th birthday. (On the other side, they are only told "yes" around 5,000 times. According to Dr. Alice Sterling Honig, Professor Emerita of Child Development at Syracuse University, and an expert in early language development, if you just say no to a young child all the time, that child doesn't learn to use language to reason with you and others. 148,000 nos sounds like brainwashing to me.

No wonder we are often negative, and more likely to think we can't do something, than taking the more positive view.) New government guidance in the UK will tell pensioners how long left they have to live. (Everyone approaching retirement in Britain will be told when they are expected to die. The UK's Pensions Minister, Steve Webb, is asking pension providers to give people an "estimate" of their shelf life. Seemingly we usually underestimate how long we are likely to live, Mr Webb said, "Many people underestimate how long they will live. If you are thinking about this, what do you do? For best guidance you probably think about how long your grandparents lived, but that is two generations out of date... Retirees need to gain a sense of how long they might live to help make financial decisions." Thanks for the concern Mr Webb, but frankly, I would rather not know.) Interesting Fact - Sexism in the UK According to a UN spokeswoman on violence against women. Rashida Manjoo, the UK is the most sexist country in the world. (Rashida Manjoo, a human rights expert from South Africa, says that there is a "boys’ club" sexist culture in the UK.

In that respect, she is correct. The old boys network is alive and well in the UK, and they do know how to look after each other, so maybe we need an old girls network too. Something she neglects to notice is that most guys don't get to join the old boys network either.) Interesting Fact - Entertaining According to a survey conducted on behalf of French mustard Maille one in four Brits feel pressure to perform after watching competitive cooking programmes. (A quarter of people in the UK, who hold dinner parties, admit to trying to serve "restaurant quality food" and to outdo their friends when entertaining. In order to make a good impression, the average dinner party host will now spend six and a half hours preparing food and lay out an average of £102.17 on food and trimmings, and one in 10 amateur cooks will spend more than £200 to entertain at home. The survey almost found that men were more likely to spend to show off. Their average dinner party bill is a fifth more than women’s, and they are more likely to shop at a specialist store. However, women put more care into their entertaining, taking nearly a quarter more time to prepare.

If you are spending that much on entertaining friends, you might as well take them out to a restaurant. Source: Interesting People - Richard Platz In 1913 Richard Platz threw a bottle into the Baltic sea. (Over 101 years later, the brown beer bottle was found in the catch of Konrad Fischer, a fisherman, and it is now thought to be the oldest recorded message in a bottle. Much of the message was indecipherable, although the address in Berlin on the front of the card was legible, as was the author's polite request that the note be sent by the finder to his home address. He also included two stamps from that time, which were also in the bottle, so the finder would not incur any cost. I wonder what he would think of today's instant messaging.) Photographer Charles O'Rear took the iconic photograph, Bliss, that has adorned many computer screens around the world; the default wallpaper in Windows XP. (He took the photo 60 miles north of San Francisco in a wine region of Napa Valley called Carneros.

It is now a vineyard, so that particular landscape no longer exists, but although the operating system is no longer supported by Microsoft, the image will live on for this generation. Estimates say that ‘Bliss’ may have been seen by over a billion people around the world, from Buckingham Palace in London, factory control rooms in North Korea to the situation room of the White House in Washington DC.) Interesting Fact - Love According to a survey carried out by adult retailer Lovehoney, 3% of people in the UK admit to saying "I love you" on a first date and and 13 per cent took the plunge in the first week. (Two-fifths declared their love by the end of the first month, but A third of women have told a partner that they loved them when they didn't, and a fifth of men admitted to doing the same thing. The usual excuse is their partner had said it first and so they felt under pressure to say it back. I guess they were just being polite, but really - don't say it unless you mean it.) Interesting Food - Bananas The Cavendish variety of banana accounts for 95 per cent of bananas shipped to export markets around the world.

(That's interesting in itself, but the biggest nightmare of a monoculture has arisen, and the world’s banana crop is under threat from a fungus; Foc-TR4. According to Nature, a strain of Foc wiped out the Gros Michel cultivar, which was the main exported banana variety until the 1950s. Gros Michel plants were then replaced with the Cavendish variety, which is resistant to that Foc strain, but susceptible to the new Foc Tropical Race 4 (Foc-TR4) strain. The disappearance of bananas from supermarket shelves in the UK is one thing, but bananas form a crucial part of the diet of more than 400 million people.) Interesting Fact - British Law A newly proposed law in the UK would mean that any parent or carer who harmed the 'emotional, social or behavioural development' of a child would face up to 10 years in jail.

(The current law on “wilful neglect” is governed by the Children and Young Persons Act 1933, the update to this law is being called a Cinderella law, and it attempts to address the fact that emotional neglect of a child has been shown to be equally as destructive to a child’s well being as physical abuse. The new law will mean that “emotional cruelty” will be a crime for the first time, ranking alongside physical or sexual abuse.) Interesting Fact - Facial Expressions According to research carried out at Ohio State University, the average human only makes 21 facial expressions. (There are six core emotions: happiness, sadness, fear, anger, surprise and disgust, but human Faces Can express21 distinct emotions, combining emotions, such as happily surprised or sadly angry. However, according to research carried out at the University of Glasgow human faces might only be able to make four universally recognized facial expressions. They argue that shared key facial signals should be combined: the wrinkled nose: fear and disgust widened eyes: fear and surprise I'm sure my face has shown more than 21 expressions just in the time it took me to write this.

Perhaps they didn't count the tongue sticking out of the side of the mouth to help concentration as an expression.) Plutchik's wheel of emotions Grey elegy | Global | The Guardian The Guardian browse all sections close Grey elegy With his father's affairs and eccentric choice of careers, John Major boasted a background far more colourful than most of us. So how did he become the grey man of British politics? Simon Hattenstone meets the prime minister the Tories tried to write out of history Wednesday 13 October 1999 21.45 EDT Share on Messenger Close John Major is worried. He stares at the gently whirring tape recorder and looks at Arabella, his personal assistant. "Are you already on interview?" Arabella asks. Major's buttocks seem to tighten. "I thought we were chatting before we started the interview, that's all." Would he prefer it if I turned the recorder off? "Well, if we're chatting, yes." John Major, Mr Normal, One Of Us to abuse a Thatcher phrase, is very much the practised politician.

After seven years as prime minister, trying to glue together the tiniest of majorities, struggling through crisis after crisis until the inevitable collapse in 1997, it is not suprising he's wary of the media. Some people have used the word paranoid - the way he read everything written about him, never forgave Charles Moore, editor of the Daily Telegraph, for patronising him, couldn't forget that he had been called the Des O'Connor, the Forrest Gump, the Pooter of politics. It all hurt, still hurts. If he were a cricketer, he would be Brian Close - standing up fearlessly to the bouncers and left bruised all over. In the flesh, he reminds me of the Steve Bell caricature which was said to upset him. His lips are tightly stitched, the nose as stumpy as if a chunk has been bitten out. I am tempted to twang the underpants but, of course, today he is wearing them on the inside. The first part of the television documentary series, the Major Years, was aired on Monday night. The most moving section was when he talked about his parents, how he had been publicly mocked because dad was a trapeze artist turned garden-gnome maker.

When Major entered the cabinet he seemed to learn about institutional snobbery for the first time. "First of all, let me say I haven't seen the programme yet... So in answering any of the questions about the programme it is with the caveat that I haven't yet seen it. I love my parents. My father had a most remarkable career and I think the people who thought it was funny that in his later years he made garden ornaments... I don't think they are fit to lace up his boots." Why did people find it so funny? "I can't answer that. I remember an elderly man in a different age struggling hard to support his family in the best way he could. I found nothing funny in that." He begins to talk about the classless society he wanted to create. Major was his own paradigm, the boy who rose from humble beginnings to the very top. Michael Portillo recently said that Britain was desperate for an ordinary prime minister, but when we got him we weren't as ready as we had thought. Major says it will be a terrible day when normal people do not make the cabinet, before launching into a Blitzkrieg on the political class, the dilettantes who have no experience of the real world.

"If you wish to have people governing you, I think it's desirable if those people have some experience of what life is like for the people they govern. One of the problems of politics is that too many people who get into politics have too little experience of real life. They go to school, they go to university, they move in some fashion to support a minister and then they get into the House of Commons. Where are the businessmen, where are the soldiers, where are the farmers? Where is the broad swathe of different experience?" Is that a message for William Hague? "It's a message to William Hague, Tony Blair and Charles Kennedy." Major painted himself into a grey corner. It has always seemed amazing that a man with such a dazzlingly eccentric background could be so desperate to sell himself as the epitome of suburban drear, the lad who fled the circus to join the bank. Perhaps if he had celebrated rather than buried his past he could have been a truly classless politician - bastards here, there and everywhere, the numerous affairs of his father, the struggle against poverty, the three O-levels if he was lucky. His family was so much more like the rest of us - albeit a heightened, cartoon version.

"The reality of my background is anything but grey, the reality of my views was anything but grey," he says. "But if you present something in a conciliatory, low-key way... colour is supposed to be banging on the tables, swinging the handbag," he says pointedly. Proper politics, his politics, was always more complex - the search for compromise, agreement where there is discord, he says, if we don't mind him quoting St Francis. As he talks about the fantastic colour of his early life, it dawns that he is actually as grey as we were led to believe - the man from the ministry who dreamed of old maids on bicycles and warm summer beer. He would still suit the bowler hat and brolly of yesteryear. Would he have been more popular if he had just told us 'look I come from this crazy family, I've got a half-brother born in 1900 whom I only knew as my parents' landlord, a half-sister born in the 20s whom I only recently discovered, my family is probably even more dysfunctional than yours.' He smiles, and looks taken by the fancy. "I wouldn't have done it for two reasons.

One, I would have been parading my family for political circumstances and I would have destroyed their right to privacy. Secondly, I believe that what matters is policies, this isn't showbusiness. I loathe and detest soundbite politics." Instead Major became inextricably linked with "back to basics", commonly reported as a call for traditional family values. "What d'you think of as back to basics?" The tinny little voice is now roaring. I burble about moral responsibility. "Absolutely not. Everyone thinks that is what it's about. Now if you go back you will not find a single shred of moral revivalism in that," he chides. "I talked about education, the health service. At no stage did I ever introduce the concept of personal behaviour. Other people in my party may have talked about that, often off the record, but it was not what I intended. Then, of course, you had a series of events that allowed stories to say,'his minister misbehaved and it must be very embarrassing to John Major's back to basics'..." He trails off, still miserable that he was so misunderstood, that he ended up apologising for shag-happy ministers. "Look at my family," he says.

"I'm not in a position where I would talk about the golden age of family values. It didn't ever exist." His foreword to his autobiography exercises two of his favourite neuroses - that he was inadequately educated and that the media was his enemy. Why was he so unforthcoming about his O-levels? "Whose business was it? What relevance was it when I was prime minister at the age of 47 what had happened 32 years ago? It was the intrusion." I tell him about a friend who remarked that Major always looked like a man who went home and worried himself silly that he would get found out. "I don't quite understand that," he says. I think he does, but I explain anyway - the inferiority complex about his education, the fact he came from a lower social class than most fellow Tory MPs and, politically, he wasn't even a Thatcherite. His answer comes in a shocking boom. "What you're inviting me to do, and what I won't do, is psychoanalyse myself . . . I'm not going to do it." Let's put it another way.

What about the time they televised him being driven round his childhood haunts, looking at his old house with wonder and commenting that it was a very long journey from Brixton to Downing Street. "I really don't think I can follow this line any more." Did he worry too much about the media when he was PM? Probably. How? " You asked me a question, I answered a question ." No wonder he's sensitive. Seven years in power and at last week's conference the Tory party blanked his tenure out of existence. How can they write him out of history? "They can't." Why would they want to? "Well, you better ask the people who tried it." "I'll tell you why it's impossible," he says, "look at my legacy." He talks about the steaming inflation he inherited, the unemployment, interest rates of 14%, the poll tax. By 1997, he had handed over a better economy than any other administration in 70 years.

"If anybody in the Conservative party thinks it is wise to write those seven years out of history and assume that the golden economic position we are in at this moment was created by Tony Blair on May 2 then it is going to make it a good deal more difficult for them to win the next election." When he talks of "them" it is easy to forget that Major is still the MP for Huntingdon. In his competing autobiography, Norman Lamont says that Major was crippled by indecision, no more so than on Black Wednesday when he fiddled while the pound burned. "That isn't actually true. It isn't true. I had a different style of running the cabinet, but it isn't true... If that perception is true, how did I get so much done against the opposition of so many people? How did the economy turn round?" Whatever he can legitimately claim, he failed to unite the party. He reminds me of the impossible odds - inheriting 11 years of one-party rule, the poll tax, a disillusioned electorate and then clinging on to a majority of 21 that was shrinking all the time. Has he contributed to public cynicism about politics?

After all, how can politics have integrity when politicians write books damning former colleagues as soon as they quit high office? "I don't think this a rancorous book." But they're all at it like scorpions. "I have several times made it clear that Norman Lamont did things that were very brave and very good." Fair enough, but what about Thatcher? The books tells us that first she tried to run him, then destroy him, that her behaviour was "intolerable". He gives the impression he cannot forgive her. "You must have that perception if you wish." Does he ever think Blairism could have been Majorism? "Well, a good deal of it is. A good deal of it is. There's a good deal that the government started to do when it came into office that I approved of, and so I should have because they were my policies." And the man who loathes soundbites takes it further. "Some of the phrases were mine. 'Hand up, not a hand out', 'opportunity for all'. I can't remember all the others now, but they were actually my phrases as well as my policies.

I think I expressed it once that I went swimming leaving my clothes on the bank and when I came back Tony Blair was wearing them." A smile spreads across his wide, thin lips. Possibly pleasure, possibly regret. Probably a bit of both. He gets up to leave. How optimistic is he about the future of Majorism? "It will thrive," he cries, as he disappears. Cameron blasts back at Major over the rule of public school elite: PM says he believes 'what counts is not where you come from but where you are going' | Daily Mail Online Next Cameron blasts back at Major over the rule of public school elite: PM says he believes 'what counts is not where you come from but where you are going' Sir John, who is the son of a circus performer and garden gnome salesman, left school with only three O-levels comments David Cameron yesterday rejected John Major’s attack on the ‘shocking’ domination of public life by a private school elite. The Prime Minister insisted he believes ‘what counts is not where you come from but where you are going’. But in his second speech to damage the Government in a month, Sir John told Tory activists he was ‘outraged on behalf of the people abandoned when social mobility is lost’.

Sir John's speech comes at a time of deepening unease over the decline in social mobility that had, in the post-war years, let many children from working and lower-middle class backgrounds rise to the top The former prime minister added: ‘In every single sphere of British influence, the upper echelons of power in 2013 are held overwhelmingly by the privately educated or the affluent middle class. RELATED ARTICLES Share this article Share ‘Our education system should help children out of the circumstances in which they were born, not lock them into the circumstances in which they were born. 'We need them to fly as high as their luck, their ability and their sheer hard graft can actually take them. And it isn’t going to happen magically.’ Sir John, who is the son of a circus performer and garden gnome salesman, left school with only three O-levels Mr Cameron, who went to Eton, is vulnerable to charges that his Cabinet is dominated by a privileged elite. And some wavering Tories believe he should change tack and bring back grammar schools to help poorer children. But Mr Cameron’s spokesman said: ‘At the heart of this is the importance of building what the Prime Minister has described as an aspiration nation.

He has said what counts is not where you come from but where you are going. ‘That’s why we have put education reform and welfare reform at the heart of Government policy. The Prime Minister is saying we need to unleash and unlock the promise in everybody. What parents really want to know is that the Government has policies to ensure their kids can fulfil their talents and ambitions.’ Sir John’s speech comes at a time of deepening unease over the decline in social mobility that had, in the post-war years, let many children from working and lower-middle class backgrounds rise to the top. Sir John, who is the son of a circus performer and garden gnome salesman, left school with only three O-levels. On the lack of children from less affluent backgrounds in powerful positions, he said: ‘To me, from my background, I find that truly shocking.’ He blamed the Tony Blair and Gordon Brown Labour governments for leaving a ‘Victorian divide between stagnation and aspiration’. In October, in the wake of Labour leader Ed Miliband’s promise of a freeze on energy prices, Sir John called for a windfall tax on energy companies and spoke of ‘net-curtain poverty’.

Tory MP Nadine Dorries said the loss of selective schools was a major factor in denying progress to the underprivileged: ‘I came from a council estate where the way out was to get to a grammar school.’ Sajid Javid, the Tory Financial Secretary to the Treasury and the son of a bus driver, suggested the Government was working to address Sir John’s concerns. ‘The important thing is that this Government continues to put forward its policies on education, on welfare, on the economy,’ he added. John Major - Everything2.com John Major by fondue Fri Mar 01 2002 at 18:20:20 Cricket fan John Major was a long-serving member of Margaret Thatcher 's cabinet before stepping in to take over her role as Prime Minister as she was given the heave-ho in 1990 . Kenneth Clarke and Michael Heseltine had both been in the running to take over once the Iron Loony, er, Lady got her comeupance, but strangely this unassuming son of a trapeze artist managed to win out over them*.

Major was Prime Minister for just under eight years before the massive landslide victory of the Labour Party in the 1997 general election. During that time his government managed to raise taxes on 22 seperate occasions and fucked up the railways. After his long-overdue defeat, Major retired from politics and wrote his memoirs . John Major was generally depicted in the media as being incredibly dull ( Spitting Image gave him grey skin), and sometimes likening him to Major Major from Catch-22 , a model of mediocrity. He is married to Norma Major and his son James Major is married to glamour model Emma Noble . In 2002 it came to light that Major had had an affair with Edwina Currie (who just so happened to have once written a novel telling a remarkably similar story). So, maybe not so boring after all. * Albert Herring conjectures that he was picked as someone who would get beaten in the 1992 election so that the followers of Thatcher could reimpose their control on the party. It's a mystery how he managed to win, although the Labour party were in a mess at the time.

by nyte Thu May 16 2002 at 22:57:34 On March 29, 1943, John Major was born to Tom and Gwen Major in Wimbledon , England . His father was a trapeze artist and a failed garden gnome manufacturer . He spent the majority of his childhood in Brixton , a working-class suburb in south London . He went to school at the local Rutlish Grammar School , but dropped out at age 16 to work various manual labour jobs. At one point in this period he was unable to get a job as a bus conductor because of his poor math skills; at age 19 he spent 8 months on welfare . Finally in 1965, when he was 22, he landed a job at Standard Chartered Bank where he quickly rose through the ranks to become top aide to the chairman . While working for the bank, his interest in politics began to grow and in 1968 he ran for a seat on and was elected to the Lambeth borough council as a Tory . In 1979 he ran for Parliament from Huntingdonshire and entered the Commons , the same year that Margaret Thatcher became the Prime Minister .

In 1983, during a working dinner, Major challenged Thatcher on some policy issue s; Thatcher was duly impressed, and Major began his rise. Tue May 23 2006 at 6:35:58 British Prime Minister (1990-1997) Born 1943 We are concerned here with the John Major who was the hero of the Secret Diary of John Major, age 47¾ 1 , current President of Surrey County Cricket Club and former British Prime Minister and leader of the Conservative Party , rather than John Major, the sixteenth century Scottish historian who was the author of the Historia Majoris Britanniae or indeed the John Major who is a Conservative party councillor in Monmouthshire . Our John Major was born on the 29th March 1943 at the St Helier Hospital in Carshalton , the son of Tom Major-Ball , a former travelling showman who later set up in business as a producer of garden ornaments. The youngest of four children, he was christened John Roy Major, although his middle name was omitted from his birth certificate, and he himself abandoned its use in the early 1980s.

At the time of his birth his family were living in Worcester Park , a prosperous London suburb, but thanks to the failure of his father's business, the family were forced to downshift to a small flat on the Coldharbour Lane in Brixton in 1955. The two roomed flat in Brixton was located in a house owned by 'Uncle Tom' who, unbeknownst to Major at the time, was his older half-brother, a product of one of his wayward father's many adulterous liasions. His fellow tenants included a professional cat burglar and a Jamaican who was later jailed for stabbing a policeman. Major was to later write with enthusuasm regarding his acquaintance with the cat burglar's girlfriend who "used to walk around in her underwear". All of which proved something of an education for the young Major. As far as Major's formal education was concerned he attended the Rutlish Grammar School in Wimbledon , but displayed little in the way of academic aptitude and left school at sixteen in 1959 with only three O-levels to his name 2 . His subsequent career was a little patchy, with frequent periods of unemployment.

His application to become a bus conductor was rejected because he was too short 3 , he worked as an insurance brokerage clerk, occasionally helped his brother with making garden ornaments, before eventually finding permanent employment with the London Electricity Board in 1963. Soon afterwards he began studying for the examinations of the Institute of Bankers and in 1965 joined Standard Chartered Bank . He was posted to Nigeria in 1967, where he was almost killed in a car accident but escaped with the loss of a kneecap, but nevertheless enjoyed a successful career at the bank, rising to the position of personal assistant to the chairman Anthony Barber . As it happens Barber was the former Conservative Chancellor of the Exchequer and did much to encourage the political aspirations of the young Major. Political career Major joined the Brixton Young Conservatives in 1963 and is said to have spent his leisure hours standing atop his soap box in Brixton market disputing the issues of the day with whomsoever would listen.

It was however not until after his return to Britain from Nigeria that he somewhat unexpectedly found himself elected to Lambeth Borough Council in 1968, where he became Vice-Chairman and then Chairman of the Housing Committee but lost his council seat in 1971. This experience appears to have given him a taste for politics and he began looking around for a parliamentary seat. In 1974 he unsuccessfully contested both General Elections as the Conservative candidate for the safe Labour seat of St. Pancras North in London, but appears to have done well enough to impress the selection panel for the safe Conservative seat of Huntingdon and was adopted as their PPC in May 1976, after which he was returned to the House of Commons in the General Election of May 1979 which saw Margaret Thatcher swept into power for the first time. On the 13th June Major made his maiden speech in the Commons during the debate on the new government's first budget and within a year or two had made sufficient impression to be considered for office.

Having served his apprenticeship as a parliamentary private secretary to the Minister of State at the Home Office from 1981 to 1983, in January 1983 he became an assistant government whip and in October 1984 a Treasury whip. In 1985 he became under-secretary of state for social security and then from September 1986 Minister of State for social security, before finally joining the cabinet as Chief Secretary to the Treasury in 1987. This was the steady but unspectacular rise of one of the foot soldiers of the Thacherite revolution , who appeared to be competent without being brilliant. It was therefore came as a surprise to many when on the 24th July 1989 Thatcher appointed him Foreign Secretary as the replacement for Geoffrey Howe who was being moved out of harm's way to become Leader of the House of Commons and Deputy Prime Minister .

It appears that Major did not much want the job of Foreign Secretary, but as things turned out he was to spend only three months at the Foreign office, as the resignation of Nigel Lawson forced Thatcher into another cabinet reshuffle, as a result of which he became Lawson's successor as Chancellor of the Exchequer on the 26th October 1989. As Chancellor, Major was responsible for only the one budget, notable for the introduction of the Tax Exempt Special Savings Account or TESSA , although his most significant decision was his announcement on the 8th September 1990 that Sterling would enter the European Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM) with effect from the 5th October. By this time, continuing unrest in the country over the imposition of the Community Charge (otherwise known as the Poll Tax ) had led many within the Party to question Thatcher's leadership. Anthony Meyer's attempt to flush out serious opposition to Margaret Thatcher in November 1989 proved unsuccessful, but in the autumn of 1990 Michael Heseltine finally broke cover and decided to stand against her.

Although Thatcher defeated Heseltine, the margin of victory was regarded as unsufficient to allow her to continue as party leader and so she decided to withdraw from the contest (and therefore effectively resigned). Major, who had initially stood by Thatcher, now entered the contest together with Douglas Hurd . In the second ballot Major received 187 votes, against 131 for Heseltine and 56 for Hurd. This was two votes short of the majority needed for victory, but as both his rivals decided to concede defeat, on the 27th November 1990 Major became Leader of the Conservative Party and on the following day Thatcher formally tendered her resignation as Prime Minister. Major as Prime Minister 1990-1992 Major became Prime Minister during a period of crisis in the Middle East since Iraq had invaded and annexed its neighbour Kuwait on the 2nd August 1990. His first priority was therefore to steer Britain through the Gulf War which ran from the 17th January 1991 to the 28th February 1991.

In the midst of the conflict he narrowly escaped becoming a casualty when the Irish Republican Army succeeded in launching a number of mortar bombs at 10 Downing St on the 7th February 1991 whilst there was a Cabinet meeting was in progress. He was afterwards heavily involved in the negotiations regarding the transformation of the European Community into the European Union. Major eventually signed Britain up to the Treaty on European Union (commonly known as the Maastricht Treaty) in December 1991, although he managed to secure 'opt outs' on both the Single Currency and the so-called ' Social chapter '; a necessary compromise given the divisions that were beginning to appear within the Conservative Party regarding Europe's new direction. Domestically the greatest challenge he faced was the task of unravelling the whole poll tax mess, which was replaced with a modified version of the old rating system known as Council Tax , and was forced to raise the rate of VAT to 17.5% to fund the changeover. Major as Prime Minister 1992-1997 Compelled to hold an election in the spring of 1992, Major might well have argued that his period in government had not been without its successes.

He had negotiated the Maastricht Treaty, defused the poll tax crisis and been victorious in the Gulf War . Unfortunately the global economy had moved into recession and taken Britain with it; in the years 1991 and 1992 the country experienced the longest and deepest recession since the 1930s. Unemployment was rising again, and the expectation was that the Labour Party would win the next election and that Neil Kinnock would become the next Prime Minister of Britain. During the General Election campaign of April 1992 the Labour Party ran a 'sophisticated' campaign that culminated in a flashy pre-election rally held at Sheffield , whereas Major was to be found dusting off the soap box that he had first used at Brixton market, speaking up and down the country trying to establish himself as a 'man of the people'.

To everyone's surprise the Conservative Party won a 41.9% share of the vote and 336 seats, a majority of twenty-one, substantially down on the majorities achieved by Thatcher in 1983 and 1987, but nevertheless a working majority and a personal triumph for Major, whose own majority in Huntingdon of 36,230 was the largest majority recorded since the passing of the Reform Act 1832 . Unfortunately things soon began to go wrong for Major, specifically his decision as Chancellor to enter the ERM came back to haunt him, as Sterling came under increasing pressure in the currency markets. Having allowed public expenditure to rise in the period preceding the election, his government was now struggling to control the ballooning borrowing requirement. Sterling increasingly came to be seen as overvalued and the government was forced to commit ever larger sums in an ultimately futile attempt to maintain it within the prescribed limits. It all came to head on the 16th September 1992, a day thereafter known as Black Wednesday , when the United Kingdom was forced to abandon its membership of the ERM.

Major was later to admit that he came close to resigning office that day, but nevertheless decided to soldier on. Some say that he dithered for months before deciding to replace Norman Lamont as Chancellor with Kenneth Clarke . (Although it was rather difficult for Major to blame Lamont for the very policy which he had been responsible for adopting back in 1990.) As a consequences of the decision to abandon the ERM, interest rates were cut and sterling was allowed to find its own value on the currency markets. Strangely enough these were exactly the economic measures which led to a recovery in the economy, and has thus led the 16th September 1992 to be known as White Wednesday in some quarters. This was not however the end of Major's troubles as his government became increasingly to be dominated by the question of Europe. European Union The Maastricht Treaty was intended to be the first step on the road to the single European State, a concept which a number of Conservatives found great difficulty in accepting.

So rather than becoming a celebration of his historic election victory, the October 1992 Conservative Party Conference turned out to be one of the most tempestuous and divisive conferences in the party's history when both Margaret Thatcher and Norman Tebbit made plain their strong opposition to the Treaty. This of course simply encouraged others to voice their opposition, which included not only bankbench MPs but also a core of Eurosceptic ministers within Major's own cabinet. Major thus faced a struggle to win sufficient support to ensure parliamentary ratification of the Maastricht Treaty. The extent of his difficulties soon became public as a result of the celebrated 'bastards affair'. After only narrowly winning a vote in the Commons on the issue on the 23rd July 1993 and only then because he had announced it would be treated as a vote of confidence in his government, Major agreed to be interviewed by the major TV news services at Downing Street . He had just finished an interview with the political editor of ITN Michael Brunson . Whilst they were waiting for the BBC to finish setting up for their own interview, both he and Brunson had what both regarded as an 'off-the-record' conversation.

Both parties appear to have been unaware that technical staff from the BBC were monitoring their conversation and later distributed a bootlegged transcription of what was said. During the course of their conversation Brunson brought up the subject of the number of cabinet ministers whom it had rumoured had threatened resignation unless Major modified his line on the Maastricht Treaty. Asked why he simply hadn't sacked them, Major uttered the now immortal words "We don't want another three more of the bastards out there. What's Lyndon Johnson's maxim?" 'Johnson's maxim' was of course a reference to the former US President's views regarding the future employment of FBI director J. Edgar Hoover i.e. "it's probably better to have him inside the tent pissing out than outside pissing in", whilst there was much press interest in exactly which three politicians were the "bastards" referred to. The consensus view was that Michael Howard , Peter Lilley and Michael Portillo were the most likely candidates, although the name of John Redwood also featured from time to time.

Its doubtful whether anyone thought any the less of Major as a result of this little outburst, it did however highlight the deep divisions emerging in the Conservative Party between its Eurosceptic and Europhile factions and portrayed a cabinet divided within itself. Back to Basics Back to Basics , launched at the 1993 Conservative Party Conference was Major's big idea and his attempt to relaunch the party and renew its electoral appeal and most divert the public's attention away from Black Wednesday and his problems over Europe. At the conference he announced (to rapturous applause from the assembled delegates) that; "We must go back to basics. We want our children to be taught the best; our public services to give the best; our British industry to be the best.

And the Conservative Party will lead the country back to these basics right across the board: sound money; free trade; traditional teaching; respect for the family and the law." Major was simply explaining the philosophical underpinning for his approach to government, as well as making emotional appeal to traditional 'Britishness'; had he thought of it at the time, he might well have also mentioned "long shadows on cricket grounds, warm beer, invincible green suburbs, dog lovers and pools fillers." However the press decided that back to basics meant that Major was advocating some kind of return to 'traditional' moral values and so went out in search of Conservative politicians who were failing to live up to these perceived standards. Thus was born the British media's thirst for what became known as ' sleaze ', which led to a long series of gleefully recounted revelations regarding the sexual indiscretions of Tim Yeo , Stephen Norris et al, the unfortunate and bizarre death of Stephen Milligan , Cash for Questions , as well the affair of Tim Smith , Neil Hamilton and the phony pharoh of Knightsbridge. In the end Back to Basics, which must have seemed such a promising catch phrase, only served to make matters worse.

Europe also continued to be problem for Major, despite his success in ratifying of the Maastricht Treaty. Under pressure from the Europhile wing of the party to name the day on which Britain would commit itself to the Single Currency, Major adopted a " Wait and See " policy, hoping that events would soon make it clear which way he should jump. Naturally this wasn't enough to satisfy the Euroscpetics who clamored for a clear rejection of the whole idea. In November 1994 eight Conservative MPs made plain their opposition to the idea when they voted against increasing Britain’s budgetary contribution to the European Union , and were promptly deprived of the Conservative Whip, whilst a ninth Richard Body, voluntarily withdrew the Whip in sympathy. However this did nothing to quell the level of dissent in the party and if anything exacerbated it as the dismissed MPs were feted as martyrs to the cause of free speech and national freedom. With a party fundamentally divided on policy, its reputation damaged by Black Wednesday and tarnished by an apparently continuous series of press revelations, there were perpetual murmurings that Major should go. Increasingly annoyed and frustrated by such talk Major decided that it was time for his opponents to " Put up or shut up ".

Thus he decided to resign as party leader and submit himself to re-election. John Redwood , the Secretary of State for Wales emerged as his sole challenger. Major won by 218 votes to Redwood's 89 (with 22 abstentions and spoiled votes) but the result did little to improve matters. A series of fairly disastrous by-election losses eventually wore away his majority, but Major struggled on until the last possible moment hoping that either the rapidly improving economy would persuade the voters to give him another chance or that New Labour would trip over itself. In the end the 1997 General Election was not fought on any difference of policy between the two parties, but rather on the question of competence . With the Conservative Party's reputation in tatters as the result of Black Wednesday and a long series of sleaze scandals, New Labour romped home to victory. On the 1st May 1997 the Conservative Party suffered one of its greatest ever electoral defeats, being reduced to a mere 165 seats and a 30.7% share of the vote, whilst Labour secured 418 seats and a majority of 179.

In the aftermath of the defeat Major duly announced his resignation as party leader and was succeeded by William Hague in June 1997. After presiding over such an electoral disaster the Party appeared to be anxious to forget that he had ever existed. Major was very obviously snubbed by Hague at the 1997 Party Conference, and with the Party becoming increasingly dominated by Euroscpetic views, it came as no surprise when he announced his intention on the 13th March 2000 to stand down at the next election, and thus left the House of Commons at the 2001 General Election. Life after government

Question: The father of which ex prime minister of the UK was a trapeze artist and a garden gnome salesman?
Answer: John Major