John Major's dentist

34 years ago this week, a new PM was chosen thanks to bad teeth

This is one of my favourite chapters from my book, which I am sharing here in the hope that you will enjoy it so much that you order a dozen for Christmas.

Illustration by Morten Morland

‘If Halifax had had better teeth,’ a pupil declares in Alan Bennett’s The History Boys, ‘we might have lost the war.’ It’s a good line which captures perfectly the accidental nature of politics. The power of happenstance is strong. It’s just that, in this case, it’s wrong.

The reason why Lord Halifax didn’t replace Neville Chamberlain in 1940 is not because he had an appointment at the dentist’s the afternoon the decision was made. It was more to do with the fact that he was even less popular with Labour than the guy who got the job of leading the war coalition, Winston Churchill, who, it must be said, was rather less popular with his own colleagues on the Conservative benches. Even so, fifty years later the opposite of the Halifax teeth tale happened – it was a trip to the dentist that helped ease in a new prime minister. 

The toothache had been a problem for weeks. Late one night, during a visit to Washington DC, the chancellor had been rushed for emergency treatment on what turned out to be an abscess under a wisdom tooth. The pain was too much. So John Major finally agreed to have it operated on. The problem was, he was going under the dentist’s scalpel just as Margaret Thatcher was fighting for her political life. Whether this was terrible timing, or the perfect alibi, was not clear as he succumbed to the anaesthetist’s spell.

The seeds of Thatcher’s downfall had been sown by the Iron Lady herself: notably the deeply unpopular Poll Tax, which would force everyone to pay a flat rate for local services; and Europe, which had put an increasingly antagonistic and aloof prime minister at odds with her own colleagues. Major had been promoted twice in the space of months, first to replace Geoffrey Howe, who was demoted from foreign secretary to deputy PM in July 1989, and again ninety-four days later to chancellor when Nigel Lawson resigned. It fell to Major to sit silently next to Thatcher on Tuesday, 13 November 1990, while Howe delivered his devastating Commons speech in which he claimed Thatcher’s Brussels-bashing had deliberately undermined colleagues.

‘It is rather like sending your opening batsmen to the crease,’ Howe told a stunned Commons, ‘only for them to find, the moment the first balls are bowled, that their bats have been broken before the game by the team captain.’ He ended his speech with what was seen as a call to arms to colleagues: ‘The time has come for others to consider their own response to the tragic conflict of loyalties, with which I myself have wrestled for perhaps too long.’ 

Swashbuckling Michael Heseltine, who had quit Thatcher’s cabinet in 1986, took his cue, triggering a leadership election by declaring: ‘I am persuaded that I would now have a better prospect of leading the Conservatives to a fourth election victory.’

In retrospect he might have jumped the gun. Heseltine later told me that actually Howe may have had others in mind: ‘I thought when he said “it’s now up to others”, he was actually thinking about me. Some many years later, in talking to people who were very close to Geoffrey at the time, I was persuaded that he was not referring to me at all, he was referring to the cabinet.’ Too late, of course. The race was on. 

In the first ballot of Tory MPs on 20 November, Heseltine won 152 votes while Thatcher got 204, a clear majority but 4 votes short of the required margin of 15 per cent. Away at a summit in Paris sketching out a new world order after the Cold War, rather than being at home adding up the numbers, she had blown it. ‘I fight on; I fight to win,’ she declared. But she wouldn’t, she couldn’t. A rerun would be worse. The Iron Lady was corroding.

Major missed all this. Having issued a statement urging unity and praising her as ‘one of this country’s most successful peacetime Prime Ministers’, he left London. Three days before the vote, on the morning of Saturday, 17 November 1990, he had opened a fair for Mencap in his Huntingdon constituency, and was then driven by a friend to Herts and Essex Hospital in Bishop’s Stortford hoping that the wisdom tooth operation he had booked weeks earlier would finally sort out the pain in his mouth.

Thatcher supporters were suspicious of the timing. Why was the new-ish chancellor taking himself out of the action for up to a week just as the prime minister was so vulnerable? Cancel the operation and it would look like panic on behalf of a doomed PM, yet go ahead and raise suspicions of abandoning the boss in her darkest hour. Medical considerations overrode the political – the toothache was too great. 

In his autobiography Major recounts the story of waking from the general anaesthetic and being visited by his wife Norma and daughter Elizabeth, when bizarrely they began discussing a tilt at the top job while he was still coming round. ‘I remember nothing of the conversation but Elizabeth is certain we talked about whether or not Margaret would make it through the first ballot . . . She says I speculated about whether I should stand. If so, I suspect I was expecting a firm “no” in response. I didn’t get it. “Go for it” Elizabeth said. Norma agreed.’ 

So go for it he did, albeit he was in no position to tell anyone just yet. The sore, gaping hole where the abscess had been meant he could barely speak or eat.

His memoirs on this period are striking, if not a little alarming, because while weighing up the life-changing decision on whether to stand to run the country he seems to have been off his head on painkillers.

The drug-addled chancellor was ‘only half alert’ when Norma pointed out the gravity of the prospect of becoming PM. He was, he recalls, ‘in no state to talk to anyone for long’ as the phone rang off the hook with support for the idea. As the days passed and the crisis deepened, Major was still recuperating at The Finings, the 1930s family home in Great Stukeley near Huntingdon, which was surrounded by high trees, keeping back the press who were by now camped outside. Inside he was being ‘fed yet more painkillers by Norma’.

After the result was announced Thatcher called her heavily medicated minister and demanded his support by seconding her in the next round of voting. Maybe it was his drugs, maybe it was her directness, but a moment’s hesitation before he agreed soured relations between them. Major was still at home when Thatcher famously met her other ministers one by one in the cabinet room, and most said that while of course they personally remained loyal, it was everyone else who was turning against her. On Thursday, 22 November 1990 the triple election winner who reshaped British politics, and Britain itself, was humiliated into withdrawing from the leadership contest that she believed just days earlier she would easily win. 

Major finally left The Finings and drove to Westminster, getting snarled up in traffic and making it to his desk at the Treasury with only half an hour to spare before the midday deadline to get his nomination papers in. A clean skin, he could honestly say that all that ghastly business had played out while he had been recuperating, and now here he was ready to run, having obviously done nothing to encourage his own candidacy, what with his teeth.

His pitch was simple: he was not Heseltine, the self-styled Tarzan swinging through the Westminster jungle, who had committed the sin of moving against the prime minister. Nor was he Douglas Hurd, whose education at Eton seems to have counted more against him in the Conservative Party of the early 1990s than other Old Etonians found more than a quarter of a century later.

Not that Major was back on top form. Before each public appearance he was again dosed up on antibiotics and paracetamol. Derek Oakley, the husband of Major’s constituency secretary Barbara, trailed round after him forcing him to down more ‘pills and potions . . . even at one stage leaving them on my pillow, with a despairing note’. On the day of the vote, the impact of both the contest and the operation hit. Mid-afternoon Major took himself off to bed and woke only an hour before the result was announced.

Hurd secured 56 votes and Heseltine 131, with Major way ahead on 185. Not enough to win by the rulebook, but win he obviously had. The rivals soon withdrew. So just ten days after his wisdom tooth operation, John Major stood outside Number 10 as prime minister declaring, somewhat toothily, ‘there is a smile on the face of the party’ and boasting he would win the next election. Less than eighteen months later he did, securing a surprise victory over Neil Kinnock’s Labour with 14,093,007 votes, the most ever cast for any party in a UK general election. Five years of economic and political turmoil later, he would lead the Conservatives to a crushing defeat against Tony Blair’s New Labour.

In addition to the convenience of a dental appointment, one of the lasting consequences of this period is the idea that Heseltine lost because he had moved against Thatcher first – despite there being plenty of colleagues who agreed with him at the time. ‘He who wields the knife never wears the crown,’ Heseltine intoned with characteristic melodrama. In retrospect, this quote is not what it seems. ‘I thought I was quoting Shakespeare,’ says Heseltine. ‘Years later, someone said where did you get that quotation? I said, “Oh I think it’s Shakespeare, isn’t it?” And they came back to me and said there’s no quotation attributed to anybody except you. So I think that maybe it was me originally.’ 

Maybe it was being the sort of person who would quote himself believing it to be Shakespeare that counted against him. Maybe if Major had been in Westminster, not in a drug-induced fug at home, he too would have been tainted, as either the favoured heir or unfaithful assassin. Politics is a lot of maybes.

Recent political history is littered with ditherers who hoped to obtain the crown while hoping someone else would do the dirty work – just ask David Miliband or Penny Mordaunt. Yet Gordon Brown spent a decade doing a lot of wielding while Tony Blair was in Number 10 before taking the crown himself. Boris Johnson’s weapon was rarely sheathed. Even Rishi Sunak, who was initially punished by Tory members for knifing Johnson in the summer of 2022, got there in the end. And if Major had had better teeth, he might have lost the keys to Number 10.

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John Major’s dentist is one of the 50 places that changed British politics which feature in my book, Planes, Trains and Toilet Doors, which would make the perfect Christmas present for the sort of person in your life who is hard to buy for but is quite into politics. Buy early, buy often.