MINOR MAJOR :

The rebirth of John : Five years ago John Major's political career and confidence were in tatters. Now he's got a new lease of life - tanned, rich and respected as a globetrotting speaker and lobbyist. He's even been targeted as the man to run English cricket, his biggest passion. (Nicholas Watt, August 2, 2002, The Guardian)

An unassuming middle aged couple, who would once have melted into the crowds on a Saga holiday cruise, are cutting quite a dash in London and in the smarter political salons of Republican Washington. John and Norma Major have cast off their gloomy demeanour - the legacy of a seven-year nightmare in Downing Street -and are learning to live with permanent suntans in their new lives as globe-trotting millionaires.

Life could hardly be better for the man lampooned as Britain's greyest prime minister, who now earns up to £850,000 a year after his appointment to the boards of a series of blue-chip American companies. When he can bear to tear himself away from his beloved Oval cricket ground, the former Brixton boy is in huge demand across the Atlantic on the George Bush senior circuit as a board member of the American Carlyle Group, a $3.5bn defence contractor. And he is in demand here too - yesterday it emerged that he is the man the English Cricket Board wants to run the game in this country when Lord MacLaurin steps down. Friends say that Major, 59, is now so relaxed that he is ready to confront the demons which paralysed his premiership and soured his departure from office in 1997. At a recent party to launch a book by his former cabinet colleague Ian Lang, Major made a light-hearted speech in which he laughed off the Eurosceptic "whooping savages" who gave him sleepless nights in No 10. He even suggested in a recent Daily Telegraph article that he wished he had thrown the towel in altogether when he issued his "back me or sack me" challenge to his party in 1995. Such remarks are a far cry from Major's angry outburst of last August, at the height of the Tory leadership contest, when he gave vent to 10 years of pent-up frustration at Margaret Thatcher's disloyalty during his premiership. His broadside was a ham-fisted attempt to destroy Iain Duncan Smith's leadership campaign as a punishment for his role as a Thatcherite Maastricht rebel. A year on, Major is said to be "surprised and delighted" that Duncan Smith has moved on to his One Nation Tory territory.

John Major seems like a perfectly decent man, but his and the Tory Party's failure to understand that their future lies in opposition to the EU and in defense of English sovereignty has been an ongoing electoral disaster. Posted by Orrin Judd at August 3, 2002 1:09 PM