The Reinvention of John Major

It's all about reinvention these days, isn't it?  No matter how incompetent, or how much of a bastard, a public figure has been, it seems that they can rehabilitate themselves with a few well-timed public utterances which seem to cast them in a new light.  Suddenly, all of their past misdemeanours are forgotten and they are once more accepted into the pantheon of celebrities.  The rehabilitation mechanism might be something as simple as an appearance on Have I Got New For You, where, through allowing yourself to be ridiculed in person, you show that you have a sense of humour and understand the mistakes you made, whilst simultaneously turning them into a harmless joke.  Just look at the Hamiltons: from corrupt and disgraced Tory MP and his pushy wife, to Z-list celebrity comedy couple earning a nice living appearing on reality TV programmes, via an appearance on Have I Got News For You. As for their misdemeanours - nobody seems to remember or care.  Most recently we've had that misogynist, bigoted bastard of a UKIP MEP on the programmes, showing us that he's really just a harmless buffoon.  I'm confident he'll be on Celebrity Big Brother soon, or maybe hosting his own travel show on a digital TV station, where he amusingly insults foreigners in their own countries.

All of which brings us, finally, to the inspiration for this post: John Major.  He's been in action a lot lately, reinventing himself as Tory elder statesman and standard bearer for the moderate tendency of the Conservative Party.  First of all, it was his intervention on the subject of energy prices, suggesting a windfall tax on energy companies.  Most recently, he's been telling us all how shocked he is at the disproportionate influence privately educated people have in the UK.  Aside from giving the impression that he must have been in a coma for the past few years to have only just noticed this, Major's pronouncements on education are clearly designed to position him as the 'man in touch' with Tory grassroots opinion, the champion of working and lower middle class Tories.  The problem for him is that he can't actually blame the real culprits for over-priced energy and reduced social mobility - his own party, which privatised energy companies without adequate regulation, and whose leadership is made up of a bunch of over-privileged toffs - he's, rather nonsensically, blaming the last Labour government. 

Now, Major is obviously at a stage in his life where the question of how people will remember him becoming increasingly important to him.  Hence these attempts at reinvention.  They are also carefully timed - his time as PM is now so far in the past that he hopes people don't remember his shambolic administration, which was so mired in incompetence and allegations of corruption that a Labour landslide in 1997 became inevitable.  Not that he has learned anything, though.  His intervention on the question of social mobility involved bewailing the demise of the grammar school, which supposedly gave opportunities for advancement to working class children.  Which is just more of the establishment view of an England that never existed, with warm beer and cricket matches on the village green, he unsuccessfully peddled during his time as PM.  It was bollocks then, it is still bollocks now.