ABSTRACT
Thatcher's fall ushered in a very different Prime Minister in John Major. In November 1990, after the arcane rituals of the Tory leadership election had been allowed to weave their web over the ambitions of Michael Heseltine, the country awoke to find their new Prime Minister the archetypal product of the ‘classless society’ he was to espouse. Major was born in 1943, the last British Prime Minister to be a child of the war generation. His school career was undistinguished, he did not attend university and was involuntarily unemployed for a while. After making a career in banking and local politics Major became MP for Huntingdon in 1979. His immediate task was in some senses straightforward and in others quite complex. He was not his own man in that he had fortuitously inherited power rather than winning it for himself. He wisely made his first Cabinet a mixture of friends and supporters, including his campaign organizer Norman Lamont, while retaining the Thatcherites in the shape of Kenneth Baker and Lord Waddington. The room for manoeuvre would remain limited until the older generation of politicians chose to resign or until Major won his own mandate at a general election.
