How I fell out of a love after the honeymoon

WHAT FOLLOWS is an apathist's account of those aspects of Mr Major's premiership that have happened to swim into my ken. If you want expertise, read the other columns. On the other hand, my ignoramus's view will probably give you a better idea of how most people in this country actually think about politics than anything the experts will tell you. The editor may have some notion that I 'speak for women'. Forget it. I speak for apathy of either sex.

I had never noticed John Major until he became Prime Minister - his stints at the Foreign Office and the Treasury passed me by. The first impression was reassuring: he seemed mentally stable and of a phlegmatic rather than hysterical humour, which was a relief after his predecessor.

Many of my snobbier friends bewailed his appalling haircut and ghastly voice, but I liked his plain grey manner: I could never vote for a blow-dry like Michael Heseltine's. Even the foul rumour (quickly denied) that he tucked his shirt into his underpants was survivable. The only thing that worried me about his appearance was the long gap between his nose and upper lip - a trait I had hitherto associated with over-fastidious misogynist homosexuals such as Anthony Blunt - and his eerie resemblance to Ken Livingstone. His way of speaking could, I guessed, be explained by his being the child of elderly parents: it seemed to denote a courteous desire to be understood by the hard of hearing or slow of intellect. Everything about his background - the garden gnomes, the parental trapeze act - was appealing and the media debut of his brother Terry Major-Ball was a joy.

Those early days were quite a honeymoon. He seemed to have natural good manners and I liked his kindness to Baroness Thatcher in her downfall - I thought and still think that he extracted himself from her shadow just about as tactfully as anyone could have done. Cynics might ascribe this to political expediency, but his behaviour seemed to include genuine compassion. Compassion was, of course, a word that had been banned from Tory lips during the Thatcher years, but Major reintroduced it in an early speech and embodied it in one of his first acts as prime minister, when he agreed to pay compensation to the haemophiliac Aids victims.

His bearing throughout the Gulf war was level-headed and mercifully free of jingoism. He seemed decently reluctant to speak of 'our boys' and showed no inclination to leap aboard tanks or dress up in combat gear, as Heseltine assuredly would have done. And of course, one felt great waves of gratitude that he wasn't Mrs Thatcher - we didn't have to sit through any arias of 'Rejoice, rejoice'.

Major's early announcement that he wanted to make Britain a classless society also warmed my cockles . . . but now my memory is soured by disillusionment. His much-ballyhooed 'reform' of the honours system was pathetic when it eventually came, and last month's Budget, with its nasty little stomp-the-poor gimmicks such as VAT on domestic fuel, seemed like the worst sort of Thatcherism. What is really shameful, though, is that he has not made a single move to help the homeless. After two and a half years of non- action we must conclude that, like Thatcher, he actually enjoys the sight of children begging on the streets.

When he first came to power, I waited eagerly to see where he stood on the question of women. It didn't take long. In his very first Prime Minister's Question Time, talking about pensions, he used the phrase 'the individual and his family' deftly demonstrating that he not only didn't know of the existence of single mothers, but that he didn't consider women individuals anyway. Soon afterwards he made his revealing admission that his favourite character in literature was Lily Dale, the unspeakably drippy heroine of Trollope's The Small House at Allington.

Then there was Norma, the mouse that bored, yakking about her passion for ironing and how she couldn't wait to spend another day cleaning the oven. To make it worse, she used her two teenage children (somewhat older than mine) as an excuse to talk piously about her 'career' as a 'home- maker', confirming my suspicion that she was not just a doormat, but a sanctimonious, passive-aggressive doormat with a real animus against working women. This was followed by the hideous incident in September 1991 when, returning with her husband from a diplomatic mission to Camp David, Moscow and Peking, she forced him to stop the limo at a bathroom suppliers in Cambridge to look at bidets. It was all of a piece - and if Mr Major's notion of women was based on Norma, then no wonder he wasn't too keen to have them in his Cabinet.

His sudden announcement of Opportunity 2000 looked like exactly what it was - a sop to women voters on the eve of the election - and we haven't heard a peep about it ever since. (Just to show how influential it has been, British Gas last month published a full-page advertisement listing the names of all its branch managers, not one of whom is a woman.) I think we can forget any high hopes for women under Major's premiership.

The fiasco of his handling of the economy will be better dealt with elsewhere, but I thought his handling of a minor matter, the monarchy, showed the same characteristics: a slowness to act almost tantamount to paralysis, followed eventually by too little, too late. He should have persuaded the Queen to pay tax much sooner, instead of scrambling in panic after the Windsor fire, and he should have insisted on installing a Government press officer at the Palace to minimise damage arising from the war between the Waleses. Some - not all - of the public relations disaster of the Queen's annus horribilis could have been spared by more energetic Government intervention.

However, almost the blackest spot on Mr Major's character so far, in my view, was his friendship with David Mellor and his reluctance to sack him over the Mona Bauwens freebie. Major must have known about it long before the court case and he should have dumped Mellor forthwith. Loyalty to friends is all very well, but not if your friends are disastrously ill-chosen in the first place. The Mellor business really worried me. I think we undervalue political probity in this country because, so far, we have taken it for granted. But we could very easily become like Italy, with every MP running round waiting to have his palm greased. Corruption is like cancer - if you allow one cell of it to grow, the whole organism is doomed.

I don't doubt Major's own probity, but I hoped for more: I hoped that, along with his unfashionable haircut, he shared my own unfashionable addiction to 'Caesar's wife' standards in public life. Apparently not. His tolerance of Mellor's freebie, Norman Lamont's solicitor's bill and John Gummer's pond show that he is prepared to turn a blind eye while colleagues cash in. On this, as on so much else, he has proved disappointingly weak. But weakness still seems almost a virtue after the nightmare of Thatcher's strength - I will give him another year before I write him off.