The new prime minister of Britain is a tall, gray, deliberate ex-banker with perhaps the most exotic background of any leader in modern British political history.
John Major, at 47, is the youngest British prime minister in 186 years. And in a country where many leaders boast a trace of blue blood and an Oxford- Cambridge educational history, Major is a school dropout who once worked as a laborer, lived on welfare and prefers such proletarian food as toast with bacon.
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Major made his political career in the Thatcher years and is widely seen as a cool, careful man more interested in economic theory than people. But his friends say his background actually left him sensitive-much more sensitive than Thatcher-to the problems of the poor.
Major was born in 1943 when his father, a onetime circus acrobat and vaudevillian, was 66 and nearly blind. Soon after, his father`s suburban business, making garden ornaments, collapsed, and the family moved to Brixton, one of London`s poorest neighborhoods. They lived in a two-bedroom apartment in a house occupied by people of many races and occupations, including a cat burglar.
Major hated school and quit at 16. He tried but failed to become a bus conductor, got a job as a laborer, lost that, and spent eight months unemployed.
Eventually he became a bank apprentice. He never looked back. Swept upward in the Standard Chartered Bank, he also became active in Conservative Party politics-a rare thing for a working-class boy, most of whom become Labor Party supporters.
He paid his dues in Tory politics by fighting two hopeless battles before being given a chance at a safer seat in Huntingdon, north of London, in 1979. That was the year of Thatcher`s first victory as prime minister, and he entered Parliament on that wave.
Within two years, Thatcher began appointing him to various government jobs, pushing him steadily on until, in a surprise move in July 1989, she made him foreign secretary. Two months later, Nigel Lawson quit as her chancellor of the exchequer and Major took his place.
Major is a conventionally handsome man with gray hair, a quiet voice and a determinedly unexciting manner. He is said to possess both charm and a firm moral sense, coupled with an instinct for the politically possible.
After the explosive and self-confident Thatcher, he should be quite a change. Asked in a recent interview how he saw himself, he stumbled unhappily: ”I have always shrunk from seeing myself as anything. If I spent time wondering what I was like, I wouldn`t be what I am. Self-knowledge is never great for anyone and I don`t think I do it very effectively.”
Major and his wife, Norma, have a son and a daughter.