10 Downing St. to Be Home to a Horatio Alger

The election of John Major on Tuesday as the leader of the ruling Conservative Party puts a political Horatio Alger in No. 10 Downing St., the home and office of British prime ministers.

A high school dropout who drifted from job to job until he caught on as a bank trainee and rose to become chancellor of the exchequer in Margaret Thatcher’s Cabinet, Major personifies the Conservative Party as rebuilt by Thatcher to recognize talent and reward merit.

And the centerpiece of his five-day campaign to succeed Thatcher was his vision of a “classless society” to reform further a country where white collar still looks down upon blue collar, where Englishmen disdain immigrants, where ambition is often scorned as social climbing.

“I want a genuine classless society in which people can rise to whatever level their abilities take them regardless of their origins,” Major said last week, making his claim on the Conservative Party leadership and the premiership that comes with it.

Major, at 47 the youngest of Britain’s 18 prime ministers in this century, is himself a model of such a grit-and-guts rise out of poverty.

His election over two classic Tory politicians--one, Michael Heseltine, a millionaire who set himself the goal of Downing Street while at Oxford more than 35 years ago, the other, Douglas Hurd, a patrician graduate of Eton and Cambridge, the son and grandson of Conservative members of Parliament--symbolizes the shifts in British politics under Thatcher away from the decades of battles between the country’s moneyed governing class on the right and the rebellious working class on the left.

“He is the very essence of the classless meritocrat,” says Hugo Young, Thatcher’s biographer. “He went neither to public (private) school nor university and would thus personify and perhaps complete the routing from Tory power and influence of the old landed gentry and their heirs.”

But Major is also very gray--a pleasant man but nearly featureless as a politician. He is invariably compared by Britons to their neighborhood bank manager or perhaps the chairman of the local school committee.

“A politician without an ideology of his own who would rather be led by a strong prime minister and well-informed officials than lead himself,” two writers in the left-leaning Guardian said of Major this week. And a friendly journalist, writing in the Daily Mail, said, “Alas, for those who admire him as I do, he can be deeply exasperating.”

To that was added the more serious charge on Tuesday that he would be a Thatcher puppet after she was quoted as telling Conservative Party officials at a farewell that she would be “a very good back-seat driver.”

Major, already dubbed Thatcher’s “poodle” three years ago for his devotion to her policies, was clearly the prime minister’s preference as a successor. Political insiders said she had been grooming him for several years, valuing his sharp mind and talents for negotiation, and Major described himself unhesitatingly as a “Thatcherite.”

He has insisted, however, that he will be his own man. “I am not running as ‘Son of Thatcher,’ ” he told a television interviewer over the weekend. “I am running as myself, with my own priorities and my own program.”

Some policy differences did emerge in the brief campaign. Major stressed the need for stronger measures to control inflation; he called for a review, and implicitly a change, of the much-hated per-capita “poll tax” used to help finance local government services, and he put an unaccustomed emphasis on social services.

Major, in the view of many analysts here, had won his independence two months ago with the decision, reversing Thatcher policy, to join the European Community’s exchange rate mechanism, which links Europe’s principal currencies to one another and, above all, to the dominant German mark. He had also promoted a further, interim measure, although publicly rejected by Thatcher, to lay the basis for an eventual common European currency.

While supporting all the virtues, notably initiative and self-reliance, that have formed the core of Thatcherism for the past decade, Major is notably less doctrinaire.

“I am not ideologically pure in any way,” he said. He would continue the economic and social revolution begun by Thatcher, Major said, but the government would have to move ahead. “I am in the business of further change.”

“Classlessness” would be one of his major goals, Major said. Praising the contribution of blue-collar workers--he had been a construction worker himself--Major said that Britain must begin to treat all equally. “I hope the general atmosphere we create will remove those old social attitudes,” he said.

“We have nearly got the property-owning democracy (through the sale of government-owned housing to their occupants), but we have not yet got the capital-owning democracy,” Major said, referring to the extensive privatization of state-owned enterprises under Thatcher. “I don’t mean rich men with piles of money. I mean the ordinary ‘everyperson’ having his own savings for the independence and security it gives them.”

He also stressed in weekend interviews that he would be a collegial prime minister, not dominating the Cabinet as did Thatcher. “The Cabinet has to be the centerpiece of the government’s administration,” he said.

“As a chairman of Cabinet committees, he is very good at summing up the voices and coming down decisively for what he feels to be the common will,” a fellow minister, who was not among his backers, said of Major. “He does not exclude people. He is a good listener.”

But another parliamentary colleague added, “He is quiet but not soft. He definitely has a steel girder running up his backbone.”

Elected to Parliament in 1979 when the Conservatives won and Thatcher became prime minister, Major worked his way up the political and governmental hierarchy, holding seven jobs in the past nine years and winning promotions through his talents as a politician and administrator and devotion to Thatcherism.

Before becoming chancellor of the exchequer, or the country’s chief Treasury official, in October, 1989, he served briefly as foreign secretary; chief Treasury secretary, or principal budget officer; the undersecretary of state and then minister for social security; a whip in the House of Commons and a parliamentary secretary for the Home Office minister. He was the first member of Parliament from the “Class of ‘79” to be promoted to the Cabinet.

Still, critics said that Major was not experienced enough to become the party’s leader and prime minister, noting that his rivals for the post had at least 10 years more experience than he.

But no one faulted his performance in any of those posts. He even drew praise for the swift correction of a major mistake, in 1987, of not immediately providing the country’s old-age pensioners with additional money as a fuel subsidy during a bitter January cold spell.

Major had been an executive of Standard Chartered Bank, one of Britain’s largest, for 14 years before he entered national politics with the patronage of Tony Barber, a former chancellor who was then the bank’s chairman.

“Normally, I discourage people from entering politics if they have a young family and don’t have money,” Barber said on Tuesday. “John Major was different. He was too great a talent to ignore. We had to grab him for the Conservative Party.”

Major learned his politics as a Young Conservative on a soapbox in Brixton, a poor, racially mixed neighborhood in south London, where he took on the socialist Labor Party for its inept management of the area’s public housing projects. He won election to the local council primarily with the support of blacks; housing and racism were his issues as he established a reputation as a progressive.

He had grown up in the neighborhood after his father--once a trapeze artist with Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus, later a vaudeville performer and then a sculptor--went bankrupt manufacturing lawn ornaments. The family moved from comfortable, middle-class Wimbledon to Brixton, where they lived in a two-room apartment, cooked on a gas stove on the landing and shared a bathroom with other tenants.

Major left school at 16 to help support his family. He worked a variety of jobs, mostly in the construction industry, and once was rejected when he applied for a position as a bus conductor on grounds that he was weak in arithmetic. He was unemployed for eight months and collected welfare.

“It has been of immense value to me to have been on the other side of the fence and know what it is to face difficulties, and I don’t regret any of that,” Major said when asked whether he regretted not having gone to a university.

Thatcher described him this week as “a man of the people,” and Major has seemed truly happy being with them, even eating dinner regularly at a nearby McDonalds and other fast-food restaurants while foreign secretary and chancellor of the exchequer.

During Major’s years in Parliament, his wife, Norma, 45, and their children, Elizabeth, 19, and James, 16, have lived in Great Stukeley in his constituency, Huntingdon, in Cambridgeshire, north of London, and he has come home on weekends.

Norma Major, an expert cook and dressmaker, prefers a quiet family life and seemed almost frightened Tuesday as photographers and television crews thronged her and her husband. She has been active in local Huntingdon charities, and in 1987 she published a biography of opera singer Joan Sutherland.

“I am very fulfilled by domesticity, and I don’t feel ashamed or guilty about that,” she said--doing her ironing to an operatic aria--when her husband was named foreign secretary last year.

Even more quoted on Tuesday was her reply to another interviewer who asked in 1986 whether she thought her husband would ever become prime minister.

“No,” she said, “that kind of thing doesn’t happen to people like us.”

MAJOR’S POINT OF VIEW

A look at the views of John Major, new leader of Britain’s Conservative Party. He will succeed Margaret Thatcher as prime minister. ON THE PERSIAN GULF: “There will be no difference in policy,” Major said. “There is absolute unity that what has happened there is unforgivable and that it has to be reversed.”

ON THE ECONOMY: In the mold of Margaret Thatcher, Major is a rigorous free-marketeer who will follow her policies of selling nationalized industries and holding down government spending. As chancellor of the exchequer, he has kept interest rates high as part of the government’s program to combat inflation, currently at 10.9%. He has said he would make some tax cuts in lower brackets.

ON EUROPE: Major will show more enthusiasm for European monetary union than Thatcher did, but he remains cautious. He drafted a plan for a “parallel currency” that would be used in addition to the 12 national currencies. As chancellor, he took the pound into Europe’s exchange rate mechanism in October.

ON LOCAL TAXES: Major has pledged to review the unpopular per-capita “poll tax,” which has become a major political liability for the Conservative Party. But he has ruled out its abolition.