“Trouble ahead!” has emerged as John Major’s favourite handwritten response to the contents of the Downing Street files that filled his red box every night as prime minister.
While Margaret Thatcher regularly responded to proposals with “No, no , no!” underlined up to three times, Major’s responses were somewhat calmer.
On a note proposing an elaborate menu of scampi provencale and glazed courgettes during a flight to Zimbabwe, he simply wrote: “As long as I have soup and cheese and biscuits I will be all right.” As for the proposed itinerary: “Yes please. Plenty of travel pills.”
On a memo informing him of developments in the 1992 summer coup against Russia’s Boris Yeltsin, he noted: “Illegal coup. Calm. Put the clock back.” A briefing about nuclear weapons in the disintegrating Soviet Union was met with “Oh dear.”
To one of his private office civil servants who was trying to rush him into letting the LSE take over the old London County Hall: “Barry. Hang on! Treasury aren’t signed up and the chancellor won’t want a meeting today.”
A speech by the then home secretary, Ken Clarke, to the Police Federation on police pay provoked Major to reply: “It reads like a chocolate-coated poison pill!”
The Man Who Never Was
Ewen Montagu, the British naval intelligence officer who devised the Operation Mincemeat deception plan against the Germans, made a 1984 plea for the fifth volume of the official history of British Intelligence in the second world war to be published.
Margaret Thatcher had blocked publication of Prof Michael Howard’s book detailing the deception work of Britain’s secret “double cross committee” on the grounds that “too much has been said and written about intelligence and less should be said”.
Montagu, whose own 1953 book, The Man Who Never Was, detailed the deception plan that involved a dead British soldier washing up on the coast of Spain with fictitious plans to invade Sardinia in a briefcase, appealed to the cabinet secretary for publication of the official history, saying that the doctors had given him only a very few months to live.
“I was astounded to learn that the publication was officially banned some years ago, since when there has been no move. This must be an oversight.”
He told the cabinet secretary in December 1984 that having spent more than five years of his life in attempting to deceive the enemy, he “was intensely keen to know what the official verdict is”.
Thatcher refused to lift the ban on publication but she did permit Montagu to be shown Howard’s typescript on the condition that he read it, returned it and did not show it to anyone else.
Montagu died, aged 84, on 19 July 1985.
• Corrected 29 December 2017: The location where the corpse, dressed as a British soldier, washed ashore was on the coast of Spain, not Portugal.
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