Forget the butler, this was a Major crime

The Strange Death of Tory England by Geoffrey Wheatcroft (Penguin, Pounds 20)

IT IS presented as a detective mystery that would test Monsieur Hercule Poirot himself: how did an otherwise seemingly healthy and successful entity - Tory England - suddenly meet its end on 1 May 1997? Did it jump or was it pushed?

Who had the opportunity, motive and method for such an audacious murder? Was it Black Wednesday, in the library with a revolver, or Sleaze Stories, in the billiard room with a rope, or Tory journalists in Canary Wharf with any number of knives?

Historian and journalist Geoffrey Wheatcroft, in the tradition of the best of Agatha Christie's whodunnits, reveals that there was more than one killer, each acting from different motives. But I am not convinced.

There might also be a case of mistaken identity here, since it wasn't Tory England that died in the 1997 general election but Tory Scotland and Tory Wales, where not a single Conservative MP was returned. Tory England is still relatively healthy, especially outside the major cities; it is Tory Britain that was done in.

Wheatcroft starts his story in October 1963, with the victory of Alec Home over Rab Butler after Harold Macmillan's resignation, and his retelling of the Tory story is accurate, intelligent and fair- minded up to the fall of Margaret Thatcher in November 1990. There are learned asides on newspaper ownership, the explosion of the government payroll vote, prime ministerial adultery and many other interesting and informative subjects.

However, after 1990 Wheatcroft allows his personal prejudices to intrude upon what until then has been a creditable work. If journalism is the first draft of history, books such as this represent the second draft, so it is not really acceptable for Wheatcroft to denounce the John Redwood supporters in the leadership bid of 1995 as simply "grotesque" and "gruesome" or to put High Tory dislike of John Major down to mere snobbery - Thatcher was scarcely born a toff, after all - or to describe the naming of Worsthorne College at the Sunday Telegraph as "fatuous", when it was a jokey but not inaccurate reference to the type of people who Peregrine Worsthorne invited to write for his comment section.

Wheatcroft attacks "young fogeys" such as Charles Moore (born 1956) and Simon Heffer (born 1960) with vigour, but he is only 60 himself and therefore not really old enough to make the absurdly old fogey remark that those writers "did not even remember what life had been like before the 1960s".

He denounces "a knot of Maggobites" (ie Maggie's Jacobites) at The Daily and Sunday Telegraph for not forgiving the Tory Party for its assassination of Mrs Thatcher, yet goes on to agree with them that Major simply did not have the necessary qualities of character and strength of personality to become prime minister.

As Wheatcroft states, Major's rise proves that Britain had become a society where top careers were "open to those with no obvious talents at all".

STEP forward the true assassin of the modern Tory party. Major might have graduated, as he himself pointed out, from the University of Life, but he did so with a poor Third. Unable to pass the test to become a bus conductor in Hackney, he went into local politics. As Wheatcroft says, Major "spoke like a man who had learned English from a crumbling British Council phrasebook".

Major's quietness seemed like a gift to the Tory party after what Wheatcroft calls "the noise and anger of Mrs Thatcher", but it only goes to show that one should beware of geeks bearing gifts.

Wheatcroft takes us through the disasters of Major's premiership - Back to Basics, Jeffrey Archer's peerage, the ERM debacle, Stephen Milligan's auto-asphyxiation, Maastricht, David Mellor's painfully protracted resignation, cash for questions, the Scott Inquiry, the Aitken trial, and several more - until the reader feels like a dog returning to vomit.

When Major was caught on tape telling Michael Brunson "I'm going to f***ing crucify the Right," he managed in one brief sentence to split an infinitive, utter a blasphemy and an obscenity, and make a promise he couldn't keep.

Of Major's three most memorable promises - to make Britain "at ease with itself ", "a classless society" and "at the heart of Europe" - none were kept. The British people saw through him when he refused to resign at the time of Black Wednesday, and spent five years not needing to revise their estimation.

Monsieur Poirot, your services are not required after all; Rt Hon John Major MP was found at the scene, his dabs all over the murder weapon.

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