The National Theatre wants you to care about John Major. They have turned the greyest man in modern British political history into theatrical fodder, framing his ascent from an obscure whip to Prime Minister as some kind of gritty social realism drama.
It is nothing of the sort.
The lazy consensus among cultural commentators is that putting Major on the stage is a bold act of political excavation. They call it a fascinating look at the underdog who beat the odds, a populist drama about a kid from Brixton making it to Downing Street through sheer bureaucratic endurance.
That narrative is a comforting fairy tale written by the establishment to validate itself.
I spent years watching political machinery grind people into dust from the inside, and I can tell you right now: John Major was never an underdog. He was the ultimate safety valve. The ruling class did not accidentally stumble into a John Major premiership because he handed out the right whips in the tea room. They installed him because the Conservative Party was tearing itself apart over Europe, Thatcher had left a crater where party unity used to live, and the system desperately needed a blank, unthreatening canvas to project stability onto.
When you strip away the theatrical varnish, Major is not a symbol of disruption. He is the patron saint of institutional self-preservation.
The Myth of the Accidental Leader
We love the narrative of the grey bureaucrat who wins through quiet competence. It makes mediocre people feel like their lack of flair is actually a hidden virtue.
The standard biographical take on Major goes like this: leave school at sixteen, work as a bus conductor, trade in Lambeth council flats, rise through the whips' office, and somehow outmaneuver seasoned heavyweights like Michael Heseltine and Douglas Hurd to take the crown in 1990.
It sounds like a script. That is precisely why the National Theatre bought it.
The flaw in this argument is that it treats politics as a meritocracy of personality. It assumes power flows to whoever works the hardest in the dark corridors of the House of Commons. Power does not flow that way. Power flows to whoever offends the fewest factions during a civil war.
Major was not chosen because he was brilliant. He was chosen because he was completely devoid of sharp edges. In 1990, the Tory party was bleeding from a leadership contest that destroyed Margaret Thatcher. Choosing a polarizing ideological crusader would have split the party in two. They needed someone who looked so unremarkable that nobody could muster the energy to hate him.
Imagine a board of directors watching a company implode because the CEO drove everyone off a cliff. They do not replace him with a visionary. They appoint the corporate compliance officer who knows where the staplers are kept, simply so everyone stops screaming for ten minutes.
That is your hero of the new theatrical season. A human placeholder.
The Rewriting of the Nineties
Let us look at the actual legacy of the Major years, free from the nostalgic haze that currently infects British cultural institutions.
We are told his era was defined by "Back to Basics"—a wholesome, if clumsy, attempt to return to traditional values. What actually happened? A parade of sleaze scandals that destroyed the moral authority of the government faster than any opposition campaign ever could. Cabinet ministers resigning over minor indiscretions, cash-for-questions, extramarital affairs splashed across the tabloids while the economy crashed out of the Exchange Rate Mechanism on Black Wednesday.
Black Wednesday alone wiped out billions of pounds of public wealth and shattered the Conservative Party’s reputation for economic competence for a generation. Yet, cultural memory treats Major as a tragic, well-meaning uncle who was just dealt a bad hand.
I have seen politicians blow millions of pounds of taxpayer money on vanity projects and walk away with peerages, but Major achieved something even more impressive: he managed to institutionalize mediocrity and turn incompetence into an aesthetic.
When the National Theatre frames his rise as a triumph, they are engaging in historical laundering. They are telling younger generations that if you just keep your head down, follow orders, and offend nobody, you too can preside over economic humiliation and party fracture, and fifty years later, actors will wear your NHS spectacles on the South Bank.
Why the Theatre Loves a Blank Slate
Why are playwrights and directors so obsessed with turning technocrats into protagonists?
Because writing about actual ideological conviction is difficult. It requires taking a stance. If you write a play about Thatcher, you have to deal with the ferocious hatred and deep adoration she still evokes. If you write a play about Tony Blair, you have to grapple with the shadow of illegal foreign wars.
Writing about John Major requires none of that moral heavy lifting. He is a cinematic blank page. You can project whatever mild melancholy or working-class grit you want onto him because the man himself left behind very few ideological footprints.
This is the core problem with contemporary political drama. It mistakes the study of administration for the study of power. Administration is boring. It is about filing cabinets, committee meetings, and parliamentary procedure. Drama requires conflict, stakes, and passion. When you make a play about a man whose primary political skill was not making waves, your dramatic conflict has to be manufactured out of thin air.
You end up with a two-hour meditation on the anxiety of being slightly out of your depth, starring an actor in a sensible grey suit looking worried near a prop water cooler.
The Real Lesson of Brixton to Downing Street
The unspoken subtext of the Major mythos is that social mobility in Britain used to work. The narrative insists that a boy from a modest background could rise to the highest office in the land, proving the system is fundamentally open.
This is a dangerous inversion of reality.
Major’s rise was the exception that proved the ironclad rule of British class structures. He succeeded by completely erasing any distinct cultural markers of his background, adopting the clipped, neutral diction of the civil service, and blending seamlessly into the Etonian wallpaper of the parliamentary Conservative Party. He did not challenge the club; he memorized its by-laws so thoroughly that they let him sit at the head of the table.
True social mobility does not look like a bus conductor learning how to appease the landed gentry. True social mobility looks like changing the rules of the game so that background stops mattering altogether. Major did not change the rules. He was the ultimate beneficiary of a system that rewarded conformity above all else.
When the curtain goes up on this new production, do not look for the triumph of the underdog. Look at the comfort it provides to an elite that loves nothing more than celebrating a working-class kid who spent his entire career ensuring the establishment remained completely undisturbed.
The stage lights go down. The audience applauds the gritty realism of a man wearing sensible shoes. And nothing changes.
