Background and career
Sir John Major (born 29 March 1943) is a British statesman who served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom and Leader of the Conservative Party from 1990 to 1997. He previously held various Cabinet positions under Margaret Thatcher. Major was the Member of Parliament (MP) for Huntingdon, formerly Huntingdonshire, from 1979 to 2001. Since stepping down, Major has focused on writing and his business, sporting, and charity work, and commentating on political developments. Major left school before 16, worked as an insurance clerk, joined the Young Conservatives in 1959, and became a highly active member. He was elected to Lambeth London Borough Council in 1968 and, a decade later, to parliament as a Conservative MP at the 1979 general election. Major held junior government positions under Thatcher from 1984 to 1987, including parliamentary private secretary and assistant whip. He served as Chief Secretary to the Treasury from 1987 to 1989, Foreign Secretary in 1989, and Chancellor from 1989 to 1990. Following Thatcher's resignation in 1990, Major stood in the 1990 Conservative leadership election and emerged victorious, becoming prime minister. Major's more conciliatory political style contrasted with Thatcher's, though much of his policy agenda continued the Thatcherite programme. His government introduced the Citizen's Charter, replaced the poll tax with Council Tax, oversaw Britain's participation in the Gulf War, took charge of the UK's negotiations over the Maastricht Treaty, led the country during the early 1990s economic crisis, withdrew the pound from the European Exchange Rate Mechanism on Black Wednesday, launched the Back to Basics campaign, and oversaw the privatisation of the railways and coal industry. Two years into his premiership, Major led the Conservatives to a fourth consecutive electoral victory, winning more than 14 million votes, which remains the highest total won by a British political party. The struggle to ratify Maastricht deepened Conservative divisions over Europe, and Major's small and later shrinking Commons majority gave dissenting MPs substantial leverage over his government. With Irish taoiseach Albert Reynolds, Major issued the 1993 Downing Street Declaration, which helped establish the basis for the Northern Ireland peace process. In 1995, Major resigned as party leader amid internal divisions over UK membership of the EU, parliamentary scandals and questions over his economic credibility. Despite winning the 1995 leadership election, his government remained unpopular and lost its majority. The Labour Party pulled ahead of the Conservatives in every local election during Major's premiership, and its lead increased after Tony Blair became Labour leader in 1994. The Conservatives were defeated by Labour in a landslide in the 1997 general election, ending 18 years of Conservative government.
After Blair became prime minister, Major served as Leader of the Opposition during the leadership election to replace him, which was won by William Hague. Major remained in the House of Commons as a backbencher, regularly attending and contributing to debates, until he stood down at the 2001 election to focus on writing and his business, sporting and charity work. Major has maintained a low profile, occasionally making political interventions. He supported the unsuccessful Britain Stronger in Europe campaign for the UK to remain in the European Union, and has often criticised Brexit since the 2016 referendum. Major was appointed a Knight Companion of the Order of the Garter (KG) in 2005 for services to politics and charity, and became a member of the Order of the Companions of Honour in 1999 for his work on the Northern Ireland peace process. Major's premiership has generally ranked near the middle of later survey tables: in a 2021 survey of historians and political scientists it placed joint seventh among fourteen completed post-war premierships, while a public Ipsos survey that year placed Major sixth by the proportion saying he had done a good job. Since Thatcher's death in 2013, he has been the oldest living former British prime minister.
John Major was born on 29 March 1943 at St Helier Hospital and Queen Mary's Hospital for Children in St Helier, Surrey, to Gwen Major (née Coates, 1905–1970) and former music hall performer Tom Major-Ball (1879–1962), who was 63 years old when Major was born. He was christened "John Roy Major" but only "John Major" was recorded on his birth certificate; he used his middle name until the early 1980s. His birth had been a difficult one, with his mother suffering from pleurisy and pneumonia and John requiring several blood transfusions due to an infection that caused permanent scarring to his ankles. The Major family—including John, his parents, and his two older siblings Terry and Pat—lived at 260 Longfellow Road, Worcester Park, Surrey, a middle-class area where Major's father ran a garden ornaments business and his mother worked in a local library and as a part-time dance teacher. John Major later described the family's circumstances at this time as being "comfortable but not well off". Following a German V-1 flying bomb attack in the area in 1944 which killed several people, the Majors moved to the village of Saham Toney, Norfolk, for the remainder of the war. John began attending primary school at Cheam Common School from 1948. His childhood was generally happy, and he enjoyed reading, sports (especially cricket and football) and keeping pets, such as his rabbits. In 1954 John passed the 11+ exam, enabling him to go to Rutlish School, a grammar school in Merton Park, though, to John's chagrin, his father insisted that he register as 'John Major-Ball'. The family's fortunes took a turn for the worse, with his father's health deteriorating and the business in severe financial difficulties. A recalled business loan which the family were unable to repay forced Tom Major to sell the house in Worcester Park in May 1955, with the family moving to a cramped, rented top-floor flat at 144 Coldharbour Lane, Brixton. With his parents distracted by their reduced circumstances, John's difficulties at Rutlish went unnoticed. Acutely conscious of his straitened circumstances in relation to the other pupils, Major was something of a loner and consistently under-performed except in sports, especially cricket, coming to see the school as "a penance to be endured". Major left school just before his 16th birthday in 1959 with just three O-level passes in History, English Language and English Literature, to his parents' disappointment. Major's interest in politics stems from this period, and he avidly kept up with current affairs by reading papers on his commutes from Brixton to Wimbledon. In 1956 Major met local MP Marcus Lipton at a local church fair and was invited to watch his first debate in the House of Commons, where Harold Macmillan presented his only Budget as Chancellor of the Exchequer. Major has attributed his political ambitions to this event. Major returned to Brixton during his premiership for the film The Journey, which was made as a party political broadcast during the 1992 general election.
Major's first job was as a clerk in the London-based insurance brokerage firm Price Forbes in 1959, but he found the job dull and offering no prospects and eventually quit. Major began working with his brother Terry at the garden ornaments business; this had been sold in 1959, enabling the family to move to a larger residence at 80 Burton Road, Brixton. Major's father died on 27 March 1962. John left the ornaments business the following year to care for his ill mother, though when she got better he was unable to find a new job and was unemployed for much of the latter half of 1962, a situation he says was "degrading". After Major became prime minister, it was misreported that his failure to get a job as a bus conductor resulted from his failing to pass a maths test; he had in fact passed all of the necessary tests but had been passed over owing to his height. In the meantime he studied for a qualification in banking via a correspondence course. Eventually in December 1962 he found a job working at the London Electricity Board (LEB) in Elephant and Castle. In 1959, Major had joined the Young Conservatives in Brixton. He soon became a highly active member; this helped increase his confidence following the failure of his school days. Encouraged by fellow Conservative Derek Stone, he started giving speeches on a soap-box in Brixton Market. According to his biographer Anthony Seldon, Major brought "youthful exuberance" to the Tories in Brixton, but was sometimes in trouble with the professional agent Marion Standing. At the age of 21, Major was a candidate to become a councillor for Larkhall ward at the 1964 Lambeth London Borough Council election, but lost to Labour. He also assisted local Conservative candidates Kenneth Payne in the 1964 general election and Piers Dixon in the 1966 general election. Another formative influence on Major in this period was Jean Kierans, a divorcée 13 years his elder with two children who lived opposite the family on Burton Road, who became his mentor and lover. Seldon writes, "She ... made Major smarten his appearance, groomed him politically, and made him more ambitious and worldly." Major later moved in with Kierans when his family left Burton Road in 1965; their relationship lasted from 1963 to sometime after 1968.
In May 1965, Major left the LEB and took up a post at District Bank, though he soon left this to join Standard Bank the following year, largely because the latter offered the chance to work abroad. In December 1966 he was sent on a long secondment to Jos, Nigeria, which he enjoyed immensely, though he was put off by the casual racism of some of the ex-pat workers there. In May 1967 he was involved in a serious car crash in which he broke a leg and had to be flown home. Leaving hospital, he split his time between Jean Kierans' house and a small rented flat in Mayfair, working at Standard Bank's London office and resuming his banking diploma and activities with the Young Conservatives in his spare time. In the 1968 Lambeth London Borough Council election, Major stood again as a councillor, this time for Ferndale ward. Though a Labour stronghold, the Conservatives received a huge boost following Enoch Powell's anti-immigration 'Rivers of Blood speech' in April 1968 and Major won, despite strongly disapproving of Powell's views. Major took a major interest in housing matters, with Lambeth notorious for overcrowding and poor-quality rented accommodation. In February 1970 Major became Chairman of the Housing Committee, being responsible for overseeing the building of several large council estates. He also promoted more openness at the council, initiating a series of public meetings with local residents. Major also undertook fact-finding trips to the Netherlands, Finland and the Soviet Union. Despite the Lambeth housing team being well-regarded nationally, Major lost his seat in the 1971 Lambeth London Borough Council election. In April 1970, Major met Norma Johnson at a Conservative Party event in Brixton, and the two became engaged shortly thereafter, marrying at St Matthew's Church in Brixton on 3 October 1970. John's mother died shortly before the marriage, in September, at the age of 65. John and Norma moved into a flat at Primrose Court, Streatham, which John had bought in 1969, and had their first child, Elizabeth, in November 1971. In 1974 the couple moved to a larger residence at West Oak, Beckenham, and had a second child, James, in January 1975. Meanwhile, Major continued to work at Standard Bank (renamed Standard Chartered from 1975), having completed his banking diploma in 1972. Major was promoted to head of the PR department in August 1976, and his duties necessitated the occasional foreign trip to East Asia. Despite his setback at the 1971 Lambeth Council election, Major continued to nurse political ambitions, and with help from friends in the Conservative Party, managed to get onto the Conservative Central Office's list of potential MP candidates. Major was selected as the Conservative candidate for the Labour-dominated St Pancras North constituency, fighting both the February and October 1974 general elections, losing heavily both times to Labour's Albert Stallard. Major then attempted to get selected as a candidate for a more promising seat and, despite numerous attempts, was unsuccessful until December 1976. Growing increasingly frustrated, Major resolved to make one last attempt, applying for selection to the safe Conservative seat of Huntingdonshire and finally he succeeded. Major was in some ways an odd choice, being a born-and-bred Londoner in a largely rural constituency still home to many landed families; however, he was seen as being the most likely to win over the increasingly large numbers of upwardly mobile London overspill families living in the area, and local MP David Renton helped to familiarise him with the area. In 1977, the Major family purchased a house at De Vere Close in the village of Hemingford Grey. Major took on a less demanding job at Standard Chartered and started working part-time in 1978 so that he could devote more time to his constituency duties.
In the 1979 general election, which brought the Conservatives led by Margaret Thatcher to power, Major won the Huntingdon seat by a large margin. He made his maiden speech in the House of Commons on 13 June 1979, voicing his support for the government's budget. Major assiduously courted contacts at all levels of the party in this period, joining the informal 'Guy Fawkes club' of Conservative MPs and attending various committees. He became Secretary of the Environment Committee and also assisted with work on the Housing Act 1980, which allowed council house tenants the Right to Buy their homes. At this time Major lived in De Vere Close, Hemingford Grey.
Sources
Net-worth figure: Celebrity Net Worth (October 2026), in USD. Biography and career facts: the person's Wikipedia article and linked reporting. Snapshot date for all StarWorth figures: 28 October 2026.
