The Tories who witnessed the Major years still bear some scar tissue and David Cameron is no exception. The absence of triumphalism with which he greeted his and his party’s victory this month (and that has been sedulously maintained since) was conditioned by memories of 1992: another result that almost no one, apart from some who were fighting for it, expected. That victory turned to disaster in five months with the debacle of Black Wednesday. The ensuing battles over Britain’s place in Europe paved the way for the Blair landslide of 1997.
The great challenge for Cameron is to manage a majority even smaller than John Major’s – this year’s 12 against 21 in 1992 – while delivering a promised, inevitably divisive referendum over Britain’s membership of the EU. There will be no Black Wednesday in a few months to destabilise him and, as Cameron-sceptics such as Alan Duncan and David Davis have said, hardliners will be slow to undermine the Prime Minister precisely because so many remember 1992-97 and the locust years that followed.
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