How handovers work: John Major's final hours in No10

5 min read03 July

For the first time since 1997, Britain is approaching an election where no one doubts that power is about to change hands. And by happy coincidence, last Christmas saw the release of a memo spelling out how Downing Street prepared for the moment last time around.

A feature of our democracy is the brutal swiftness with which a defeated leader is removed: John Major was on his way to resign to the Queen within hours of losing the election. But he wasn’t just leaving his office: he was leaving his home. Few of us could pack for a holiday in the time in which he and his wife Norma were supposed to empty their Downing Street flat.

“This was obviously delicate,” Major’s principal private secretary Alex Allan recalled in a 2000 note to Jeremy Heywood explaining how the couple had made sure they were ready, now available at the National Archives in Kew. He said he had sat down with them to discuss what would happen, after which Norma “discreetly moved quite a lot of clothes etc out of Downing Street during the weeks running up to the election”. She took the view, he said, that “if they had won, bringing clothes and other possessions back would have been a pleasure!”

He also secured a room in the Cabinet Office for them to store larger items so that they could be moved after the election: “They were (understandably) keen to avoid having a removal van seen in or near Downing Street.” This plan was thwarted on polling day “when I got a panicked call from the press office to say that there was a removal van in Downing Street.” It turned out that another group of civil servants had decided it would be a nice quiet day to shift furniture in Whitehall.

There were sensitivities to all this. “I had made discreet arrangements with the Majors over the inventory of the flat,” Allan wrote. “In particular what gifts were their personal property and what were government property.” However, he said, the Majors felt officials “were a bit insensitive” on the day after the election in their efforts to stop government property being removed.

This was, however, nothing to the difficulties that Allan faced with the other resident of Downing Street, Chancellor of the Exchequer Ken Clarke.

Some time before the election, Allan had found a Saturday when both the Majors and the Clarkes were away, and invited Jonathan Powell, Tony Blair’s chief of staff, to come and look round the building. Powell had discussed how his boss would want to arrange his office, and then taken a look at the two Downing Street flats. “That was when we decided the Number 10 flat was too small for the Blairs,” Allan wrote. Instead the family would take the Number 11 apartment, then occupied by the Clarkes.

This made it a Treasury matter, but though Allan had tried to get the Chancellor to engage with the question of his likely departure, it had been “without much success”. Clarke, he sighed, “was not the type to do this in advance.”

Worse than that, “it required some efforts immediately after the election to get him to move out quickly: he kept saying he was sure Tony Blair wouldn’t mind if he delayed this for a day or two.”

Aside from these hiccups, the day itself ran relatively smoothly. Major returned from his constituency to Downing Street at 7am, made a speech to staff at 10:30 am and then left. He had asked not to be clapped out of the building, because “he had felt it would make it harder for him to be in the right frame of mind when it came to addressing the press outside.” He left the building for the last time as prime minister at 11.30 am, made a brief statement, and headed for Buckingham Palace.

Behind him, officials swung into action. Offices were rearranged as agreed with Powell. Cleaners went into the Number 10 flat “and so far as possible the Number 11 flat”. The director of the Government Art Collection dashed in to remove a portrait of the cricketer WG Grace that had been loaned to Major from another collection. Labour supporters were allowed into the street to cheer the Blairs in, and issued by the party with union jacks, to give the TV pictures an air of national celebration. A buffet lunch was set out in the building for the Blairs and their staff.

Not everything went smoothly. “Do not assume that an incoming prime minister will have sorted out all the ministerial appointments in advance, or that people won’t be offered jobs and refuse them,” Allan advised. There was the question of what people would be paid. Salaries for advisers were “a nightmare” – they were supposed to be based on previous jobs, but many had taken low-paying roles inside Labour in the expectation that their earnings would be restored in government.

But perhaps the biggest immediate problem was food. “When employed by the Labour Party,” Allan recalled, “staff had got used to sending out for pizzas, sandwiches etc, and were horrified to discover how hard it was to do this in Number 10.”

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