Things Can Really Get Worse

Meadow, what the hell is this?

It's a timeline.

But you always start timelines and never finish them. You've literally never finished a timeline.

I know.

So why are you starting another one, you tit?

Because this is a timeline-in-a-day.

...

...

What the blazes is a timeline-in-a-day?

It's a short, self-contained timeline that gets published, in its entirety, in one day.

How are you going to manage that? You can barely write a story about Ted Short going to the toilet without it taking 36 months.

It's obviously going to be shorter and less detailed than most timelines. This one, for example, started life as a PM list and still is, essentially, a list of Prime Ministers. It's just got very long descriptions of what happened in their governments, so it's been turned into the first timeline-in-a-day (TLIAD).

...the first timeline-in-a-day? And stop trying to make new acronyms catch on.

Yes, I intend to do more of these, for the reason you stated above - I come up with TL ideas a lot but never finish them. So I'm starting a season of short TLIADs, to be written as and when I get a day or so to put them together.

...that actually sounds like it might be a good idea.

Why thank you, gentle strawman. Now, if you'll permit me to begin?

Go on then. Show us what you got. But if this isn't finished within 24 hours, there will be hell to pay.

Understood. Can you put those down now, please?

Oh, yes, I'm sorry, I didn't realise these were your housekeys.

Thank you. Now, without further ado...​

No-one quite knows what happened on 1 May 1997. The British public went to the polls en masse, took a look at the ballot and, so it seems, decided it was better the devil they knew than the devil they didn't. The unexpected acceleration of the Northern Ireland peace process had led to the 1997 Maunday Thursday agreement, and this had allowed John Major to appear more statesmanlike than he had in years. Or perhaps it was Blair's triumphalist television appearance the night before the election. Maybe those 'New Labour, New Danger' posters didn't backfire after all - the public just said they didn't like them out of embarrassment. Or maybe it was just the heavy rain that day. Somehow, incredibly, John Major and his soapbox had done it again. As he crawled back into Downing Street with a majority of 4, he couldn't quite believe it himself.

​

After 9 years in office, and the last four in an exhausting, uphill struggle with a divided party and a tiny-to-non-existent majority, John Major had simply had enough. Staking his personal future on the passage of the National Health Service Assets (Sale) Act 1999, when it fell he went gently into that good night with a short but dignified speech from the steps of parliament, not Downing Street.

The Conservative Party looked desperately for his successor. Ken Clarke remained far and away the most popular figure in the government with the public, but his Europhilia looked as though it made him untenable to lead the Conservative Party that had nearly come to blows over the Treaty of Maastricht. In the event, the search for a unifying 'stop Clarke' candidate failed. The geeky and unpopular Culture Minister William Hague was proposed as a Warren G. Harding-esque candidate when Michael Howard and Peter Lilley refused to give way to each other, but the right were clutching at straws. Michael Portillo's refusal to stand was believed to be based on a desire to lead the party once it lost the next election, not while it was in governmental freefall. He would admit this ten years later in his memoirs, and the careerism of it all was obvious enough to Tory MPs at the time to end his leadership hopes forever.

The election was effectively sewn up when John Redwood, himself approached as a 'stop Clarke' candidate, endorsed the Chancellor for the Leadership. Some made unkind comparisons to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, as the endorsement of a hardline Eurosceptic could only be a matter of politics, but it didn't seem to matter in the event. Clarke won the election handily, and while plenty of quiet aneurysms were neared in the smoking room of the Members' Bar, the Tory Party, for now, remained intact.

Clarke took over a government with a majority of 2 (thanks to a death and an elevation to the Lords) but an economy that, all had to admit, was booming. Dignified but with the common touch and on the side of the growing liberal consensus on social issues that the Tories had tried to remain above, the fat man in Hush Puppies seemed to be the Tories' best hope as the millennium loomed.

​

Within six months of Clarke taking office, the Tory majority was gone. A week of intense negotiations saw Tony Blair cry from the rooftops for a general election. Blair’s own position had slowly but surely improved since the bloody, three-month 'battle for the soul of the party' leadership contest between himself and former Shadow Chancellor Gordon Brown in 1997. After five days behind locked doors in Downing Street, Clarke emerged, smiling wearily, to a lectern in front of Downing Street. David Trimble was at his side.

The UUP deal (dubbed the 'Tory-Trimble Pact') gave the government an effective majority of 22, doing wonders for morale and ending the whispering campaign against Clarke for the time being, helped of course by some major concessions to the right. Desperate to continue the work the government had started, John Redwood relished his new post as Health Secretary, even if it did have less to look after than it used to. Michael Howard embarked on a disastrous series of PPBs entitled 'The Home Secretary Explains', laying out how from 1 January 2001, ID cards would be compulsory for all British citizens and residents. The NUT narrowly avoided calling an immediate and indefinite strike when Ann Widdecombe became Education Secretary, and the occupation of Parliament Square by OutRage began shortly afterwards. Peter Tatchell’s speech on the third night of their encampment (called an ENCAMPMENT by the Sun) was captured by the world press. His impassioned attack on Section 28, call for sexuality discrimination laws and demand for equalisation of the age of consent has gone down in history and is generally found in textbooks recounting ‘the Blue Nineties’.

But Ken Clarke, for now, was safe. It was he personally who had secured Trimble’s support, in exchange for a friendly seat at the table at the next negotiations for the devolved budget at Stormont. This, and his amiable manner to both public and party – he knew he was fighting to keep the party together and so held his rapier tongue a little more than he used to when talking with Tory MPs he disagreed with – meant he was fulfilling all expectations as the statesman ready to lead Britain into the new millennium.

Speaking of which, the Millennium Yacht was a surprising hit, for about two weeks. Complaints of seasickness from about half of all visitors, combined with the huge overspend that had gone on under Major and Clarke, meant the project was almost sunk (not literally). Only deference to Her Majesty (whose Yacht it was to become on 31st December 2000) kept Labour from truly going for the jugular, and after partially beaching the so-called ‘superyacht’ (which held only a fraction of the planned ‘Festival of Britain’-style attractions) Richard Branson’s Virgin company, in charge of the project since mid-1999, were able to carry on, cap'n, without much further trouble.

​