After years of deep-rooted racism, it took the murder of Stephen Lawrence and the inquiry into his death to reach the understanding that something had to change. AS PART of a programme initiated at seven sites across the capital, the Metropolitan Police has sought to establish ways to improve the operation of the stop-and-search policy, removing potential bias Not a day too soon. And the man most obviously waiting in the wings to assume the leadership would not be Michael Portillo, one of the very few now in the highest levels of the Tory party who tried to persuade her to stay – and did not lift a finger to help John Major’s leadership bid.The truth is that the Tory party will not experience catharsis until it is led either by someone who was brave, and consequently guilt free, enough to charge her frontally – such as Kenneth Clarke – or has no blood on his hands, such as Portillo For Tories, the day can surely not come soon enough.. For the biggest unanswered question about Major’s premiership is whether it foundered because she and her supporters were so awful or because he was too weak to overcome them.But sorry, Mr Maude, the history still counts.

Didn’t appeasement in 1938 and 1939 still matter in the Tory leadership struggles of 1955 and 1963? And if it didn’t still count, the Shadow Chancellor would not fear, as he did yesterday, to take sides between the two ex-prime ministers. This itself suggests a further complication in the Major-Thatcher relationship; she wasn’t necessarily cleverer than he was, but despite her carefully cultivated provincialism, she was a Somerville girl, with huge intellectual self- confidence.With any luck, his book will shed some light on the crucial period between 1990 and 1992 when the Major premiership, according to all outward signs, was going extremely well, but when he was already paranoid about the long shadow cast by his predecessor’s acolytes. Instead, they followed late Thatcher by turning against everything which smacked of trying to improve relations with the EU. And, in the end, they did for him as the pro-European Geoffrey Howe and Michael Heseltine had done for her.According to those who have read parts of it, Major’s book is “more balanced” than the leaked snippets from the television interviews suggest. He is expected, for example, to be fairer about Norman Lamont than Lamont will be about him. It is reportedly a moving account of how he came from a humble family background to the highest office in the land.

When Major bravely tried to put Britain “at the heart of Europe” they instantly forgot that, up to the mid-1980s, she had been, in her own way, as communautaire as Heath, introducing in the Single European Act, the biggest surrender of sovereignty before or since. John Major, nursing a timely toothache at Huntingdon at the time of the November 1990 trauma, had been the beneficiary of their treachery, and was in turn punished by the traitors.The weapon they used, above all others, was Europe. But you don’t have to be Sigmund Freud to recognise that once she turned against him, the guilty Tory right were bound to follow. Of course, the worst moment of Major’s term, Black Wednesday, was a disaster which was not of her making And of course she was a bigger figure than he was.

And what made it still more complicated was that they voted for Major because she told them to. Some were enraged by her political assassination; the rest were traumatised by the guilt of having themselves played a part in the assasination to save, as they saw it at the time, their own parliamentary seats. (This is a little like, some think, the way that it might have been less traumatic for Gordon Brown if he had actually been beaten by Tony Blair for the Labour leadership, instead of standing down in his favour.)But, in any case, a large majority of John Major’s tormentors, who made his party unleadable, were precisely those who wished she had never been ousted in 1990. It might have been better if she had gone to a second ballot and been beaten fair and square by Michael Heseltine, instead of being persuaded by the Cabinet, invited to her presence by the silkily enigmatic Lord Wakeham, to stand down to avoid such a defeat.

And Thatcher’s fall in 1990 was a regicide with complications, not least the fact that it wasn’t a clean fight. But on the whole he didn’t, to use that phrase beloved of Tory grandees, “have the chaps”. Certainly, by the time she had asserted control of her Cabinet after the 1981 budget, there was no squadron of Heathian Jacobites secretly swearing allegiance to their departed leader.In Margaret Thatcher’s case the circumstances were different. Major apparently describes her fall as marking the beginning of a Greek tragedy. The more appropriate reference might be Shakespeare’s histories, with all that imagery about the brutal yanking up of roots with which the poet described the regicides which so preoccupied him. But he has never let so much as a hint of a reservation pass his lips in public.But in fact Margaret Thatcher’s baleful, or, as Major calls it in one of his forthcoming BBC interviews, “intolerable” presence in the shadows throughout Major’s regime was exceptional even by Tory standards Ted Heath made no secret of his contempt for his successor. Kinnock was, for example, profoundly antipathetic to one of the most controversial policies pursued by both John Smith and Tony Blair – devolution in Wales and Scotland.