When Margaret Thatcher was forced to resign as leader of the parliamentary Conservative Party, she was succeeded by John Major, a relatively unknown figure who had entered the Cabinet only three years before as Chief Secretary to the Treasury.In 1992, Major called a general election, which the Conservative Party won with over 14 million votes, the largest number of votes ever cast for a single political party in a British election. After Thatcher's forceful and charismatic leadership, John Major's extremely bland public persona may well have been an asset.
The British electoral system, however, meant that the unprecedentedly large number of votes did not convert into a strong majority in the House of Commons. Thatcher in 1983, and Blair in 1997, had "landslide" victories with a smaller number of votes cast in their favour, the issue not being number of votes, or even the proportion of the national vote, but the number of constituencies in which a party's candidate gets more votes than any of the competing candidates. In 1983 the Conservatives, under Thatcher, won a sound majority in the Commons (397 of the 646 seats) on 42.4% of the national vote; in 1997 Labour, under Blair, won 418 seats on 43.2% of the national vote. In 1992, on a comparably strong 41.9% of the national vote, Major won only 336 seats - a slender majority, especially as a strong minority of Conservative MPs continued to support populist "Eurosceptic" positions, and were willing to go against their party leadership on important votes on European affairs. This put Major's government in a weak position to direct policy.
The pattern of voting in the 1992 general election also showed a country divided: Major's party won a lot of its votes in the South-East of England, where it would have done well anyway. In Scotland, Wales, and most of the North of England the Conservatives did very badly, but were returned to power in Westminster regardless. This could give people the feeling that they were being governed not by the United Kingdom's vote, but by the South of England's vote. In the 1955 general election, the Conservatives had got 50.4% of the vote in England and 50.1% in Scotland. The Conservative share of the Scottish vote had been falling ever since, and in the 1992 election they got 46.7% of the vote in England, and 25.6% in Scotland. This disparity bred discontent with rule from Westminster, and lay behind the decision of the Blair government to "devolve" powers to a Scottish Parliament after 1997.
