Why should we listen to John Major?

Sir John Major has been sounding off. Again. The former Tory prime minister criticised his party’s Rwanda asylum plan as ‘un-Conservative and un-British’. In an interview with the BBC, Major said he thought Rishi Sunak’s plan to send migrants to Africa was ‘odious’:

‘I thought it was…if one dare say in a secular society, un-Christian, and unconscionable and I thought that this is really not the way to treat people.’

Major is the man – let it never be forgotten – who led the Tory party to a landslide defeat in 1997. The former prime minister also presided over Black Wednesday in 1992 – the exchange rate debacle that shattered the Tories’ reputation for economic credibility – and the era of Tory sleaze. Yet now Major has the gall to emerge from retirement to give the BBC’s Amol Rajan the benefit of his dubious wisdom in a wide ranging interview on where his old party has gone wrong, and how it should proceed in the future.

He says that he refrained from such critical commentary recently because he could not support much that the party was doing in office, and didn’t want to harm their electoral chances.