So here he is, ten years out of office, back in his native Lambeth where his political journey started more than 40 years ago. And there does seem to be something of a rather obvious metaphor here, not just about tides and affairs and men, or how much he has gone up in the world since he first stood, at 21, on a soapbox in Brixton Market, but about how he has risen above all that he used to know and deal with: the machinery of government and State and church, the panoply of powers he once wielded, the grubby business of politics and yes, how to handle the media. A decade has passed and he has done this largely by steering clear of comment of any kind. He doesn’t give interviews – this is a rare exception – and he emphasises several times during our conversation that he is not in politics any more, that he has moved on.

As we sit down to talk, he makes an off-hand, disparaging remark about the inaccurate press reports of his purchase of this property, which is perhaps an appropriate starting point for the interview. He has agreed to talk about the nature of the press during his term of office and as it is today and although he may, indeed, have moved on, and although he insists that what he has to say is not prompted by the bruising coverage he has consistently received over the years, there is more than a trace of bitterness detectable in his remarks. The phrase “Don’t we know it!” crops up several times, and it is more than rueful.

He has an agenda for our interview. I had been asked to propose in advance the questions he might address and, somewhat to my surprise, he has evidently given considerable thought to his response to my somewhat vague outline. He has a number of points he wishes to make about what he sees as the way forward for newspapers and the broadcast media. He wants the press to accept a voluntary code of conduct supervised by an independent regulator – which we will come to – and he also has some wistful retrospective concessions about his own experiences. He admits mistakes in dealing with the press when he was Prime Minister, and in doing so shows a marked selfconfidence he didn’t previously exhibit.

‘I’m rather a puritan’

He was deeply hurt by the press he received and quite uncomprehending of it. When I was political editor of The Sunday Telegraph I can remember receiving a call from his then press secretary, the current Cabinet Secretary Sir Gus O’Donnell, asking whether I could explain why a Conservative newspaper was being so beastly to a Conservative Prime Minister. It was shortly after I had written a front-page story reporting that Margaret Thatcher had been raging about what a mistake she had made in supporting him as her successor – “He is grey. He has no ideas.” All I could answer was that I was accurately reporting her words.

Now Sir John agrees “absolutely!” that he read the newspapers too assiduously when he arrived at 10 Downing Street. “I was wrong. I shouldn’t have read the papers so much.” He denies that he regularly stayed up at night, nervously awaiting the arrival of the first editions – “All that stuff was overdone” – and, in his own defence, says that the volatile political situation he inherited, with his Government effectively in a minority on the European issue, meant that newspapers had a degree of influence on Conservative back-bench opinion to which he had to pay regard. “There were the most extraordinary stories appearing daily and one did need to know what they were. All that said, I should have ignored them more than I did.” Defensively, he adds: “It didn’t affect policy.”

He is 63 and doesn’t look much older than one recalls him in office. He seems glossier – he is reputed to be earning £30,000 a pop for after-dinner speeches – although when he sits down, a vision of rather thick yellow socks doesn’t seem quite right. The big smile is the same, but there is also an assurance that he used to lack. He is harder; scrupulously polite, but not interested in political gossip as he once was. When she was Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher had a handshake that discouraged loitering and propelled guests passed her at top speed; Sir John has developed a similar conversational skill. He uses it to get swiftly down to business with his proposal for a code of conduct. The previous week, in a letter he wrote to The Times about the paparazzi pursuit of Prince William’s girlfriend, Kate Middleton, he had described the idea that existing legislation could be tightened to protect individuals in such circumstances as “sheer bunkum”. Proprietors and editors should agree not to publish photographs without the consent of the subject, he wrote, commending Rupert Murdoch for doing so. “Whatever happened to common decency?” he asked.

Well, he has been thinking further about all of this. “I have been reading the press more regularly than others over 50 years and it seems to me that there are things that have changed in the press that have changed its character.” He is reading from notes he has prepared as he says this. He believes the existence of too many national newspapers has led to greater competition for sales, which has produced sensationalism and thus reduced their overall standard. (I mentioned that there are not more newspapers now, but Sir John insisted there were still too many). He acknowledged my point – rather curiously, but typically, because there is something very 1950s that clings to him – citing as an example the News Chronicle, which was merged with the Daily Mail in 1960, rather than any of the rather more recent newspaper closures. He thinks 24-hour news channels have made the straightforward reporting of facts into what he calls “stale buns” for a television audience that has been listening to the same news for 18 hours, and that consequently newspapers thus contain less news and more comment. His third point is that newspapers are much more politically labelled than previously, that it is not easy to buy a newspaper that does not represent a political point of view, and that while this had always been the case in the editorial and comment columns, it is now spilling over into the way news is reported. In his opinion all of this, plus the internet and the declining readership of newspapers, means a tremendous scramble for sales that ignites a pressure for sensationalism. “‘Government gets things right’ does not encourage sales. ‘Government makes another blunder’ does encourage sales, so there’s a commercial imperative that pushes sensationalism.”

Harassment of celebrities

“You can’t get away from the fact that people are in the public eye, but they do have a right to go about their normal business without harassment. I do think this could be stopped by proprietors.” It would, he thinks, do wonders for the prestige of the press. We have an amusing diversion about the occasion when Neil Kinnock, as Labour Party leader, took a swipe with a rolled-up newspaper at a fellow diner who had provoked him in an Indian restaurant. “I rather like Neil Kinnock,” Major says, then collects himself and adds quickly: “Anyway, he shouldn’t hit people over the head in restaurants”, and then laughingly refers also to John Prescott in Tony Blair’s words “just being John” when he lashed back at a voter who threw an egg at him.

He pays tribute to some photographers – “thoroughly decent guys” – who would respect his own desire not to be pictured, if requested to do so, but bewails the “mob mentality” that can take over. He goes on: “There is something distasteful about those little boxes at the bottom of stories which say: ‘If you have a story about a celebrity please contact us’. What sort of society does that create? Is it in the best traditions of journalism? I think not.”

It is an issue he addressed in government. “In the 1990s I looked at whether a form of privacy law would be practicable and I reached the conclusion that it wouldn’t be. I reached that conclusion because I couldn’t see how you could frame a law which would protect traditional press freedom and also protect the general public...” (The public’s right to know? I asked. “Yes”). “I didn’t see how you could frame a law that I would be comfortable with, so we didn’t do it. That raises the question of whether self-regulation is working as well as it could, and I don’t know that there are many people who think that it is.”

The answer, he believes, could lie in a new voluntary code of conduct – setting out, for example, the right to the correction of a newspaper error that occupies the same space and page and uses the same typeface as the original mistake – which would be policed by an appointed independent regulator whose remit the press would accept. (“Off-Press” or “Press-Off ”? I suggest. He laughs: “You’ve nearly got it right”). The Press Complaints Commission, chaired by his own former press secretary, Sir Christopher Meyer, could not do this, he says, for the obvious reason that there are too many newspapers represented among the commission’s members. He dismisses the ombudsmen system that some newspapers have developed. “I only look at the present circumstances.” The relationship between the media, Parliament and the press is a unique one, he goes on. “I am trying to make sure that because we all believe in the freedom of the press – and I genuinely do believe in it – we have to protect that freedom from becoming licence. And that is actually the margin of the problems: where press freedom becomes press licence, that’s the distinction I’m trying to get at. It could be done by agreement if the press agrees a code of conduct and agrees to abide by it – and I would prefer to avoid legislation.”

No, he has not discussed these ideas with his friend Sir Christopher, or anyone else, and no, he is not putting them forward now because of his personal experiences, nor because of the mauling he underwent from the press, nor even because of the revelations after he left office of his love affair with Edwina Currie. Her name is not mentioned, but I allude directly to this. He is aggravated by this. “It’s ten years on!” he says. None of this is because, “Here am I, sore, smarting”; he has already explained that he looked at this question when in office. “It’s been in my mind for a very long time. No! It wasn’t just because of my personal experiences. It wasn’t my personal experiences that caused me to write to The Times. My personal experiences were a long way ago. I like the best of the British press. I think the best of the British press is very good. I dislike the fact that it’s let down a bit by the worst of the British press. The press could choose to do this [agree a code of conduct] if the press wish to do so. I am assuming that the best of the people in the press wish the press to have a very high reputation and wish to ensure that those who wish to misbehave are not able to do so. I am assuming the press understand the point about commercial imperatives moving them towards sensationalism and wish to protect the reputation of their newspapers. An agreement of this sort to regulate is a step towards doing that.”

No sympathy

He is similarly angry about what he describes as the “really distasteful” spectacle of MPs with pagers being given a political line to take. “The sight of allegedly sophisticated politicians parroting complete tripe trivialises and demeans government and it has to be stopped. It’s played a significant part in public disillusionment with politics and has led to the absurd situation where more people vote for the winner of Strictly Come Dancing than voted in the general election.” (Not quite, Sir John, but we take the point.) “It’s very bad for democracy. But I’m bound to say that I sat back when I saw what they began to do in 1997 and asked myself why the press accepted it. If you were favoured you got stories; if not you were frozen out and because they [Labour] had a big majority, the press accepted what was going on. I was deeply disappointed in that.” He concedes, after a protest from me, that not all the political press settled for, nor accepted, this change in their circumstance and rephrases his comment, saying that “a large number” did do so. He then adds that he is astonished by how tame the members of the press appear at Tony Blair’s televised press conferences.

He was horrified at the way in which New Labour had sought to court the newspapers. It would have been “absolutely inconceivable!” that he might ever have accepted a gold-embossed invitation from News International to fly to any of their conferences in pursuit of their published favours. “I think it’s rather demeaning for elected Prime Ministers to keep in with unelected men who happen to be proprietors.” Surprisingly, however, he turns out not to be gratified by the negative press that Tony Blair receives now. He doesn’t seek to encourage contempt for politicians among the electorate, and thinks that while members of the press have now collectively realised that even Labour ministers have feet of clay, criticism of them has nonetheless actually swung too far.

We then come to a question of mine that he clearly particularly liked: Does he think there is a difference between the contemporary assessment of a political situation by the press of the day and the historical analysis that emerges subsequently? OK, it was an easy question and the triumphant answer from a politician whose reputation in office was so tarnished is, of course, a resounding positive. He had come into office in 1990 with three problems – distinct from the acknowledged difficulties with the press (“I didn’t handle the press particularly well” comes in again here) that he was to encounter. His problems were that the Tories had been in office for 11 years and were beginning to be regarded as “stale” by the press; Europe; and what he mysteriously describes as “a series of individual incidents”.

“There was a time when the Conservative Party went quite mad over Europe,” he says. There were only two disputes in the party’s history that remotely compared: the reform of the Corn Laws in the 1840s and the row over protectionism in the early 20th century. As for the “individual incidents”, it turns out he is describing the sex scandals which beset his administration, the ongoing exposures of which were unfortunately timed after he had made an appeal for a return “Back to Basics” at his party’s annual conference. The “basics” he had in mind – education, family values, apple pie, etc. – were not the ones for which his MPs became celebrated.

In perspective you see reality

Sir John agrees that the electorate do not know what they might get from Gordon Brown as Prime Minister – “They don’t! They certainly don’t!” he says in those graveyard tones – but apparently believes that Brown won’t be in office for long, anyway, if he does take over. He is extremely reluctant to be drawn on David Cameron’s leadership of the Conservative Party or of the nature of the press he has received, beyond saying, somewhat sparingly: “ I think he is very able and I think he will be Prime Minister.” As may already be clear, this is presumably because he has no time for New Labour. “It has lost Labour’s soul,” he says. “It had a soul and a heart. I grew up in Brixton, with ‘old’ Labour in Lambeth. I disagreed with them, but I admired what they stood for.” He can’t see them out of the window though, not now he’s come up in the world. Brixton is on the other side of the building and he doesn’t have a window facing that way.