Telegraph review of his book, Creative Britain, as a ‘Pooter of the Arts’.
It is hard to pinpoint exactly when John Major was first compared with Pooter but the idea probably came from the satirical magazine Private Eye which usually produces a spoof diary as the popular caricature of the prime minister of the day might write it. Soon after John Major took office in November 1990 the Eye began running ‘The Secret Diary of John Major aged 47?’ undisguisedly based on Sue Townshend’s The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole aged 13?. Since Mole is obviously a younger, 1980s version of Pooter, commentators eventually began comparing the prime minister with the hero of The Diary of a Nobody. One of the first to do so was Roy Hattersley who nearly became prime minister himself in the 1980s. He made the comparison in his Guardian column in 1991 after seeing Major on TV telling a desert prince that the coffee was ‘extremely agreeable’.
These comparisons continued until the end of Major’s premiership. Andrew Moncur in the Guardian Diary for 31 March 1997 wrote: ‘It would be interesting to hear what John Major, the Mr Pooter of Downing Street, has to say on the topic of ritzy hotels.’ A Financial Times review of Anthony Seldon’s Major, A Political Life on 14 November 1997 was headlined ‘Mr Pooter’s Place in History’.
Keith Waterhouse, The Collected Letters of a Nobody (London: Michael Joseph, 1986).
Richard Le Gallienne, The Romantic ’90s (London: Putnam & Co, 1951).
Keith Waterhouse, Mrs Pooter’s Diary (London: Michael Joseph, 1983). Also see Further Reading.
This led J. B. Priestley to describe Padge as ‘the most laconic character in English Literature’ in English Humour (London: Heinemann, 1976), p. 98.
George Grossmith published his own recollections, A Society Clown (Bristol: Arrowsmith’s Bristol Library, 1888) that same year. Ironically, since he never kept a diary, it was done largely from memory.
Faber & Faber Book of Diaries, edited by Simon Brett (London: Faber & Faber, 1987), p. 23.
Raymond Chapman, The Victorian Debate: English Literature and Society 1832–1901 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1968).
David Thorns, Suburbia (London: Paladin, 1972), p. 38.
