Rishi Sunak’s government is sometimes compared to that of John Major, the man who succeeded Margaret Thatcher in 1990, went on to win an unexpected election in 1992 – and then went down after a landslide defeat at the hands of Tony Blair’s New Labour in 1997.

On an episode of The Rest Is Politics, a podcast hosted by former Tory MP Rory Stewart and Alastair Campbell, Blair’s media chief and an architect of New Labour, Sir John, now 80, looked back at his seven years in power. Major reflected on the lessons that time may hold for Sunak’s similarly embattled administration.

Major refused to be drawn on whether today’s Tories are as doomed as his government was after the debacle of Black Wednesday – 16th September 1992 – when  Britain was forced to withdraw from the European Monetary System (the EMS), leaving millions in mortgage misery similar to today’s homeowners, who face soaring interest rates.

The former PM hinted that Keir Starmer’s Labour party is making mistakes that may yet deny them power – though he declined  to disclose what those errors are, as he ‘did not want to help Labour win’. For all his recent criticism of his party, Major said he was still a Conservative and that he voted for his local Tory MP at the last election.

Major blamed the rising Tory Euroscepticism that had plagued his government on nostalgia for the British Empire

Nor did Major rise to his interlocutors’ invitation to take a pop at one of his favourite targets, Boris Johnson, on the grounds that now he has been ousted, Johnson is ‘down, if not out’ and it is mean to kick a man when he’s down.

In fact, the whole tone of the interview was geared to bolster Major’s self-created image of a decent man doing his best to deal with the difficult circumstances that confronted him. He disclosed that he alone had believed that victory was possible in the 1992 election, when he literally got up on a soapbox to take his message to the people. The morning after the Tories’ triumph, he revealed that he had sat down with party chairman Chris Patten and they had decided that defeat was inevitable in 1997 as the Conservatives had run out of road.

On the great question that split his party in his time – Europe – Major revealed that he had ‘learned nothing and forgotten nothing’ since the days when he had railed against the Tory ‘bastards’ who had opposed his subservience to the EU as he railroaded the Maastricht Treaty through parliament. Ludicrously, he blamed the rising Tory Euroscepticism that had plagued his government on nostalgia for the British Empire, and refused to acknowledge that it was actually based on distrust of the EU’s encroachment on British sovereignty and its democratic deficit.

Leaving aside his uncritical Eurofanaticism, Major was on surer ground when claiming that he had seen the economy through a recession and left it in a far healthier state for Blair to inherit than he had found it in when he became prime minister: inflation had been curbed, debt cut and growth restored.

As Stewart and Campbell share Major’s disdain of Brexit, they gave him an easy ride on the subject, leaving the impression that anyone who disagreed with their Europhile views was a ‘populist’ who dared to disobey the orders and reject the opinions of an entitled establishment so neatly represented by this centrist trio.

Major’s government had solid achievements that he can rightly take pride in: taking the first steps towards ending the Troubles in Northern Ireland, and winning the Gulf War against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and the foundation of the National Lottery among them. Nonetheless, when confronting the great issue that has defined Tory and national politics for the past thirty years, John Major was wrong and the ‘bastards’ he derided were right.