Major's bid to lance the boil

The Prime Minister has taken a great gamble. But it is right that he did so, for the country's sake

You don't associate John Major with coups de theatre. But this was, by any standards, a spectacular political ambush. It took Westminster, and the Tory plotters, by utter surprise. Though it may end up with the Prime Minister lying dead on the summer battlefield he has chosen, he is far more likely to scatter the conspirators this way than by waiting passively for their timetabled assassination.

After the initial shock most Conservatives will feel intense relief. And perhaps not only them. The remorseless campaign against Major - death by a thousand smears - has become a bit of a national embarrassment. Having a party rule-book for an annual plot, so that each November becomes a pencilled-in nightmare, would be destabilising for most governments. It has nearly finished off this one.

Mr Major at least, and at last, has had enough. Outwardly, whether in Nova Scotia (and you don't get much more outwardly than that) or in the Commons, he has in recent days been almost eerily relaxed. The self-deprecating smile has been as ready as before; the sharp retorts have come, if anything, more quickly than they used to. Behind the grin, however, he has been boiling. He has been seeking out his closest friends in the trade to discuss how to "lance the boil".

His chosen lance is a genuine gamble. This has been a desperately bad fortnight for him. His meeting last week with the Euro-sceptics went disastrously wrong and hardened the opinion of many middling Tories against him. Having a leadership battle now means that he will be fighting with that episode still fresh in many minds. The same applies to the local election results, and to some particularly awful opinion polling. Finally, having ceded his formal position in the party, John Major has come a little down, stepping off the podium into the arena.

But his ambush offers his enemies a serious dilemma. It is very hard to see any cabinet member taking Major on in the first ballot. They have served under him; professed loyalty a hundred times; and were rushing to the cameras to profess it again last night. To stand under these circumstances would be seen by many Tories as naked treachery - an act of opportunism too gross even for these desperate times.

So the rebels may have to find a backbencher who can run the Prime Minister very close - in this case, within 50 votes - to trigger a second ballot, by when a serious contender might emerge from the Cabinet against him. Such a candidate might get so many votes that Major would resign anyway; he was interestingly vague last night about what he would do if there was a big vote against him. But he is not looking just now like a man ready to throw in the towel: in fact, he seems almost pleased with himself. I wouldn't bet on him going unless he is forced to fight a second round. And I would lay a side bet on the rebels, caught on the hop, messing things up. Major's gamble, in short, is that the big cats will be trapped inside cabinet while the rest of the felines are too small to get him.

So much for tactics. There are, no doubt, some surprises and twists in the weeks ahead. More important is Major's motivation for bringing the contest forward. He is endlessly derided for being merely a tactical politician, with some cause. But in this bold move there is much more than tactics. Major's words on the Downing Street lawn were not mere sentiment. The evidence of a government being undermined and a Tory party on the rack is glaringly clear. In deciding that it couldn't go on, Major was absolutely right.

It was significant that the first sign that something was up came yesterday morning from Sir Patrick Mayhew, when he made his unprecedented admission that the Irish peace process was under threat because of what he nicely termed the "commotion" about John Major.

It is not normal for a prime minister's friend to say publicly that his party position has become so weak as to damage one of the government's central purposes. Nor for a prime minister to regard the saying of it as an act of warm friendship. But that's how Major felt: although he did not see the Mayhew letter until after it had been sent, the two men had talked earlier in the week about the Government's plight, and the Prime Minister knew what was coming.

He wanted it said because Mayhew was speaking the unvarnished truth. The peace process is at a very difficult stage. All the messages from Sinn Fein are that a decommissioning of arms would be read by the IRA as surrender, and that this would be intolerable. But the Republican side had come to believe that this was something the British could be persuaded to give way on. The huffing of London ministers about guns was merely another sign of the Major administration's drift and disunity.

Gerry Adams is a shrewd and well-informed politician. He knows that when Major stands before a Tory audience to explain his personal achievements, the words "Northern Ireland" come near the head of the list. To have the peace process break down now would be immensely damaging for the besieged prime minister in London. So this is the moment, Sinn Fein may believe, to try to get the wimp to crumple.

This is a serious mistake on their part, and may be a mistake with truly serious consequences. It is precisely the sort of misunderstanding that can end up killing people. It has deeply worried British ministers; and they see part of their problem coming not from Sinn Feiners in Belfast and Derry, but from their own fevered backbench colleagues at home.

As for Northern Ireland so, less dramatically, for much else. The British policy on European union has become frozen; nothing now matters except internal Tory semaphore. As for the intergovernmental conference, we are close to a position where we can save the cost of a delegation and simply send a piece of card bearing the word "No", to be balanced on the British blotter. Our partners don't bother to hide the fact that they are waiting for Labour to be elected before they get down to serious talking.

Elsewhere, privatisation and other radical changes are on hold because of the general assumption that this government is dying. The House of Commons barely deals with any serious legislation now; most evenings it has all the bustle of a deserted Montana mining town. In many ways this seems a government only in the most narrowly technical sense.

Seems; not is. The Government's health and education reforms are not going to be reversed by Labour; its privatisations and trade union legislation are generally accepted; its Chancellor has just won a very significant victory on interest rates; it has kept its nerve on Northern Ireland. Yet none of that registers with the public so long as Tory hysteria and schizophrenia block all bulletins.

Holding a leadership contest now cannot cure the party. "Lancing the boil" is fine; but the Tory fever is the sort to give it boils in unpleasant places time and time again. Yet the contest could calm the inflammation until the general election. Could - and should. This story has been meat and drink for commentators like myself; but it has become a crashing bore for most of the country. It is time to finish it off.