Publicly coalition sources were defining their mood as concern rather than dismay

Publicly, coalition sources were defining their mood as concern rather than dismay. But the terms of Mr Bruton’s response left little doubt that he was seething.Yesterday, he first sent sympathy to the family of Clegg’s victim, Karen Reilly, then reiterated his call for equality before the law and in executive action. Yet no signal was given then to Dublin that the release was imminent, Irish sources insisted.Fears that nationalists will now see the British handling of the peace process as distinctly one-sided were considered by the Irish cabinet yesterday. Downing Street dismissed as “utter rubbish, without foundation” claims that the release on licence approved by Sir Patrick Mayhew, the Secretary of state for Northern Ireland, was timed to boost John Major’s standing with Tory backbench MPs in today’s leadership election.
Dick Spring, the Irish Foreign Minister, noted that Irish concerns about giving the wrong signals by taking the Clegg case in isolation had been raised again with London as recently as four days ago at the Anglo-Irish conference.

A professional team – John Major, to Conservative party conference, Blackpool, 1991. The London and Dublin governments were at odds last night over the demands for the release of IRA prisoners after the freeing of Private Lee Clegg, which provoked rioting in Belfast. Not in any age – John Major, Brighton conference, 1992On youth: Let the word go forth from this time and place, to friend and foe alike, that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans – John F Kennedy, inaugural address, January 1961We’ve heard some cracking speeches this week From the right team A young team – in fact the youngest Cabinet this century. And I’ve looked over and I’ve seen the Promised Land – Martin Luther King, Memphis, Tennessee, April 1964I see public service as a duty and if you can serve, I believe you have an obligation to do so – John Major, resignation speech, Downing Street, June 1995On being tough: The world must be made safe for democracy – Woodrow Wilson on the US’s decision to enter the First World War, 1917New age travellers? Not in this age. The rough places will be made plain and the crooked places will be made straight – Martin Luther King, Washington, August 1963Long shadows on county grounds, warm beer, invincible green suburbs, dog-lovers …

Old maids bicycling to Holy Communion through the morning mist – John Major, to the Conservative Group for Europe, April 1993On service: I just want to do God’s will And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I want to thank Norman Lamont for his courage in bringing that inflation rate down – John Major, to the Conservative party conference, Brighton, 1992On war: The lamps are going out all over Europe; we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime – Viscount Grey, on the eve of the First World WarRight across Europe now, in this critical hour, people are looking and listening to us and what we have to say – John Major, Brighton 1992On ideals: I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, every hill and mountain shall be made low. But it seems the act doesn’t play – and, for better or worse, its time may be up.Great speeches … and Major’s minor versionsOn enemies: I’d much rather have that fellow inside my tent pissing out, than outside my tent pissing in – Lyndon Johnson on why he kept J Edgar Hoover at the FBI, 1971With a low inflation rate, we can compete with the best in Europe. It is probably fair to say that the business of the House, which is chiefly dull, earnest and chore-like, has more in common with moving stairways than with, say, abseiling. Maybe even Mr Major’s severest critics would applaud him for resisting the Peggy Noonan-style illusion that somehow politics reaches gloriously to the heavens, and for refusing to dress himself in speech as some sort of big-muscled voyager or action hero. In this metaphor, politics is a department store or an airport, a place in which the worst that can happen is that you might find yourself heading off on the wrong escalator, which is always a bit of a pain, though frankly, one is never hugely inconvenienced when it happens.The point is, Mr Major’s escalator metaphor, like many of his metaphors, is honest about what politics, for the most part, feels like.

Last month, ahead of his resignation, Mr Major told the Welsh Conservatives’ conference: “We will not ride on an escalator that takes us where we do not want to go.” This escalator image is worth pausing over, because it gives us an insight into what a political journey for Mr Major might be. It’s not an adventure on which you run the risk of being forced into a crevasse or nudged into a pit. There is no sense here that politics is a world in which vertigo and reckless aggression from one’s adversaries are a real possibility The game is not even as treacherous as Snakes and Ladders. As Mr Major once declared: “It is right to speak plainly and directly.” He is a man compelled by the nature of his work to be a rhetorician, while beset by the feeling that rhetoric is itself to be mistrusted.So a weird rhetorical hybrid sprouts, less than exciting on the ear but inadvertently revealing. But it takes place elsewhere.Hence the awkwardness and strain in his speaking.

We should be clear, though, that the flavour of this is distinct from the flaunted philistinism of Baroness Thatcher. For Mr Major, literature is all very well and grand and noble, and fine for those who like that sort of thing. As he told the party conference in 1993 (and as he has told it, in some not entirely dissimilar form, every year since his ascent to the leadership): “I came from the backstreets of Brixton, Mr Chairman, and I’ve never forgotten it.” “Siren voices” appear in Mr Major’s speeches on more than one occasion – but they are always to be resisted.In 1992, on one of Mr Major’s rare excursions into the pages of a book, he mentioned Don Quixote, only to disparage him, in an interestingly narrowed version of the fable, as one who “read too many old books”. This may be because an elastic and scholarly allusiveness would not sit well with one of Mr Major’s other key rhetorical devices: the claim of ordinariness. Lift our country back into growth.” When the first battle you care about is an economic one, there can be no leaping up Mount Parnassus. Perhaps the best you can hope for is an uneasy alliance between the language of a DSS form and the marriage ceremony: “What families have worked a lifetime to create,” Mr Major has said, “the taxman will not be allowed to destroy.”He could help himself, as others do, to literature, but literature has never figured prominently in the Prime Minister’s public speaking.