The tale of two little boys

Recently I was sitting in The Independent's parliamentary office, when someone working the corridor for Tony Blair dipped his face in the fetid warmth of our tropical cupboard to give me some free advice. "Don't you believe all this propaganda stuff about Major and poverty," the source close to the Labour Leader told me in serious tones, "I've met people who were at school with him - and they say that he was one of those kids who always had sweets."

It's easy to laugh. This intelligent man's anxiety to tell me of John Major's infant access to penny chews didn't reveal an unhealthy obsession with the trivia of politics, or a stalkerish fascination for the minutiae of the Prime Minister's life. The same chap would have been more comfortable giving me the low-down on Britain's investment failure or the nurse/administrator ratio in New Zealand. But knowing that I was presenting a film about the boyhoods, youth and apprenticeships of the Conservative and Labour leaders, he was keen not to lose out in the fight for the past. All parties engage in the battle for history; to command it is the first step towards controlling the future.

But just as ideas are battled over, so - nowadays - are the backgrounds of the politicians themselves. Today's party leaders are celebrities - just like anyone else who is famous. They are not solely to be judged upon their policies (many of which are hard to compute), but upon their wives, smiles, children, living rooms and hair.

In British politics 'umble is good. Best to have been born in a tenement to poor but honest folks, to have attended Bash St school, to have studied at the University of Life, to have married your childhood sweetheart, to have triumphed over adversity. The ideal leader is the small man got large: Mr Deedes Goes to Town, the bloke outside the Beltway, or Richard Branson.

This, of course, suits John Major just fine. One image from the 1990 Tory leadership contest stays with me. It is of decent Douglas Hurd (one of Major's closest friends, but temporarily a rival) struggling to be regarded as a man of the people, after Major's campaigners had put it around that he was a bit of a public school nance. It didn't take long before the Old Etonian threw in the sponge. "It's not as though I'm standing for the leadership of some obscure Marxist sect!" he told one interviewer exasperatedly - and duly lost.

Little wonder, then, that Blair's people should be so nervous about this particular battle. As we know, there isn't much that is 'umble about the rise and rise of Anthony Charles Lynton Blair, so they are justifiably uncomfortable about a tussle between Brixton John and Tony the Toff. But - as I discovered - this characterisation conceals as much as it reveals, for the popular myths about the two men have obscured some interesting and shaded aspects of their personal histories - and their personalities.

The myth of Major's birth in a garret

In the 1992 party election broadcast, "The Journey", John Major returns to his old home in Brixton. Looking through the windows of the travelling car he asks of the 'umble house where his family lived in two rooms: "Is it still there? There it is! It is still there!" Once more, in his speech to the 1996 Tory conference, the Prime Minister (in Perrinesque fashion) alludes to not "coming all the way from two rooms in Brixton" just to give up the premiership now.

But John Major does not come from Brixton. He was born and brought up in the lower-middle-class south London suburb of Worcester Park. The family lived in a bijou bungalow, with a nice garden. And though the area may be architecturally featureless and culturally arid it was certainly comfortable enough in those days. Major senior (his music-hall days long gone) was not a miner or a docker, but a small manufacturer of garden ornaments, which his son later dignified with the description "sculptor" on his - John's - wedding certificate.

Then came the fall. A debt of honour had to be repaid by the business - and that meant selling the house and moving into "rooms". The Majors - like the Micawbers - became distressed gentlefolk. Their tragedy was not that they had never known the good life, but the more poignant one that they had known it and lost it.

The myth of Tony the toff

In the Washington Times recently, Tony Blair was described as speaking with an "impenetrable upper-class accent". It is true that many Americans believe that there are two English accents: Chimchimenee and Lord Charles. But this ludicrous description nevertheless reflects a commonly held view that Labour's leader - if not an aristocrat - was brought up with the silver spoon of privilege in his engagingly smiley mouth.

It is certainly true that a voyage following Blair's progression takes in some of the finest architecture in the British Isles. From Durham Choristers School in the shadow of Durham castle and cathedral; on to the mock Gothic pile of Fettes public school in Edinburgh; three years at St John's College, Oxford; a first job in law chambers in the Georgian splendour of the Temple; and finally on to Parliament itself. Tony Blair has always worked, not in buildings, but in national monuments. Usually with gargoyles.

But this doesn't make Blair a toff. His family were not rich. They did not live in a very large house, employ servants or drive Bentleys. His father was a self-made man, by then a law lecturer at the university. This meant the familiar professional-class insistence on squeezing out the best possible education for their children. So Blair's schooling was paid for through scholarships, help from other family members, and scrimping. For most of his early life he mixed with people who were considerably wealthier than he was.

The myth of John the failure

John Major left Rutlish Grammar School at the age of 16 with minimal qualifications. The number of O-levels he got is a matter of fierce conjecture, and the records remain a closely guarded secret. This lack of academic achievement has led many to regard Major as a failure, a schoolboy dunce, at best a late developer.

Actually, he was no such thing. Rather, he was a drop-out. As one of his contemporaries recalls, he had "been knocked off his pedestal" by the family disaster, and now found himself the butt of prejudice in a snobby and blinkered school. Major experienced what Pink Floyd called "dark sarcasm in the classroom", picked on by the boys and unprotected by the teachers. He rebelled through failure. One account recalls him striding (suicidally) across the playground with a fag in his mouth; he wanted out as soon as possible. That's why it is quite possible that Major got no O-levels at all - didn't even sit them - but later felt the need to invent a couple for his cv. And it would be hard to blame him.

This lousy school had, in fact, failed to notice that here was a boy of considerable talent. He sailed through later correspondence courses, built a career for himself in Standard Chartered Bank, and rose in the Conservative Party with astonishing speed. As a result Major does not have a great respect for formal education. Deep inside he thinks it unnecessary; he got on despite it; Blair, by contrast, believes firmly in the transforming power of school and college.

The myth of "smarmy" Blair

Young women (as measured by polls and focus groups) apparently hold the view that Tony Blair is smarmy and insincere. It's the famous grin, the slaughter of Labour's sacred cows, and his unsettling Christianity. Isn't it all a bit too convenient, too bloody nice? Even those who wish Labour well sometimes suggest that Blair's godliness is manufactured or hyped.

It isn't. At school Tony was religious. At college, after a week of gigs with the Ugly Rumours and flirtations with female flower-children, he would attend church. When I and my socialist friends were getting blitzed on Nigerian giggleweed, Tony was getting confirmed. His political consciousness was not informed by Marx or even RH Tawney - let alone the thrusting careerism of the Oxford Labour Club - but by a semi-mystical Christian philosopher called John MacMurray. He really believes in God, fairness, do-as-you- would-be-done-by, families and communities - not class war or Buggins's Turn. For better or for worse, the man means it.

ONCE these myths are dispatched, what is most fascinating and unexpected about the early Major and Blair, however, is something that they share. These days we are inclined to balance socio-economic models of destiny against genetic or psychological ones. Whole books are now available dealing with questions like "birth order", which seek to explain the vast differences in the talents and dispositions of children of the same family. And there is a common experience that may have shaped the fortunes of the Labour and Tory party leaders.

At the age of 11 - an age before rebellion, when boys ask their beloved dads to collect them from school in the new motor (rather than slagging them off for uncoolness) - both fathers were suddenly exposed as distinctly mortal. Leo Blair had a near-fatal stroke that left him speechless for a long time. Tom Major - a very old man - was ill and his business failing. The two boys suffered extremes of fear, guilt and distress, and both had to grow up quickly. Arguably this made for a combination of sensitivity (invaluable in any successful politician), toughness and determination; a combination which may have been more important in the making of the man than any two rooms in Brixton, or any number of gargoyles.

'Two Little Boys' is on Channel 5 tonight at 7pm