doc_text: Last year a biography of Mrs Norma Major - or, if we are being old-fashioned, Mrs John Major - claimed that the Majors' favourite film was Being There.
  I entirely concur with their choice.
  In case you did not see that marvellous film, this, in essence, was the plot: a man no one knows anything about, a gardener called Chauncey, rises without trace to become, by the end of the film, a serious candidate for the US presidency.
  Chauncey, played by Peter Sellers, utters only mundane sentiments in a halting monotone but this convinces the Republican party's power brokers that he is a sure-fire winner.
  In Chauncey's bromides everyone seems to hear what they want to believe.
  He has a deadly innocence.
  No wonder the Majors liked this film.
  John Major must, at some level, have appreciated the similarity between his own, strangely intangible, rise and that of Chauncey's.
  If he did not see the similarity, that is still more revealing.
  Do not protest that the urban John Major could not identify with a gardener.
  In an interview with Farmers Weekly, a few days ago, Major disclosed an unknown fact: his father was once a farmer.
  Farmers Weekly, you see, had asked Major how he had 'such obvious empathy with agriculture'.
  (Well, it was obvious to Farmers Weekly, anyway.)
  And Major replied: 'It's simple.
  My father was a farmer.
  He lived on a small farm somewhere in Shropshire.'
  Francis Wheen of The Guardian, a keen student of Major's mysterious past, immediately rang 10 Downing Street, which claimed that Major's father farmed near Bromsgrove in 1910.
  As Wheen pointed out, Major was an unresponsive minus 33 years old at that time, and - a minor point this - Bromsgrove is not in Shropshire.
  This, of course, does not mean that Major made everything up.
  Family folklore is a peculiar thing.
  Yet when I heard about this, my mind immediately went back to an incident a few months ago, when Major visited Pittsburgh, centre of the US steel industry, as part of his American tour.
  I recall that he made a great hit by recounting that his father had been a steelworker in the city.
  A farmer for Farmers Weekly, a Pittsburgh steelworker for the American audience . .
  .
  a pattern emerges.
  Major's father, and therefore by extension John Major himself, can be all things to all people.
  If John Major were a different sort of politician, this would be a point barely worth making.
  But it does seem all of a piece with Major's approach to wider political issues.
  On the one hand he will appeal to the pro-Europeans in his own party by claiming to want Britain to be at the heart of Europe.
  On the other he is free with insulting references to the European Commission, whenever it is necessary to appeal to an audience of Euro-sceptics.
  There are those who will argue that this merely means that Major is a typical democratic politician, that one who wants to become prime minister in a democracy must recognise many constituencies of interest, not just one.
  But that has not been true of Major's most recent Conservative predecessors.
  Margaret Thatcher was notoriously dogmatic, even in public, and so too was Edward Heath, even though he always pretended to be a 'consensus politician'.
  No, Major's technique is very much his own invention, very much a reflection of his own particular character, itself a product of his unsettled family background.
  His father, Tom Major-Ball, was an itinerant figure, moving from place to place, trying his hand at any number of occupations, including the circus.
  No wonder the young John Major learned the skill of fitting in with prevailing circumstances, no matter how fluctuating.
  The only problem is the old one: you cannot fool all of the people all of the time.
  Except in the movies.
  Dominic Lawson is editor of The Spectator
summary_text: A biography of Mrs. Norma Major claims that the Majors' favorite film was "Being There," a movie about a vacuous gardener, Chauncey, who becomes a candidate for the U.S. presidency.
  I heartily concur with their choice.
  John Major must appreciate the similarities between himself and Chauncey.
  Like Chauncey whose bromides seem to convey whatever people want to believe they heard, Major is a chameleon.
  For the pro- Europeans, he says he wants Britain to be at the heart of Europe, but before an audience of Euro-sceptics he freely insults the European Commission.
  He fits in with prevailing circumstances, no matter how fluctuating.