DATE: Thursday, October 16, 1997            TAG: 9710160544

SECTION: LOCAL                   PAGE: B1   EDITION: FINAL 

SOURCE: BY BILL SIZEMORE, STAFF WRITER 

DATELINE: NORFOLK                           LENGTH:   80 lines

FUTURE LOOKS BRIGHT FOR ALLIES, MAJOR SAYS

After enduring a crushing defeat at the polls last spring, former British Prime Minister John Major reached back two centuries into his nation's history Wednesday night to help explain the vagaries of English politics.

Consider the work habits of Prime Minister William Pitt, Major told an audience of 2,000 in Chrysler Hall.

``After breakfast, he had a bottle of port,'' Major said. ``After lunch, he had a bottle of port. And after dinner, he had a bottle of port.

``And I have to tell you, 200 years later, after seven years in Downing Street, I know exactly how he felt.''

Nevertheless, Major seems to be adjusting to his new status as a back-bench member of Parliament in a minority party with a traditional British stiff upper lip. And despite his own political misfortune, he declared himself incurably optimistic about the future of Britain, the United States and their democratic allies in a rapidly changing world.

Major, the first speaker in this year's Norfolk Forum lecture series, pointed to what he called the ``astonishing'' change that has occurred in Russia since the collapse of the Soviet Union. True, he said, it has been a bumpy road, hindered by corruption and other ills, ``but economic reform now looks as if it has taken root.''

He predicted that the free-market forces at work there and elsewhere around the world today will lift half the world's poor nations out of poverty within 10 years.

``If governments can keep the peace,'' he said, ``then industry and commerce will build for us and for successive generations a prosperity of a sort that we have never known before.''

He issued some caveats, however.

He said he believes Britain, the United States and their allies have gone far enough in downsizing their militaries for a post-Cold War world. Strong militaries will still be needed, he said, to counter terrorist threats and contain regional conflicts such as the one in Bosnia.

And he endorsed the North Atlantic Treaty Organization's plans to take in former Soviet-bloc nations as members, but cautioned that it should be done very slowly to avoid inflaming Russia.

Russia's ``greatest nightmare,'' Major said, is that ``the West will encircle their country and place them at a tremendous military disadvantage. That is a genuine, heartfelt fear.''

``If we move too fast and too clumsily, we might unsettle the reform program in Russia, with immense damage to all our interests,'' he said.

In a question-and-answer period, Major touched on a variety of other topics. Among them:

He believes China will allow democracy and capitalism to keep flourishing in the former British colony of Hong Kong because ``I do not believe the Chinese will kill the goose that lays the golden eggs.''

Asked about the symbolism of Prime Minister Tony Blair's handshake this week with pro-independence leaders in Northern Ireland, Major said the fact that all sides in the conflict are now talking improves the chances of a permanent peace. ``If the handshake helped that,'' he said, ``it is well worthwhile.''

Major, 54, was unceremoniously turned out of office last May after seven years as prime minister when his Conservative Party lost control of Parliament in a landslide.

That vote gave the opposition Labor Party, under Blair, its new centrist leader, the biggest parliamentary majority in nearly two centuries.

Major's fall from power was even swifter than his meteoric rise in Tory ranks during the 1980s as the protege of his predecessor, Margaret Thatcher.

The son of a circus trapeze artist, Major rocketed ``from the dole to Downing Street,'' in the words of one biographer.

He was unemployed for a time and worked as a laborer, insurance clerk and banker before making his mark in politics.

Once in the top office, however, he came to be widely reviled as weak, colorless and boring.

When his anticipated defeat became a fact, his departure from office was typically matter-of-fact. The day after the election, he turned in his resignation to the queen, had lunch and took his wife and children to a cricket match.

``Don't forget I'm English,'' he once said. ``The English tend to be understated.'' ILLUSTRATION: [Color Photo]

Former British Prime Minister John Major spoke at Chrysler Hall in

Norfolk.

Send Suggestions or Comments to webmaster@scholar.lib.vt.edu