While criticising Tony Blair, the former prime minister forgot his own dismal record on big money and the Bosnian war

Suddenly it all came back. Listening to the unctuous Sir John Major on the Today programme last weekend, in surely the most unchallenging interview of a politician in the programme’s history, one heard the authentic voice of the Bourbon Conservativism that learnt nothing and forgotten nothing.

Major opined on parliament as if his era as whip, minister and prime minister was a golden chapter in the history of the Commons. Yet the wretched allowances and expenses system that has caused such damage and justifiable anger was put in place in his time. There was an attempt to link an MP’s salary to that of a middle-rank civil service grade. That way, it was thought, the media hype every time MPs’ pay went up might be avoided. But under Major’s premiership the first pay rise based on this link was proposed and blocked to avoid one day’s nasty headlines. His whips pottered around the tea room soothing angry backbenchers. “Don’t worry, chaps, we’ll bump up allowances and expenses instead,” they said.

For Major, who presided for seven years over exactly the same system that now causes outrage, to pose as a moralist on MPs’ pay is outright hypocrisy. At least Shirley Williams, who was guest-editing the programme, had the decency to point out that up to the early 1990s, an MP earned roughly the same as a GP, but that GP and other public sector professional salaries have soared ahead.

Major was not asked about the brutal treatment of independent Tory MPs under his reign, nor why he promoted Jonathan Aitken or allowed the cash-for-questions scandal to grow under his leadership. No mention of the Pergau Dam or the political party fund-raising by cabinet ministers on overseas trips. David Cameron has Lord Ashcroft and the Tory front bench is so stuffed with millionaires that the problem of MPs’ pay and allowances is for other people, not the shadow cabinet. But under John Major the fusion between Tory politics and big money and the transformation of underpaid MPs into cash-for-questions and outside earners helped devalue transparent democratic politics.

On the Iraq intervention, Sir John is now a revisionist. He supported the 2003 invasion but now the chance to undermine his successor, Tony Blair, whose humiliating defeat of Major clearly still rankles, was too great. He boasted that he always told the truth about conflict. Tell that to the families of eight Fusiliers who were killed by US friendly fire in the first Iraq war. Month after month, the Major government told lies to the grieving parents. Major himself wrote long letters full of dishonest obfuscation about what really happened. It required a campaign helped by the human rights QC Geoffrey Robertson and a coroner who would not be silenced by Whitehall to uncover the truth with the help of America’s Freedom of Information Act. Major left the families swinging in the wind of his refusal to tell them the truth.

Or take the massacre of Srebrenica. 8,000 European men were taken out one by one in 1995 and shot dead in a manner Europe has not seen since the killings at Katyn where Polish officers, public servants and professors were killed in cold blood by Russians acting on Stalin’s orders. Major equivocated and did nothing to intervene to deal with the murderous activity of Milosevic, which inflamed Muslim public opinion in Britain and helped create the jihadist politics amongst young Muslims here and elsewhere in Europe.

If Tony Blair is guilty of removing Saddam Hussein, John Major is guilty of allowing Slobodan Milosevic to stay in power for a decade until Robin Cook and Tony Blair summoned up the political courage and energy to put together the coalition that finally stopped the mass murders in a region of Europe two hours’ flying time from London. Major, by contrast, did as much to stop Milosevic as his isolationist predecessor, Neville Chamberlain, did to stop fascism in Spain or central Europe from unleashing its murderous horrors.

Perhaps retired prime ministers should not face hard questions. Perhaps the Today political team believes that today’s issues – from MPs’ pay to whether we should pull out of Afghanistan – are brand new and have no roots in the recent past. But the next time Major decides to unburden himself of his views on current political topics it would be useful if someone researched the cuttings so that proper questions can be asked of the worst prime minister of the 20th century.