A COUPLE of hours earlier, about 250 miles down the A1, John Major's beloved Chelsea had turned over Middlesbrough.

Little wonder, then, that as he arrives at Middlesbrough's Riverside Stadium, Britain's last Prime Minister is grinning that distinctly John Major grin - where the toothline curves in a little too quickly leaving big gaps at the side of his mouth and his upper lip stretched taut.

"What a lovely ground," he declaims, looking out onto the pitch. In the Wilf Mannion Suite, pictures of the Golden Boy in action cover the walls. "Now he was a great player," he says with intimate knowledge of Mannion's by-gone era. "A great player."

The old, sepia-tinted pictures are somehow appropriate for Mr Major because his manners, mannerisms and speech come from a lost era when old maids really did cycle to chapel down leafy lanes, when Mannion's Middlesbrough were at the right end of the table.

It was said that he would have won the 1997 election if he'd been able to meet every voter personally. He is genuinely nice in the style of country village parson whom no one has the heart to hurt.

And it did hurt. He says otherwise, but the telling stumble - the only one in the whole interview - betrays him. "I knew what the result would be," he says, before tripping. "Well, I didn't know how, err, how big we would be defeated."

He quickly recovers. "After 18 years in government there was nothing surprising about us losing. The surprise in most people's minds was that we had won in 1992. We had just stretched the democratic elastic too far. I was mentally prepared for it and in politics, if you are a democrat, if you win you enjoy it, if you lose you must bear it. I did what came to me most naturally and went to the Oval and watched some cricket."

Mr Major is at the Riverside for a Conservative fund-raising dinner, but still seems determined to enjoy himself. Asked if he wanted a hard or soft drink, he replies: "At this time of night, I'll have something other than soft." Red or white? "White, as long as it's not Chardonnay. I always think Chardonnay tastes better the second time it passes through the body." He's so pleased with his little genteel gag that he practically dances a jig of joy on the spot.

He is to retire from politics at the General Election - whenever that may be - and has effortlessly acquired the elder statesman's air of wisdom. He's been there, done that and bought all the election t-shirts to swell party funds.

"There is a tendency these days, and it is a false tendency, to regard politicians as only being interested in politics," he says, rising above party politics. "There's a myth that every politician of every party is entirely self-centred. My experience right across the House of Commons is that that isn't true. There are some politicians who are monomanical but a majority have a hinterland of other interests that sometimes get pushed aside because of the pressure of politics."

Listening to him in his old-fashioned world where everyone is a decent chap at heart, it's hard to believe that he was ever young. But when he was first elected in 1979 he was one of the youngest MPs and, in 1990, he was just 47 when he became Prime Minister. Too young.

"In some ways it would have been better if I had had more experience," he said. "I have no doubt that if I were made Prime Minister today knowing what I know today I would have done some things differently.

"There's a tendency these days for youth to be regarded as the most important thing of all, but you can carry that too far. I was the third youngest Prime Minister ever, Tony Blair is younger than I, William Hague is younger than Tony Blair and Charles Kennedy is younger than William Hague. At this rate of progression the next leader of a political party will be pre-puberty." It's another little genteel gag of which he looks rather proud.

He is still only 58 - hardly one foot in the grave - but there is an air of the wistfulness of old age as he looks back over his days.

"When I came into government the effect of the 1980s recession was spreading," he said. "I spent most of the time getting the economy right and dealing with a turbulent parliament with no majority. Those are not the circumstances that you can carry out the sort of social changes that someone with my priorities and background would liked to have done."

He was brought up in a Brixton back street, the son of a circus trapeze artist who made garden gnomes to make ends meet.

"Money, as Iain MacLeod, once memorably said, is the root of all progress. I didn't have it. We did get it at the end of the Parliament but sadly we handed it over to Tony Blair. I'm sorry I wasn't there to do with that money the sort of things I had in mind to bring about classless society and a country at ease with itself.

"That is a regret I will always have."

And it is a regret that burns deeply as his critique of Labour's four years in power shows: "They had a tremendous opportunity. They inherited a good economy. They had a very large majority and they haven't done anything to deal with any of the fundamental problems of the country, none at all. They have been predominantly concerned simply with disposing of the money they inherited and preparing for their re-election campaign. Compare what they have done with what Clement Attlee did in 1945-51 or Lady Thatcher in 1983-87 with similar majorities and you realise the extent to which they have wasted the lasted four years - a squandered opportunity."

If the Conservatives address those fundamental problems - like how Gordon Brown's spending plans depend on Britain avoiding an economic slowdown, like how do we really afford an NHS now the human genome has been mapped and everyone will live longer, like how far do we really want to be integrated with Europe - he still believes there's a way back for them.

"The Labour Party's support at the moment is that their support is a mile wide but half an inch thick and it will crumble very speedily," he says. "And it deserves to."

Sounding almost world-weary, he despairs of the young ones he is leaving behind ever having a decent debate on Europe. "There is frankly so much party political slanging," he says. "There is a great advantage for the first politician to lift his head above the routine disagreement of politics and begin addressing those long term probs. I think William Hague is doing that."

Getting older by the second, he continues: "These days people tend to think in soundbites. I've only heard one decent soundbite in the whole of my life. That was Boris Yeltsin when I asked him what was the state of Russia and he said it was good. I was surprised. I asked him for the longer version and he said it was not good. Once you get beyond the soundbite, things are much more complex and that is true of so much of politics."

He says he only invented one good soundbite - "a country at ease with itself, although that wasn't a soundbite in the sense that I actually meant it. It was intended to be indicative of an approach".

Now he's leaving the party political slanging and the soundbites behind him, and turning to his books, his cricket and his love of the arts - "Norma and I go and listen to music whenever we can."

But momentarily, as he sweeps up his glass of white wine and prepares for the throng in the dining room, he forgets. "I'm sure we'll meet again soon," he says. "But wait. What am I saying? I'm retiring.

"But may be I could come back to see Chelsea play Middlesbrough here.

"Now that would be nice." Which is an entirely appropriate John Major word on which to end