John Major

About John Major

John Major, a British politician who served as Prime Minister from 1990 to 1997, holds a significant historical standing, ranked #559 in overall global influence by MIT's Pantheon project. His tenure was marked by navigating the end of the Cold War, the UK's entry into the Maastricht Treaty and the subsequent European Union debate, and overseeing the privatization of several state-owned industries. These actions cemented his role as a key figure in modern British and European political history.

Despite this historical importance, Major's modern internet attention appears comparatively modest. He accrued 966K annualized Wikipedia views in 2025, placing him in a position of relative overattention according to our analysis, yielding an Attention Gap of +3x relative to his historical rank. For context, this is significantly less than Bill Clinton (#704 importance), who garnered 6.6M views in the same year. Major's relative standing suggests he is more widely known online than his historical rank might predict, though he clearly remains eclipsed by contemporaries in sheer volume.

Further illustrating the dynamic nature of historical memory, his recent online interest is slightly declining, with a year-over-year change of -12.6% and a drop in momentum between Q1 and Q3 2025 of -15%. This suggests that while currently receiving more attention than his HPI might suggest, that interest is slowly waning in the digital sphere.