Bison

Quietly solid, pragmatic Conservative who just got on with it.

Rising from a childhood in Brixton with no university degree to occupy 10 Downing Street, John Major embodies the bison's defining quality: a steady, unshowy resilience that powers through hardship without fanfare. Like the bison, which endures the harshest plains winters through sheer durability rather than speed or aggression, Major weathered the catastrophic Black Wednesday currency crisis of 1992 and kept governing — bloodied but unbowed — refusing to resign when flashier personalities would have bolted. His dogged pursuit of the Northern Ireland peace process, laying groundwork that others would harvest as glory, reflects the bison's characteristic willingness to do the unglamorous herd-work. Even his self-deprecating admission that he was "a fairly ordinary sort of man" captures the bison perfectly: deeply dependable, communally grounded, and entirely unbothered by the theatre of dominance.