John Marwood Cleese (born October 17, 1939) is a retired English politician who served as Prime Minister of the Republic from 1990 to 1998, as Leader of the Conservative Party from 1988 to 1998, and as the MP for Weston-super-Mare, his small hometown on the Bristol Channel, from 1978 to 1999. He was one of the architects and leaders of the 1990 Tory landslide that brought a center-right government to Parliament for the majority of the 1990's and oversaw several popular measures. His assistance with other NATO countries in campaigns in Scotland and Cyrene earned him ire among voters, as did high inflation and gas prices in his final term, and he pledged to step down as Prime Minister after the 1998 Conservative leadership conference, where his successor, Peter Stuart, was chosen. Still, he