I was positively incredulous when I worked out that he turns 80 next year.

Where has the time gone?

It seems like, well, not very long ago that we as a nation were chortling at those brilliantly mundane 101 Uses for a John Major cartoons, while poking fun at the Grey Man's latest attempts to control the hairy-chested Eurosceptic caveman faction within the Conservative Party.

A quarter of a century seems like a more than respectable interval after which to reassess whether this image of Major as a dull, boring, insipid leader is really justified.

But actually, the more I think about it, the more it seems to me that this is beside the point.

At a time when the world is lumbered with a surfeit of messianic leaders and the country is crying out for a period of boring, technocratic government, it seems plain that the judgement that matters is whether Major’s Premiership, boring or not, was effective.

And here, while I did not vote for his party in either the 1992 or 1997 general elections, I think there are grounds for arguing that the Major years are very much underrated.

If I were to build a case for the Major Premiership, Exhibit A would be the Northern Ireland peace process: the period 1991-1997 saw many essential but difficult steps taken, with Major, on the whole, a constructive force.

Exhibit B would be the Maastricht Treaty.

Yes, really: he did eventually get the Maastricht Bill through, even if it cost some of us untold hours of overtime scurrying around Westminster’s ornately labyrinthine chambers, and arguably sowed the seeds of Brexit.

Exhibit C - and obviously the one I am going to dwell on here - would be sport.

There are for me two sides to why Major’s Premiership was a positive thing for British sport - the personal and the legislative.

This was the era of the great football rehabilitation in Britain, after the sport was cast into the outer darkness during Margaret Thatcher’s years at 10 Downing Street.

Italia ’90; the Premier League; Euro ’96: little by little, the buzz came back to the people’s game.

Fandom became for the first time in history a middle-class accoutrement, so much so that politicians of all stripes began to see football club allegiance as something, once again, to be worn on their sleeve not airbrushed away.

Sure, Major was happy enough in these circumstances to parade his fondness for Chelsea Football Club.

And yet one never doubted that his real sporting love was for cricket, most specifically Surrey County Cricket Club, the team from the unfashionable south side of the Thames.

More importantly, one never doubted that this love was impervious to fashion or which way the political wind was blowing, and would have been expressed in the same quiet, undemonstrative, absorbed manner whether he was Prime Minister, a brain surgeon or a janitor.

Sport as a gently engrossing, occasionally exciting, way to escape the pressures and drudgery of everyday life at periodic intervals: this always seemed to me a healthy conception of its place in the grand scheme of things, and Major embodied it.

And then there is the National Lottery, established slap bang in the middle of the Major era in 1994.

I have never bought a ticket and I doubt I ever shall; I slightly worry about people spending money they cannot really afford on a weekly long-shot at a life-changing jackpot, while acknowledging that, in the end, it is their life.

But you cannot deny the dramatic impact which the Lottery has had on British sport - especially Olympic and Paralympic sport.

It did not happen overnight: the Major years also included Atlanta 1996, where Britain famously mustered the sum total of one Olympic gold medal.

From then on, though, the wave was building, through Sydney and Athens to that day in Beijing in 2008 when I can still remember a group of us, none I think strident flag-waving patriots, rubbing our eyes and acknowledging it was nice to be contenders again.

This was before things went too far, as they often will, and we began to fetishize the British medals haul.

It remains the case that London 2012 would have been a very different, and probably much less impressive, beast without the National Lottery.

Of course, by then, as with Northern Ireland, Tony Blair and others had stepped in to mop up much of the credit, not without some justification.

But I remember seeing Major during those Games (in the velodrome unless I am much mistaken) and thinking, "You know what, quite a lot of this is down to you".

Twenty-five years, though! It still doesn’t seem possible.