Nigel Lawson’s driving obsession was putting power & cash into families’ hands – Rishi must take a leaf out of his book
I TOUCHED down in Sydney in October 1989, just as Nigel Lawson fired the shot which ultimately brought down Margaret Thatcher and ripped the Tory party asunder over Europe.
Lawson had made the fatal decision of secretly tying the exchange rate of the Pound to the German mark — seen by a suspicious PM as a first step towards a European superstate.
Within hours I was on the first flight home, along with every other political editor scattered around the globe for the autumn recess.
The most successful reforming Chancellor in modern history had stormed out of Downing Street after a blazing row with his next door neighbour.
No Prime Minister, not even the Iron Lady, could survive the resignation of the man who almost single-handedly turned Britain from the “Sick Man of Europe” into a world-beating economy.
Nigel Lawson, Lord Lawson of Blaby, who has died aged 91, was, alongside Mrs Thatcher herself, one of the most outstanding and revolutionary figures of modern times.
Small and overweight — he later wrote a slimming best-seller — Nigel Lawson was an electrifying figure whose crackling Budget speeches were the best show in town.
He took a sword to ballooning taxes, telling Labour critics: “You do not make the poor rich by making the rich poor.”
He took on Whitehall mandarins and such corporate smoothies as the Confederation of British Industry, which thought its job was to “manage the decline” of a former empire.
He laid the battlefield for a last stand by trade union barons, including Marxist miners’ leader Arthur Scargill, against the firms who paid their wages.
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Lawson privatised lumbering giants such as British Leyland and British Telecom, taking them off taxpayers’ backs and freeing them to make a profit and fill Treasury coffers instead.
And he lifted the dead hand of state regulation on private enterprise, unleashing a flood of foreign investment into the economy.
“To govern is to choose,” Lawson said as he ripped up the stodgy, post-war pact of defeatism and dragged UK plc out of the mire.
In a speech which would sound fresh if delivered from Downing Street today, he warned Britain faced three great enemies — “rampant inflation, a bloated public sector and excessive taxation”.
In 1988 he was able to claim: “We have defeated them all.”
In just eight years, the British economy shifted from near-bankruptcy to its first cash surplus in decades.
He told a cheering Tory conference: “We have come out of a long, dark tunnel into the sunlight.”
Andrew (Lord) Tyrie, Lawson’s closest Treasury adviser through the Eighties, said last night: “There are few truly titanic figures in British political history and Nigel Lawson was one of them.
“He was a colossus, the cleverest man I met in my time in politics.”
“PM Rishi Sunak praised Lawson as “a transformational chancellor and an inspiration to me and many others”.
Ex-PM Boris Johnson said: “Nigel Lawson was a fearless and original flame of free-market conservatism.
“He was a prophet of Brexit and a lover of continental Europe. He was a giant.”
Lawson was a man of contradictions. He fell out with Lady Thatcher after he secretly linked the Pound to the German deutschmark, the EU’s first faltering steps towards the euro.
Yet he was totally opposed to the “flawed idea” of a single European currency.
He adored continental culture and history but he became a key player in the 2016 Brexit campaign.
“I love Europe,” he said. “That’s why I live in France.”
To the under-50s, the ex-Chancellor was perhaps better known as the father of glamorous celebrity chef Nigella Lawson — and of Dominic, a respected political and economic commentator.
He was born into a wealthy family, son of a City tea trader and grandson of a Jewish immigrant who changed his name from Leibson.
A brilliant scholar, he gained a first-class honours degree from Oxford before joining The Financial Times newspaper then moving to The Sunday Telegraph as City Editor and later to edit The Spectator.
Twice married and divorced, first to society heiress Vanessa Salmon and then to House of Commons researcher Therese Maclear, he was father to six children.
His daughter Thomasina died of cancer aged 32.
Despite his aversion to television interviews, he remained an influential player here and on the world stage well into later life.
He backed Rishi Sunak for Prime Minister — and Rishi repaid the compliment by consulting his hero as a political and economic mentor, also keeping a portrait on his wall.
Lawson’s driving obsession was putting power — and cash — into the hands of family households.
He cut their income tax and devised tax-free saving schemes as pension boosters.
Sun readers were a priority, of his, with help for stay-at-home mums — policies later unravelled by Labour’s Gordon Brown.
He fought right up until the end to save hardworking, car-driving families from the crippling timetable for zero-emission policies.
Electric cars, windmills and unrealistic cut-off dates would not provide the solution, he said.
Lord Lawson rejected claims that the “science was settled” and set up the Global Warming Policy Foundation to refute claims that billions risk death from high temperatures and rising sea levels.
He was criticised by Prince Charles, among others, and abused by eco-zealots bent on destroying capitalism to “save the planet”.
“I have never shied away from controversy nor worried about being unpopular,” he said.
“But I have never in my life experienced the extremes of personal hostility, vituperation and vilification which I have received for my views on global warming.”
In his carefully researched book An Appeal to Reason: A Cool Look At Global Warming, Lawson insisted people would adapt to and even benefit from warmer weather.
Many publishers refused to touch it.
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Broadcasters, especially the BBC, effectively banned him from the airwaves.
Yet, given the choice between the record of this deeply thoughtful visionary and the rantings of, say, BBC climate panic merchant Justin Rowlatt, I know whose side I’m on.
