Lawson was radical Brexit guru that never was

Some thirty years ago, I once spent about six hours in the company of Nigel Lawson, and I enjoyed it.

It was for a BBC archival project where the big politicians of the day, recently retired, would go through their careers and explain what they did and why. Few were as big as Nigel. David Dimbleby did the asking, I did the research, and Lawson did the talking.

I’ve no idea what happened to these lengthy reminiscences — they were never intended for immediate broadcast, unsurprisingly — but I’d be happy to watch and re-live them. Lawson was a highly intelligent, thoughtful (not always the same thing), creative and serious man with an intellectual heft and hinterland rarely glimpsed at Westminster. It was enjoyable just to observe the intricate workings of his mind.

There’s always a nostalgic tendency at any given time to think a past generation of politicians much superior to a contemporary crop of lightweights, but when you place any of the Thatcher administrations against those of Boris Johnson, Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak, there is a demonstrable and pitiful decline in quality. People like Lawson just don’t seem to rise to the top these days.

So there’s that to remember Lawson by; but also, having lived through it, it’s worth recalling what he did to the country. A self-styled “Tory radical”, he shared with Margaret Thatcher a vision of Britain sharply at odds with the post-war consensus that had gone before. Their project, nothing less than the recasting of the British economy and its “bloated” state, was obviously divisive, often callous, and, as is the way with any government, flawed.

However, everyone understood what the Thatcher government was about, and why. Put simply, the idea was that the nation had to go through considerable pain in order to make itself competitive again, beat inflation, create jobs and enterprise, and restore the nation’s fortunes and self-esteem. It meant uneconomic enterprise went to the wall, it meant smashing the trade unions, being mean to public sector workers, cutting benefits and leaving young people homeless, and making the rich richer.

To a fair degree they succeeded, but the extent to which they did was because they retained the electoral support of the public. Thatcher and Lawson, and their colleagues, persuaded Britain that “there is no alternative”, that past governments, of both parties, had simply failed, and we couldn’t go back to all that.

That political effort complemented the economic and financial reforms, and, as Tony Benn used to say, they succeeded because Thatcher was a great teacher. One should add it was Lawson who, with the likes of Keith Joseph and some eccentric advisers, helped give her the intellectual basis for what came to be known as Thatcherism.

In terms of Brexit, an idea Lawson supported as the next, postponed, chapter in the Tory story, the contrast with today is again uncomfortable. There was, and is, no one like Thatcher or Lawson actually bothering to explain to the British people what Brexit is actually for, what the vision is, how it’s going to work, and how and when it will make us prosperous.

Brexit lacks its “teacher” and its guru; its Thatcher and Lawson, if you will. Lawson was above all interested in ideas, and relished winning an argument. Among the front benches of today only Michael Gove bears any kind of comparison. It is no surprise that, alone among Maggie’s ministers, Lawson’s memoir The View from Number 11 is full of charts and graphs, and unapologetically discusses the relative merits of internal versus external monetary targets. Lawson never talked down to an audience.

Often seen as arrogant, and a bit of a show-off, Lawson was in fact admirably self-sufficient as a politician. He’d spent a long career as a journalist, including a spell as editor of the Spectator, before, as he put it, he decided to stop commenting from the sidelines and get onto the pitch instead.

He became the MP for Blaby in Leicestershire in 1974, still in his early forties. It was a propitious time for him to make his move, because the failing economy and apparently ungovernable society were once again at the centre of national debate, and Lawson was well suited to such challenges.

His career in journalism stood him in excellent stead, because he was knowledgeable about the way the economy worked and eloquent and articulate in talking about it. Within a decade he was chancellor. When Thatcher gave him the job, she told him to get his hair cut, which he duly did; but he was always his own man. Later, when he and the prime minister fell out, he told an interviewer that whether he would quit was “partly a matter for the prime minister, and partly a matter for me”, a typically smart-arse quip that didn’t endear him to her.

He was cheeky like that, and didn’t mind deriding the economics editors of Fleet Street who had the temerity to query his budget judgements as “teenage scribblers”. Above all he was proud, going on vain. It should always have been clear that he wasn’t going to tolerate Thatcher employing an economic adviser, Alan Walters, who advocated an alternative exchange rate policy, while he, Lawson, was supposed to be in charge.

It should not have come as a shock when one bright day he decided to resign, and walked away with no obvious regrets. Thatcher had called him “unassailable”, but such flattery meant nothing when he felt he was being undermined if not humiliated, and the conduct of policy was no longer satisfactory.

In a way, he sacked her, not least because his resignation statement in 1989 was so wounding. Geoffrey Howe, about a year later, with Michael Heseltine, finished the job. Lawson was certainly wounding and honest: “For our system of cabinet government to work effectively, the prime minister of the day must appoint ministers whom he or she trusts and then leave them to carry out the policy. When differences of view emerge, as they are bound to do from time to time, they should be resolved privately and, whenever appropriate, collectively.” The impression given, subtly, was that Thatcher had grown too imperious and even slightly batty. It was an opinion more and more of her colleagues shared.

Of course, Lawson made mistakes. His intellectual self-confidence veered into overconfidence by 1988, and he began to believe his own propaganda about the “British economic miracle”. His tax cuts and exchange rate policies resulted in a nasty bout of inflation and then recession (albeit milder and more easily corrected than our current malaise).

His views on climate change — a mix of scepticism and resignation to the inevitable — were off-key, and he miscalculated the willingness of the British people to make his vision of Brexit work. But we’d be a lot better off if there were more people like Nigel in public life today.