Ekow Nelson
The most consequential Chancellor of the Exchequer in the late 20th century has passed https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-65167914
Here is my take on Nigel Lawson
An intellectual colossus; a formidable politician and the transformative Chancellor of the Exchequer who remade the British economy.
A close ally of Margaret Thatcher, he was not her first choice when she came to power in 1979. But buoyed by victory in the Falkland Islands and after a lacklustre performance by the late Sir Geoffrey Howe, he was soon at the Treasury wheels, navigating the British economy through some stormy waters.
Lord Lawson of Blaby, as he later became, was the economic architect of the reinvention of post-1970s Britain that had been riddled with strikes and ailing nationalised industries. As the historian Dominic Sandbrook most appositely observed, by 1979, the United Kingdom had “plunged into the worst sterling crisis yet, ending with the humiliation of a … bailout from the International Monetary Fund.” The top rate of income tax was 83 percent and interest rates were rocket high. Britain became the butt of jokes even among friends and allies with the likes of the Wall Street Journal publishing a scathing editorial that began “Goodbye, Great Britain”, and ended with “it was nice knowing you.”
Lawson was at the forefront of turning the tide of Britain’s ailing economic fortunes. He shifted the debate on taxation with radical tax-cutting measures that persist till this day. And much of the privatisation of former nationalised industries including British Telecom, British Airways, British Steel and British Gas occurred under his watch.
He presided over the deregulation of the financial markets in London in what became known as the ‘Big Bang’ that eased financial transactions, introduced electronic trading and made the City of London the epicentre of global finance. But then again, the seeds of the global financial crash in 2008, can somewhat be traced to the looseness and lack of control ushered in by such deregulation on both sides of the Atlantic. Nonetheless, he was, in Margaret Thatcher’s word, “unassailable”.
It wasn’t long though before he too fell out with the Iron Lady when he was caught clandestinely running a monetary policy of shadowing the Deutsche Mark to keep it at a 3:1 parity with the pound sterling. Incensed by her out-of-control, buccaneering Chancellor, Thatcher brought in her own economic advisor to run a parallel economic policy from No. 10 to counter No.11.
When Lawson found out Sir Alan Walters had been ensconced in No. 10 he blew up in what became the beginning of the end of his political career and indeed the Iron Lady’s. In response, Mrs. Thatcher said she did not understand what all the fuss was about because as she famously declaimed, “advisors advise; ministers decide!”.
The entire debacle provided the proximate motivation for removing politicians from the conduct of monetary policy, culminating in the independence of the Bank of England under the Tony Blair and Gordon Brown Labour government in 1997.
Forty years after his appointment, his legacy continues to loom large over the British economic model even as some blame it for the lack of investment in public services since.
His “The View from No. 11” is one of the most lucidly written political memoirs of its time I have read. He was a delightful speaker and beautiful writer, having edited the Spectator magazine as a young man, much like his son Dominic did years later.
His intransigent Euroscepticism and bonkers views on climate change apart, he was a forthright and a rather engaging politician of his time. He could be quite colourful in his use of language. I remember driving around Durham Cathedral and hearing him on radio describe parts of his former boss’s memoir as a “cock and bull story”.
His politics and mine are not the same but I will miss him. He belonged to that generation of politicians from whom one learned something whenever they opened their mouths to speak. May he rest in peace
Ekow Nelson
April, 2023, Riyadh
reimagining 