Nigel Lawson, 1932-2023

Just after winning her second election in a landslide in 1983, the British Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, called in Nigel Lawson, her Secretary of State for Energy, to No. 10 Downing Street. “I’d like you to take over as chancellor [of the exchequer],” Lawson recalled her saying. Thatcher had one condition: “You must have your hair cut.” She apparently thought that the financial markets would not have confidence in a long-haired chancellor. Lawson followed her advice, and during the following six years, he played a significant role in directing the Thatcher Revolution of the 1980s that cut taxes, reduced regulations, privatized state-owned industries such as telecommunications and steel, diminished the influence of unions, liberalized the stock exchange, restored the economy, and returned London to being a global financial capital.

Lawson resigned as chancellor in 1989, due, in part, to his differences with Thatcher regarding the pound being pegged to the West German mark and several other European Union currencies. However, he mainly resigned because he believed that the prime minister relied on the advice of a rival adviser. Nevertheless, as a journalist first and then a member of Parliament, Lawson remained a strong believer in free markets and one of the architects of the radical policies that transformed Britain from decades of stagnation and economic decline to what Thatcher referred to as “a property-owning democracy.” According to a later prime minister, David Cameron, officials and ministers were still asking, “What would Lawson have done?” even two decades after he left the Treasury.

Lawson came from a prosperous London family, was born in 1932, and had an education at Westminster School and Christ Church, Oxford. Before embarking on his political career, he spent two years as an officer in the Royal Navy and married an heiress whose family fortune came from the catering business. Lawson began his profession in the mid-1950s as a journalist, starting with the Financial Times and later reporting on politics for the BBC and The Sunday Telegraph, where he was also a senior editor. In 1966, he became editor of The Spectator magazine. The lines dividing politics from journalism in Britain are somewhat blurred, and in the mid-1960s, Lawson served as a special adviser to Conservative Prime Ministers Harold Macmillan and Alec Douglas-Home. After leaving The Spectator in 1970, he worked at the Conservative Party’s Central Office, where he developed the new Tory leader Margaret Thatcher’s insurgent economic policies, which were adopted after 1975.

In 1974, Lawson was elected to the House of Commons. He was appointed financial secretary to the treasury when the Conservatives returned to power after the Winter of Discontent (1978-1979). He was then appointed energy secretary in 1981 and, two years later, became chancellor. Lawson retired from Parliament in 1992 and published one of the most entertaining political memoirs of the modern era, titled The View From No. 11: Memoirs of a Tory Radical. He continued to be in the public eye after leaving office, often in unconventional ways. In 1996, he produced The Nigel Lawson Diet Book, which surprisingly became a bestseller after he lost approximately 70 pounds. In recent years, he was a vocal and articulate critic of climate change alarmism and, unhappy that the European Union had evolved from an economic project into a political one, supported Brexit.

Lawson took significant pleasure in the triumph of his celebrity-chef daughter, Nigella Lawson. He said, “The fact that when she was young, she was known as Nigel Lawson’s daughter, and now I am known as Nigella Lawson’s father, pleases me immensely.”