Just after her landslide reelection victory in 1983, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher summoned her secretary of state for energy, Nigel Lawson, to No. 10 Downing St.
“I’d like you to take over as chancellor [of the exchequer],” he recalled her telling him. And then she added: “‘There’s just one thing: You must have your hair cut.’ … I suppose she thought it would not create confidence in the financial markets if you had a long-haired chancellor. But that was the only advice she gave me at the time.”
Lawson, who died last week at 91, did as instructed and got his locks trimmed. But during the next six years, as the political steward of Britain’s economic life, he did as much as anyone else in directing the Thatcher Revolution of the 1980s that cut taxes, reduced regulation, privatized state-owned industries such as telecommunications and steel, trimmed the power of unions, and liberalized the stock exchange, rejuvenating the economy and returning London to its historic status as a global financial capital.
Lawson resigned as chancellor in 1989, partly because he thought that the pound should be pegged to the West German mark and other European Union currencies (which Thatcher opposed) but largely because he thought that the prime minister had come to rely on the judgment of a rival adviser.
Nevertheless, whatever his differences with his formidable patron, Lawson remained what he had always been, first as a journalist and, later, as a member of Parliament: a stalwart believer in free markets and an architect of the radical policies that transformed Britain, after decades of stagnation and economic decline, into what Thatcher would call “a property-owning democracy.” As a later prime minister, David Cameron, once wrote: “Even five, 10, 20 years after he left the Treasury, officials and ministers were still asking, ‘What would Lawson have done?’”
The question would not have surprised the charming, flamboyant, outspoken, and self-confident son of a prosperous London family whose Jewish grandfather had emigrated to Britain from Latvia. Born in 1932 and educated at Westminster School and Christ Church, Oxford, Lawson spent two years as an officer in the Royal Navy and married an heiress whose family fortune had been made in the catering business. He began his career in the mid-1950s as a journalist: first as a writer for the Financial Times and then switching to the politics beat at the BBC and the Sunday Telegraph, where he was a senior editor, before becoming editor of the Spectator, the venerable weekly magazine, in 1966.
The lines dividing politics from journalism are not so rigidly drawn in Britain, and in the mid-1960s, Lawson served as a special adviser to the Conservative Prime Ministers Harold Macmillan and Alec Douglas-Home. After stepping down from the Spectator in 1970, he labored at the party’s Central Office, designing the insurgent economic policies that, after 1975, would be embraced by the new Tory leader, Margaret Thatcher.
Lawson was elected to the House of Commons in 1974. When the Conservatives returned to power after Britain’s strike-ridden Winter of Discontent (1978-1979), he was appointed financial secretary to the treasury, became energy secretary in 1981, and, two years later, chancellor.
Lawson retired from Parliament in 1992 and, in the same year, published one of the more entertaining political memoirs of the modern era, The View From No. 11: Memoirs of a Tory Radical. While no longer holding public office, he remained in the public eye, sometimes in unconventional fashion. In 1996, after losing some 70 pounds, he produced The Nigel Lawson Diet Book, which became a surprise bestseller. In recent decades, he was a tireless and eloquent critic of climate-change alarmism and, complaining that the European Union had strayed from its original economic mission to become a political project, supported Brexit.
He took particular pleasure in the success of his celebrity-chef daughter, Nigella Lawson: “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.”