Blair’s duplicity may be deliberate, or he may just change his mind a lot

Very few political decisions achieve nothing but good: one of them was the abolition of exchange controls exactly 25 years ago. This week the Adam Smith Institute rightly marked the anniversary with a dinner at the St Ermin’s hotel. Geoffrey Howe, the chancellor who masterminded the stroke, reflected on how monumental the judgment — so obvious in retrospect — appeared at the time. Lord Howe revealed that it was the only occasion in his career that he lost sleep on account of a policy decision, while Margaret Thatcher was all but overcome by last-minute nerves. Nigel Lawson, financial secretary in 1979, used the event to muse on how political judgments are reached. ‘It was a leap in the dark,’ he remembered. ‘We knew that if we had waited for a consensus, nothing would have happened. We had to make the decision, and then build a new consensus around it.’

I reflected on Lord Lawson’s remarks after watching poor Tony Blair duck question after question at his monthly Downing Street press conference on Monday.