Nigel Lawson’s legacy is one of British transformation

The path from the editor’s chair at The Spectator to 11 Downing Street was not untrodden when Mrs Thatcher asked Nigel Lawson to replace Geoffrey Howe as Chancellor of the Exchequer after the 1983 general election. Iain Macleod had made the same journey in 1970. But whereas Macleod died 13 days into the job, Lawson went on to become Britain’s most significant post-war chancellor, and the architect of high Thatcherism.

You have to be at least 50 now to remember the stupor in which the British economy lay when Lawson took office. The statist economy of the 1970s, with its wretched labour disputes and under-performing nationalised industries had still not been fully dismantled. It is a tribute to Lawson that, when he left office in 1989 after six and a half years running the economy, Britain had been reborn as an enterprise economy.

Unemployment had plunged by a million, and the economy was growing by five per cent a year – a rate we now associate more with developing economies such as China. Moreover,