The Telegraph, April 4, Patrick Minford
Nigel Lawson was Margaret Thatcher’s key intellectual ally, brought in by Sir Keith Joseph to fashion a detailed economic policy agenda of monetarism and entrepreneurial rebirth.
His 1988 budget was a milestone for the latter. But his relationship with Mrs Thatcher was soured by a tragic schism over monetary policy and exchange rates with Europe – a schism that ultimately brought her regime down.
The internecine warfare of that time was like a revolution “devouring its young”; monetarism brought the Thatcher government to power and it was war over monetary policy that ended its last term, with all the drama of resignations by Lawson and by my mentor Alan Walters, the prime minister’s chief economic adviser.
I had my differences with Nigel Lawson. Even if our eventual ejection from the ERM under the Major government did influence our happy refusal to join the euro, Walters (and Mrs Thatcher) were right to object to Lawson’s policy of shadowing the deutschmark.
But that should not detract from the areas on which Lawson and I fundamentally agreed – chiefly over his great achievement in building “popular capitalism”: the widespread acceptance of the contribution to national welfare made by businesses and their entrepreneurial owners, and the implied need to encourage this via low marginal tax rates and pro-business regulation.
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