Obituary: Nigel Lawson

Nigel Lawson, who has died at 91, presided over the economic boom of the 1980s that came to define the Thatcher government.

A reforming chancellor, he set out to reduce taxation and encourage growth which saw him leave office with the country's budget in surplus.

He was a leading figure in the drive to privatise a number of state-owned companies.

In later life, he caused controversy with his outspoken attacks on the concept of man-made climate change.

Nigel Lawson was born on 11 March 1932 into a non-orthodox Jewish family in Hampstead, north London, the son of a tea merchant.

His grandfather, Gustav Leibson, had emigrated from Latvia, becoming a British citizen in 1914. He anglicised the family name to Lawson in June 1925.

The young Nigel followed his father's footsteps to Westminster School before going to Oxford from where he graduated with a first-class honours degree in philosophy, politics and economics.

After completing his national service in the Royal Navy, where he commanded a fast patrol boat, he went into journalism.

He began on the Financial Times, where he wrote the Lex column before moving to the Sunday Telegraph where he became City editor.

In 1966, Lawson became editor of the Spectator magazine. He trod a fairly liberal line, including opposition to the war in Vietnam. He also made regular appearances as a pundit and interviewer on BBC television.

He unsuccessfully contested the Labour seat of Eton and Slough in the 1970 general election, eventually entering Parliament as member for the Conservative stronghold of Blaby, now known as South Leicestershire, in February 1974.

With Ted Heath losing that election, Lawson found himself on the opposition benches.

As a Conservative whip, he struck up an unlikely alliance with Labour left-wingers Jeff Rooker and Audrey Wise, to amend the 1977 budget to index-link tax thresholds to prevent them being eroded by the then high rates of inflation.

When Margaret Thatcher entered Downing Street in May 1979, Lawson was appointed financial secretary to the Treasury.

He quickly demonstrated his energy and thirst for reform, playing a leading part in the government's abolition of exchange controls, which led to a free movement of currency to and from the UK.

In September 1981, he was promoted to energy secretary, where he was immediately thrown into conflict with the miners' unions.

Losses in the coal industry, due to uneconomic pits, were rising but he was aware that any attempt to tackle this would see a repeat of the miners' strike that had brought down the Heath government

Under Lawson's leadership, the government stockpiled coal and converted some coal-burning power stations to oil, moves which were crucial in the government's eventual victory over the mining unions.

Lawson also laid the foundations for the privatisation of British Gas, British Airways and British Telecom. "We are seeing the birth of people's capitalism," he said.

Following the Conservative election victory in 1983, Lawson replaced Geoffrey Howe as chancellor and immediately set out on a wide-ranging programme of tax reform.

There were changes to corporate tax in the 1984 Budget, while a year later he signalled a move from direct to indirect taxation by reducing national insurance contributions for the lower paid and increasing the scope of VAT.

During his period in office, the basic rate of income tax was lowered to 25% while the top rate came down from 60% to 40%. Lawson also turned a budget deficit of £10.5bn when he took office to a surplus of £4.1bn when he resigned in 1989.

On 27 October 1986 came the deregulation of London's financial markets, dubbed the Big Bang. While this strengthened the City of London as an economic powerhouse, Lawson later conceded that it did pave the way for the global financial crisis of 2007 by loosening the restrictions on the ability of banks to lend.

During Lawson's time at the Treasury, unemployment continued to fall but inflation began to rise, due, as Lawson later admitted, to his failure to keep a tight grip on interest rates,

"I should have tightened monetary policy at an earlier stage," he later said.

He was a fierce opponent of the European Economic Community's move towards monetary union. "It is clear that implies political union," he said. "The United States of Europe. That is simply not on the agenda."

But despite his success, his relationship with the prime minister was deteriorating. He opposed the introduction of the community charge, or poll tax as it came to be known, but was over-ruled by Thatcher.

He also fell out with the prime minister's financial guru, Sir Alan Walters.

When a public row erupted over his continued support for the exchange rate mechanism Lawson finally resigned in October 1989 and was replaced by John Major.

His was the second longest tenure of a chancellor in the 20th Century after David Lloyd George.

His sudden departure, followed closely by that of Walters, raised questions about the government's financial policies and was seen by many as the beginning of the end of Margaret Thatcher's term in office.

In 1992, he was created Baron Lawson of Blaby. By this time, he had gone on a crash diet, his familiar portly figure reduced by five stone, and published the Nigel Lawson Diet Book.

In 2004, he re-emerged as a fierce critic of the concept of man-made climate change. He was one of six signatories to a letter condemning the Kyoto Protocol, which committed countries to reduce carbon emissions.

He followed this up in 2008 with a book entitled, An Appeal to Reason: A Cool Look at Global Warming, a work which one critic described as "largely one of misleading messages".

"There is a lot in this debate that is about playing the man not the ball," he complained.

He went on to form a think tank, the Global Warming Policy Foundation, to continue to challenge the widely accepted scientific consensus on the issue.

"The policy of this government," he said in 2010, "is crazy and damaging. It is complete nonsense to say that carbon dioxide is a pollutant - it is not."

Always a Eurosceptic, Lawson backed the UK leaving the European Union in the 2016 Brexit referendum, serving on the organising committee of the Vote Leave campaign group.

Lawson, who lived in France for many years, insisted that the UK was not turning its back on Europe but reasserting sovereignty that had been given away by successive governments, including the one he served in.

In what turned out to be his last speech in the Lords in April 2019, he suggested Parliament's "refusal to accept the people's judgement" was causing a damaging rift in the country.

"There is a real danger that undesirable but very often understandable insurrectionary forces will feel that they cannot trust the British Parliament or the British constitution, and a very ugly situation could well arise," he warned.

Lawson married Vanessa Salmon, whose family owned the Lyons Corner House firm, in 1955 and the couple had four children, including Dominic, who became a journalist, and Nigella, who found fame as a TV cook and food writer.

The couple divorced in 1980 and Lawson subsequently married Commons researcher Therese Maclear. The couple, who had two children together, separated in 2008.