Portraits and Miniatures(107)
Second, it is a tremendous book for putting the blame on others. The third chapter on his Chancellorship is rather poignantly entitled ‘A Job with Few Friends’. But if the number was small when he was doing his duty at the Exchequer it is difficult to believe that this book will not make it still more exiguous. Even allies get fairly dismissive treatment. At the beginning of the Thatcher Government, for instance, Lawson was Geoffrey Howe’s Financial Secretary at the Treasury and in charge of the then panacea subject of monetary policy, although as the interplay between the stubbornly disloyal monetary aggregates of Mo, M1, M3, M4 and even M5 are developed, a lay reader could easily be forgiven for thinking that the narrator must have been at the Ministry of Transport. But it was to Chancellor Howe that Lawson was then responsible, and many opinionated minutes, all too frequently reproduced here, he fired off to him.
Except as a silent recipient of such effusions, however, Howe is not at this stage allowed a role beyond that of a sort of furry pet padding around in his Hush Puppies and greeting the initiatives of his brilliant lieutenant with a mixture of incomprehension and apprehension. Better in some ways a direct stiletto into the back, which is what, to take a few random examples, Peter Rees, his first Chief Secretary at the Treasury, Gordon Richardson, Governor of the Bank of England until 1983, and Arthur Cockfield, Conservative tax expert until he became a Brussels Commissioner, all receive. Enemies within the government, such as Prior, Walker, Biffen, Gilmour, receive still shorter shrift, although they at least get the dagger in the front. And several of them will probably be more pleased with the book than will Lord Tebbit, who gets one of the few unalloyed tributes for his performance in the 1983 Parliament accompanied by the (to him) infuriating statement that he was a strong supporter of entry into the ERM in 1985.
Lawson’s unconcealed lack of admiration for colleagues does, I suppose, make the long watches on the Medium Term Financial Strategy and exchange rate policy less tedious than they might otherwise be. But it does give an unappealing impression of everyone being out of step but Johnnie. And it is not made better by an excessive use of Christian names, which sometimes carries a flavour of Girls’ Own Paper quarrels: ‘John felt so strongly about it, however, that he wrote personally to Margaret setting out his objections to the MTFS which understandably annoyed Geoffrey when he got to hear of it.’
All previous skirmishes, however, are merely a run-up to the 1987-9 epic battle with ‘Margaret’. This has almost an operatic quality about it, except that a wise intendant would have insisted on a much shorter overture. At first there was mutual admiration, and scenes with considerable duet potential. On the night of the 1985 Budget she unexpectedly rang the Number 11 doorbell and our hero who always slept naked (the 1100 pages allow room for such graphic detail) only had time to slip on trousers but no shirt or shoes before going down and holding a ‘somewhat stilted chat’ in the open doorway against the appropriate backdrop of the dreaded Foreign Office battlements. Yet even at such happy times there were rumbles of menace from the distance which hinted that all might not be well in the end.
Then comes the story of the mounting quarrel itself, beginning after the 1987 election and gathering momentum with the Prime Minister’s open disapproval of the Chancellor’s exchange rate policy, until two and a half years later it burst into resignation over the return to 10 Downing Street of Sir Alan Walters as her economic adviser. This is well and convincingly told except perhaps for Lawson’s claim that Mrs Thatcher was seized with jealousy of him after his triumphs in the 1987 campaign.
His determination to shift, or at any rate spread, the blame for the bonanza which helped to make the subsequent slump deeper and longer than it need have been, is a good deal less convincing. The general tone is one of claiming that he did not cause the trouble, with an alternative plea that, if he did, there were plenty of others, commentators as well as ministers, urging him to go even further.
How will Lawson look in history as a Chancellor? My guess is: technically well equipped for the job (although to judge from the success of the non-economists Cripps and Butler and the relative failure of the economists Dalton and Maudling this is not crucial), durable (in a category comparable in this respect this century only with Lloyd George and Neville Chamberlain), confident, probably good to work for, but insensitive, brutally opinionated, and by believing that he had created a miracle whereas he had merely dashingly ridden a long upswing, heavily responsible for present discontents.
Is his vast budget of events accurate? Probably mostly so, although of his six references to me, two are directly and factually inaccurate and one inferentially so. But I daresay others are luckier.