Tag: Nigel Lawson

For the Conservatives, it was a year which had uncanny parallels with today – a prime minister facing questions about her leadership, a party split over Europe and the threat of cabinet resignations over the issue. Thatcher would survive the year but the resignation of Lawson in October, over the influence of her economic adviser Alan Walters, came, in hindsight, to be seen as the beginning of the end for the Iron Lady. Lawson was at loggerheads with Thatcher and Walters over the exchange rate mechanism (ERM). Thatcher recorded his departure in a private memo in terse terms: “Early Thursday morning – hair set 8-8.30 Andrew [Turnbull] came up to say Nigel Lawson wanted to see me. This seemed to me an absurd, indeed reprehensible proposition … in my view no one could possibly resign on the basis of such a flimsy and unworthy proposal.” She said she urged him to think again, concluding: “I then put the matter out of my mind.” The papers reveal that the following month she told the Sun’s editor at the time, Kelvin MacKenzie, in an off-the-record interview, that after taking a comforting “we love you” call from her children on the day of the resignation, in characteristic no-nonsense fashion she then prepared supper for her and her husband, Denis: “Someone’s got to do it … I just had to get on.” But Chris Collins, a historian at the Margaret Thatcher Foundation, said the PM’s anger came through in her memo, in contrast with her public stance, in which she affected bafflement. “She would have loved to have really punched hard, I think,” he said. Collins said: “You can see that events in 1990 would not have happened as they did had it not been for 1989 ... The Lawson resignation is actually the one that makes [Geoffrey] Howe’s resignation so damaging.” In June of 1989, Howe had teamed up with Lawson for the “Madrid ambush”, when Thatcher’s then chancellor and foreign secretary threatened to resign if she refused to state a date for Britain joining the European exchange rate mechanism (ERM). She did not accede and although they did not quit immediately, when they did – Howe, then deputy prime minister, resigned in November 1990 – it would ultimately have devastating consequences for her. By contrast to the ERM, Thatcher was a fan of the single market.