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Nerds, Rabbits and a General Lack of Testosterone

R.W. Johnson: Major and Lamont, 9 December 1999

The Autobiography 
by John Major.
HarperCollins, 774 pp., £25, October 1999, 0 00 257004 1
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In Office 
by Norman Lamont.
Little, Brown, 567 pp., £20, October 1999, 0 316 64707 1
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... Norman Lamont, who served continuously at the Treasury from 1986 to 1993 – a period when first Lawson and then Major consistently argued for the ERM – tries hard to pretend that he was too busy dealing with the fairies at the bottom of the garden to notice any of it. He claims that when Britain entered the ERM he turned to a Treasury official and ...

What difference did she make?

Eric Hobsbawm, 23 May 1991

A Question of Leadership: Gladstone to Thatcher 
by Peter Clarke.
Hamish Hamilton, 334 pp., £17.99, April 1991, 0 241 13005 0
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The Quiet Rise of John Major 
by Edward Pearce.
Weidenfeld, 177 pp., £14.99, April 1991, 0 297 81208 4
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... offices of state, to 10 Downing Street in his forties. It is no reflection on his abilities, which Nigel Lawson recognised immediately, to say that under no other circumstances would he have got to where he is so fast. Only 18th-century patronage could have competed with 20th-century patronage. How much difference Major’s leadership of the Tory Party ...

Upside Down, Inside Out

Colin Kidd: The 1975 Referendum, 25 October 2018

Yes to Europe! The 1975 Referendum and Seventies Britain 
by Robert Saunders.
Cambridge, 509 pp., £24.99, March 2018, 978 1 108 42535 3
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... the surviving protagonists of the 1975 referendum – such as the former Europhiles David Owen and Nigel Lawson; Neil Kinnock, a prominent Labour anti in 1975; or Alex Salmond, then a youthful SNP anti-Marketeer – found themselves on the other side of the debate from their former selves. The exception was Jim Sillars. The outspoken Labour anti of 1975 ...

Blood All Over the Grass

Ewan Gibbs: On the Miners’ Strike, 2 November 2023

Backbone of the Nation: Mining Communities and the Great Strike of 1984-85 
by Robert Gildea.
Yale, 469 pp., £25, August, 978 0 300 26658 0
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... exceeding its outlay on the Falklands War. After the strike ended, the Tory chancellor, Nigel Lawson, described it as ‘a very good investment’.The miners returned to work in March 1985; a thousand had been sacked during the strike, often after being arrested on picket lines. The fate of these men anticipated that of their ...

At the Skunk Works

R.W. Johnson, 23 February 1995

Fool’s Gold: The Story of North Sea Oil 
by Christopher Harvie.
Hamish Hamilton, 408 pp., £18.99, October 1994, 0 241 13352 1
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... allowed to rise to levels which decimated British industry, and equally regrettable that Thatcher, Lawson and Major ran down our stock of foreign assets by running huge trade deficits for the last seven years. And it may be regrettable that more of that money was not re-invested here. But those huge capital flows abroad benefited so enormously from the world ...

Schadenfreude

R.W. Johnson, 2 December 1993

The Downing Street Years 
by Margaret Thatcher.
HarperCollins, 914 pp., £25, October 1993, 0 00 255049 0
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... to herself as ‘head of state’ and talking of ‘I, as a government’. Geoffrey Howe and Nigel Lawson may have fulminated against her, in the course of reviewing this book, but they helped launch the good ship Thatcher and sailed in her fatly for many a year, long sustaining and defending her against those who objected from the outset to ...

The Darth Vader Option

Colin Kidd: The Tories, 24 January 2013

The Conservatives since 1945: The Drivers of Party Change 
by Tim Bale.
Oxford, 372 pp., £55, September 2012, 978 0 19 923437 0
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The Conservative Party from Thatcher to Cameron 
by Tim Bale.
Polity, 471 pp., £14.99, January 2011, 978 0 7456 4858 3
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Reconstructing Conservatism? The Conservative Party in Opposition, 1997-2010 
by Richard Hayton.
Manchester, 166 pp., £60, September 2012, 978 0 7190 8316 7
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... that the party was seen to represent ‘what might be termed the capital gains classes’? Why, Nigel Lawson, who twenty years later seemed pretty much at ease with loadsamoney, capital gains conservatism when at the helm of the exchequer. Lawson, it transpires, was something of a slow developer as a Thatcherite, and ...

William Wallace, Unionist

Colin Kidd: The Idea of Devolution, 23 March 2006

State of the Union: Unionism and the Alternatives in the United Kingdom since 1707 
by Iain McLean and Alistair McMillan.
Oxford, 283 pp., £45, September 2005, 0 19 925820 1
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... had come to mean uniformity. In a speech in Glasgow in November 1987, Thatcher’s chancellor, Nigel Lawson, complained that too many sectors of Scottish society were ‘sheltered from market forces and exhibit a culture of dependence rather than that of enterprise’. Assimilation to the values of Thatcherite England was the recipe for economic ...

Her way of helping me

Hugo Young, 6 December 1990

Listening for a Midnight Tram: Memoirs 
by John Junor.
Chapmans, 341 pp., £15.95, October 1990, 9781855925014
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... In 1988, the Prime Minister is telling him that Howe is a blancmange, Kenneth Baker is wet, Nigel Lawson wants to go and make money but is being kept in post at her request, and John Major is her most likely successor. Perhaps more to the point, she had a message for her good friend. By this time, his own days at the Express looked as though they ...

William Rodgers reads the papers

William Rodgers, 19 February 1987

The Market for Glory: Fleet Street Ownership in the 20th Century 
by Simon Jenkins.
Faber, 247 pp., £9.95, October 1986, 0 571 14627 9
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The End of the Street 
by Linda Melvern.
Methuen, 276 pp., £9.95, October 1986, 0 413 14640 5
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... the opportunity to bring a new depth and perception to profiles, has done no better. A profile of Nigel Lawson, ‘maverick at Number 11’, at the time of the Chancellor’s last Mansion House speech, was no more than a review of his four years at the Treasury. Only Terry Coleman, in his extended Guardian interviews, gets close to his subjects. The ...

Longing for Mao

Hugo Young: Edward Heath, 26 November 1998

The Curse of My Life: My Autobiography 
by Edward Heath.
Hodder, 767 pp., £25, October 1998, 0 340 70852 2
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... Conservative politicians write worthwhile accounts of their experience. I can think only of Nigel Lawson and, rather less thoroughly, Geoffrey Howe, who have done us the favour of attempting serious revelation of their public work – though the first Thatcher volume, highly selective as it is, is in a special class, and Douglas Hurd, who did ...
Digging Deeper: Issues in the Miners’ Strike 
edited by Huw Beynon.
Verso, 252 pp., £3.95, March 1985, 0 86091 820 3
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Policing the Miners’ Strike 
edited by Bob Fine and Robert Millar.
Lawrence and Wishart, 243 pp., £4.95, March 1985, 0 85315 633 6
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The Strike: An Insider’s Story 
by Roy Ottey.
Sidgwick, 157 pp., £7.95, March 1985, 9780283992285
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Scargill and the Miners 
by Michael Crick.
Penguin, 172 pp., £2.95, March 1985, 0 14 052355 3
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The Great Strike: The Miners’ Strike of 1984-5 and its Lessons 
by Alex Callinicos and Mike Simons.
Socialist Worker, 256 pp., £3.95, April 1985, 0 905998 50 2
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... expend over £3 billion on defeating the miners: ‘a worth while investment’, in the words of Nigel Lawson. Compiled around the turn of the year, Digging Deeper brings together 17 authors, mainly but not exclusively academics and all sympathetic to the aims of the strikers. The title alludes to a popular slogan among those collecting funds to aid the ...

Wartime

Alan Ryan, 6 November 1986

The Enemies Within: The Story of the Miners’ Strike 1984-5 
by Ian MacGregor and Rodney Tyler.
Collins, 384 pp., £15, October 1986, 0 00 217706 4
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A Balance of Power 
by Jim Prior.
Hamish Hamilton, 278 pp., £12.95, October 1986, 9780241119570
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... remains oddly unabashed, convinced that it was a glorious victory – but then Mrs Thatcher and Nigel Lawson believe they have done great things for the British economy, so he is hardly the only public figure to suffer such delusions. MacGregor’s memoirs are persuasive in one crucial respect. They lend no support at all to the idea that the NUM was ...

Big G and Little G

Paul Laity, 6 February 1997

The British Electricity Experiment 
edited by John Surrey.
Earthscan, 329 pp., £40, July 1996, 1 85383 370 3
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... such that efficiency gains beyond a predetermined level automatically result in lower prices. Nigel Lawson, the original mad scientist of the electricity experiment, did not ‘think that it made sense to have an “Energy Policy”, over and above the application of the Government’s overall supply-side policy to the energy sector of the ...

Boarder or Day Boy?

Bernard Porter: Secrecy in Britain, 15 July 1999

The Culture of Secrecy in Britain 1832-1998 
by David Vincent.
Oxford, 364 pp., £25, January 1999, 0 19 820307 1
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... peculiar and potent mix of libertarianism and totalitarianism proved less conducive to openness. Nigel Lawson claimed she was obsessed by her secret services. She also encouraged unofficial covert agents, her use of which during the miners’ strike is now widely known. So is Michael Heseltine’s shameless abuse of his secret powers over the Belgrano ...

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