LONDON – Nigel Lawson, a conservative politician and journalist who helped turn Britain’s economy around Margaret Thatcher but the man who left the government during a heated argument over monetary policy, has passed away. He was 91.
The BBC reported on his death on Monday but did not say where, when or how he died. In a statement, Rishi Sunak, prime minister and leader of the Conservative Party, called Mr Lawson “a transformative prime minister and an inspiration to me and many others.”
After serving in government, Mr Lawson went on to become a highly skeptic of global warming and was largely overshadowed in the public eye by his daughter, the celebrity chef Nigella Lawson.
As Secretary of the Treasury, Mr Lawson is closely linked to Mrs Thatcher’s prominent drive to deregulate and privatize large state-owned businesses and utilities, including British Airways. , British Telecom and British Gas.
His economic tax cuts helped turn budget deficits into surpluses, halved unemployment and curbed inflation. But after the so-called Lawson Boom came tougher times, with soaring inflation and high interest rates, rising from 7% to 15% in 16 months.
Mr Lawson also oversaw the so-called “Big Bang”, which in 1986 created a wave of free electronic trading on the London Stock Exchange which Mr Lawson later attributed contributed to the crash. financial fall in 2008.
In his early years, he was seen as a supporter of the European Union, but he became increasingly scathing in his criticism of the European single currency, the euro, of which Britain was not a member.
Supporting Britain’s withdrawal from the European Union, Mr Lawson argued that the bloc had moved away from its economic roots to become a political project “to create a super nation, the United States of America of Europe,” he said, which makes no sense.
“We don’t want to be little Europeans; we want to be a global player,” he said.
“I think we have a choice,” he told the British newspaper The Independent in 2014. “We either endorse this political goal, get into a single currency and play the full part. its role in trying to influence it in any way possible; or else we can say, ‘No, we don’t share this ambition,’ at which point you have to say, ‘We loved you and left you.’”
In October 2015, Mr Lawson announced he would head a group called the Conservative Party for Britain to prepare for a referendum on whether Britain should remain a member of the European Union. . He argued that Prime Minister David Cameron would not secure sweeping reforms in Britain’s relationship with the rest of the bloc to justify continued membership.
Mr Lawson angrily resigned from Mrs Thatcher’s government in October 1989 amid a dispute over who was running the economy – the prime minister or Sir Alan Walters, Mrs Thatcher’s economic adviser at No. Downing Street. The dispute revolves around Mrs Thatcher’s opposition to fixing the pound sterling to the German mark and a basket of other European currencies.
After leaving office, Mr. Lawson took on a different lifestyle. Heeding medical advice, he lost 70 pounds and wrote “Nigel Lawson’s Diet Book” in 1996. Despite his aversion to European integration, he became increasingly divided splits his time between London – where, as a mate, he is a lawmaker in the House of Lords – and a home in Gascony, southwest France.
“I live a double life because my home is deep in the French countryside,” he told The Independent, using the French term for the remote countryside. “So I spend Friday, Saturday, Sunday there, then Monday through Thursday” in London.
Challing popular perceptions of the dire threat of global warming, Mr. Lawson published a manifesto on climate change in 2008 titled “Appealing to Reason: An Interesting Look at it.” about global warming.”
In an opinion piece in The Wall Street Journal in 2009, he wrote scathingly about the “famous itinerant circus of climate change” of scientists and others who expressed alarm. on the speed of climate change.
He is the founding chairman of an advocacy group, the Global Warming Policy Foundation, set up to expose what he once called the “intellectual bankruptcy of the climate change establishment” – a translation which he has also promoted in lectures, books and articles.
During Mr. Lawson’s later years, outsiders’ perception of his family became increasingly focused on his daughter Nigella, particularly in light of her controversial divorce from Charles Saatchi, British advertising mogul in 2013.
Mr. Lawson endorsed his daughter’s growing popularity as a domestic goddess.
“The fact that in her youth she was known as Nigel Lawson’s daughter, and now I’m known as Nigella Lawson’s father, makes me extremely pleased,” he told The Daily. Telegraph in 2009. “That’s how generations will pass.”
In 2010, he updated his 1992 autobiography, “Perspective from Number 11: Memoirs of a Radical Tory.”
Nigel Lawson was born in Hampstead, a prosperous North London suburb, on 11 March 1932, the son of Ralph Lawson, whom he described as the owner of a small tea trading company. but doing well in London. His mother, Joan Elisa Davis, was the daughter of a prosperous stockbroker, and the family lived a life of affluence, he said, “complete with nannies, cooks, and maids.”
He was educated at Westminster School and studied philosophy, politics and economics at Christ Church, Oxford.
His first career as a journalist, writing financial analysis for The Financial Times began in 1956, a year after he married Vanessa Salmon, a glamorous socialite whose family founded the chain famous restaurant Lyons Corner House.
In addition to Nigella, the couple has three other children – Dominic, who became a famous journalist; Thomasina and Horatia – before their divorce in 1980. Vanessa Lawson died of liver cancer in 1985 at the age of 48, while Thomasina Lawson died of breast cancer in 1993 at the age of 32.
In 1980, Mr. Lawson married Thérèse Maclear, a former research fellow in the House of Representatives. They had a son Tom and a daughter Emily before divorcing in 2012. Full information about his survivors was not immediately available.
As a journalist, Mr. Lawson was the senior editor of The Sunday Telegraph and later The Spectator, a weekly newspaper, from 1966 to 1970. But he also displayed political ambitions, serving as a special adviser. for Prime Minister Alec Douglas-Home in 1960 and at Conservative Party headquarters in the early 1970s before being elected as a legislator in the Blaby constituency in the East Midlands in 1974.
He remained the district’s representative in the House of Representatives until 1992. During a period of rapid advancement, he was appointed finance secretary to the Treasury Department in 1979 and minister of energy in 1979. 1981 before becoming chancellor of the Exchequer two years later.
In the last years of his life, Mr. Lawson was known to his acquaintances in southwestern France as a sociable and energetic figure, committed to advancing his career.
In 2012, he told The Daily Mail: “The idea that because you’re old you’re completely selfish and think, I only have five or 10 years to live, so I couldn’t care more – that that couldn’t be further from the truth.”
