Nigel Lawson, widely regarded as Britain’s finest post-war Chancellor, died in early April. Alistair Lexden, Conservative Party historian, recalls how he first became involved in the Party after two years as the City editor of The Sunday Telegraph.
In May 1963 Harold Macmillan gave orders for the recruitment of “two good speech writers who would be borne for pay and rations by the Conservative Research Department but who would be available to me when I wanted them.”
Nigel Lawson, then aged 31, was one of the two (the other was John MacGregor, also a future Thatcher cabinet minister). Macmillan had resigned by the time they arrived. His successor, Alec Douglas-Home, kept Lawson busy. During his year as prime minister, he delivered no fewer than 174 party speeches. The phrases which the speech writer supplied seem rather tame by today’s standards, but Lawson was widely commended for lampooning Harold Wilson, an unconvincing champion of modern technology, as “ a slick salesman of synthetic science.”
The work left him with a lasting admiration for Douglas-Home, whom he described in 1995 as “the most remarkable person he had ever known,” a surprising judgement perhaps but a sincere one.
