Radical tax-cutting UK chancellor Nigel Lawson dies at 91

Nigel Lawson, the long-serving Conservative chancellor whose radical tax-cutting Budgets of the late 1980s inspired a Tory generation, has died at the age of 91.

Lord Lawson was an iconic figure for the Tory right and Rishi Sunak, prime minister, led the tributes to a man whose economic policies underpinned the Thatcher revolution.

“One of the first things I did as chancellor was hang a picture of Nigel Lawson above my desk,” Sunak said on Monday night. “He was a transformational chancellor and an inspiration to me and many others.”

Lawson’s tax cuts at the end of the 1980s — reducing the standard rate of income tax from 29p to 25p and slashing the top rate to 40p — were blamed for fuelling an economic boom and inflation.

But he was revered by many Conservative politicians as a small-state revolutionary and was widely seen as the most important member of Margaret Thatcher’s cabinet during her 11-year spell as premier.

After resigning from the government in 1989, he later won further admirers on the Tory right for his support for Brexit and his scepticism over man-made climate change.

Lawson ran the Treasury under Thatcher from 1983 to 1989, sharing her zeal for cutting taxes and reducing the size of the state, although the two ultimately fell out over economic policy.

Boris Johnson, former prime minister, said: “Nigel Lawson was a fearless and original flame of free market Conservatism.”

Sir John Redwood, who ran Thatcher’s policy unit, said Lawson had been a central figure in creating an enterprise economy in the 1980s.

Lord Nick Macpherson, former Treasury permanent secretary, said Lawson was one of the greatest chancellors of the 20th century. 

“His microeconomic reforms, particularly on tax, were both daring and substantial, and have stood the test of time,” he said. “His intellectual energy and openness to debate was inspirational in the Treasury of the 1980s.”

Although he was later a fervent Brexiter, Lawson fell out with Thatcher over her opposition to Britain joining the European exchange rate mechanism, which he saw as a means of controlling inflation.

Although best known as one of Britain’s longest-serving chancellors, Lawson had a successful career as a journalist before entering parliament in 1974 as MP for Blaby.

He wrote for the Financial Times’s Lex column, later becoming City editor of the Sunday Telegraph and then editor of The Spectator.

After retiring as an MP in 1992, he sat in the House of Lords from 1992 until his retirement at the end of last year.

Sunak’s decision to hang a picture of Lawson in his office drew criticism from some, who argued that Sunak had presided over the highest tax burden in Britain since the second world war.

Sir Bernard Ingham, Thatcher’s former press secretary, said last year he “nearly had a fit” when he heard about Sunak’s homage to Lawson, asking: “Has the man gone mad?”

For a younger generation, Lawson was perhaps less well-known than his daughter, Nigella, the celebrated television chef and food writer. He had six children, also including Dominic Lawson, a journalist.