Telegraph Canonises Nigel Lawson

There was plenty of creative reinvention performed at the time Margaret Thatcher passed away: the great Brexit pioneer whose Bruges speech told “We have not successfully rolled back the frontiers of the state in Britain, only to see them re-imposed at a European level with a European super-state exercising a new dominance from Brussels”. But this was highly selective.

Because, earlier in the same speech, Mrs T also said “Britain does not dream of some cosy, isolated existence on the fringes of the European Community. Our destiny is in Europe, as part of the Community”. So it has been with the passing, announced yesterday, of Nigel Lawson, for so long Chancellor of the Exchequer in the Thatcher Governments of the 1980s.

And no organ of our free and fearless press has been more selective, not to say fawning, than the increasingly desperate and downmarket Telegraph, which has splashed on Lawson’s death. “Nigel Lawson, Thatcher’s tax slasher, dies at 91 … Tributes paid to ‘fearless, transformational chancellor’ from Tory party grandees”. “Tax slasher”? Someone’s having a laugh.

Those in the 90% plus of workers who may have seen some reduction in personal taxation also had to contend with the last really bad bout of inflation, in the late 1980s, which resulted in eye-wateringly high interest rates followed by the inevitable recession. New council housing did not match the numbers of properties sold off under Right to Buy. House prices rose accordingly.

But this inconvenient detail is not allowed to enter at the Tel, where readers are told “He helped lead the privatisation drive that put swathes of the public sector under the control of private companies, a reform that has been largely kept in place ever since”. The result of which has been bumper pay days for management and shareholders, and crap service for everyone else.

But do go on. “His work led to the privatisation of British Airways, British Telecom, British Gas and the national electricity generators”. Gas prices are, once again, going up this month. In Portugal, energy provider EDP cut gas prices to its customers by 20% from the start of this month. What else?

“During [his tenure] he also saw the government’s financial status improve from a deficit to a surplus”. Which means selling off national assets to pay down debt, rather than investing the proceeds. There was also all that money from North Sea Oil which went, in significant part, to pay benefits to an army of unemployed workers which topped, and remained at, more than three million - rather than doing something about the unemployment.

That is not allowed to enter the blue-tinted dreamworld of the Tel, either. Nor is there much coverage of those contradictions in Lawson’s behaviour: contributed to Mrs T’s downfall by insisting on a date to join the European Exchange Rate Mechanism, but then the great Brexiteer. The Eurosceptic who made his home in France. The espouser of climate change denialism.

Instead, an editorial tells “The 1988 budget was most emblematic of his time in charge of the Treasury. Lawson scrapped all tax rates above 40p, while reducing the basic rate of income tax from 27 per cent to 25 per cent. Moreover, the broader tax system was simplified. This signalled that Britain, after decades of economic decline, was once again becoming a dynamic market economy”. No mention of the inflation. Or of the bust that followed.

Instead, we get a fawning apologia from Allister Heath, who asserts “He was the greatest of modern chancellors, a giant who bestrode British politics and, in close partnership with Margaret Thatcher, played a central role in transforming the British economy from basket case to envy of the world. He helped give Britain its mojo back, rebuilt our work ethic”.

What Heath manages not to notice is that Lawson became Chancellor of the Exchequer ten years after the UK had joined the then EEC. And that this membership benefited the country rather more than another of what Robin Day memorably and rightly called “here today and gone tomorrow politician”.

You know that Heath is being not merely selective, but fawning with it, when he sneers at Gordon Brown as “a hugely lesser Chancellor”. We no longer have the rather better times that ended in 2010, and with departure from the European Union, that “basket case”, to use Heath’s happy phrase, has returned and is not going away any time soon. It was Europe Wot Won It.

Reinventing reality is not news. So what does that make the Telegraph?

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