Former chancellor Nigel Lawson dies, aged 91

Lawson, was born on 11 March 1932 into a non-orthodox Jewish family in Hampstead, north London

By Lee Harpin April 4, 2023, 1:04 am Edit

Lee Harpin is the Jewish News's political editor

Former chancellor Nigel Lawson, credited with overseeing the economic boom of the 1980s that came to define Margaret Thatcher’s government, has died aged 91.

Lawson, was born on 11 March 1932 into a non-orthodox Jewish family in Hampstead, north London, as the son of a wealthy commodity broker.

The MP for the Blaby constituency from 1974 to 1992, Lawson served in numerous cabinet positions under Thatcher and became chancellor in 1983.

He championed wider share ownership, lower personal taxes and free market economics.

He resigned in 1989 amid disagreements with Thatcher over policy and then spent the next three years on the backbenches before being given a life peerage.

Lawson sat in the House of Lords until his retirement in January 2023.

He backed the UK leaving the European Union in the 2016 Brexit referendum, serving on the organising committee of the Vote Leave campaign group.

In an interview in 2010 he said he considered himself Jewish only by ancestry.

“I was not brought up in any Jewish culture but rather in the culture of this country,” he said. “Of course, I thought everything through myself but by the time I was in my first year at Oxford I was certainly a committed unbeliever.”

On Thatcher’s appeal to her constituents in Finchley, Lawson once said””She did represent a constituency [Finchley] with a large Jewish population.

“But I think that was a minor issue. The bigger explanation is that she was completely untouched by antisemitism. She took individuals on their own merits and recognised ability where she found it.”

Lawson also formed the Global Warming Policy Foundation, to challenge accepted scientific consensus on the issue.

His grandfather, Gustav Leibson, had emigrated from Latvia, becoming a British citizen in 1914, and had anglicised the family name to Lawson in June 1925.

Lawson married Vanessa Salmon, heiress to the Lyons Corner House firm, in 1955 and the couple had four children, including Dominic, who became a journalist, and Nigella, who found fame as a TV cook and food writer.

The couple divorced in 1980 and Lawson subsequently married Commons researcher Therese Maclear.

The couple, who had two children together, separated in 2008.