Norman Stewart Hughson Lamont, Baron Lamont of Lerwick, PC (born 8 May 1942) is a former Conservative Party MP for Kingston-upon-Thames, England. He is
best-known for his period serving as Chancellor of the Exchequer, from
1990 until 1993, and was created a life
peer in 1998.
Early career
Lamont was born in the Shetland Islands on 8 May
1942 and was educated at Loretto School, Musselburgh, Edinburgh, Scotland and
Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge, England
where he was President of the Cambridge Union Society in 1964. He also took part
in the English-Speaking Union's Tour of United States of America.
At Cambridge he was a contemporary of Michael Howard, Kenneth Clarke, Leon Brittan, and
John Gummer all of whom became leading figures of the Conservative Party. He worked in the
finance industry (in particular N M Rothschild & Sons) before standing as
a candidate for Member of Parliament in the June 1970 General
Election for Hull East. He was defeated by
John Prescott who would go on to become Tony Blair's Deputy Prime Minister, . Two years later, in May 1972 he won a by-election to become MP for Kingston upon Thames.
In government
Lamont served in successive governments under Margaret
Thatcher and John Major for a total of 14 years, in the Departments of Energy,
Industry, Defence and the Treasury. He was Financial Secretary to the Treasury, then Chief Secretary to the Treasury at the time of Nigel
Lawson's resignation and remained in that position under Major's Chancellorship. In this position he acquiesced in Major's
decision to join the European Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM) at a
central parity of 2.95 Deutschmarks to the Pound. Shortly afterwards he successfully managed Major's election campaign to succeed
Margaret Thatcher as party leader and Prime Minister. In the process he clashed
angrily in private with Nigel Lawson who preferred Michael Heseltine as Thatcher's
successor.
On May 16 1991, he stated in parliament that "Rising
unemployment and the recession have been the price that we have had to pay to get inflation down. That price is well worth
paying"[1] The remark is regularly, if not approvingly,
recalled by commentators and other politicians.
Lamont replaced Major as Chancellor in Major's new Cabinet, thereby finalising his commitment to Major's exchange rate policy.
Lamont claimed that the recession would be "short-lived and relatively shallow" and later that "the green shoots of recovery"
could be seen all around - early in 1992 one of the Sunday newspapers ran a "Green Shoots Index" of
signs of recovery, only to have to drop it when few such signs could be found. Despite the Conservatives' surprise victory in the
April 1992 general election the ERM policy proved unsustainable
and collapsed on Black Wednesday, when Lamont was forced to withdraw the pound from the
ERM despite assuring the public that he would not do so just a week earlier. He faced fierce criticism at the time for his
apparent insouciance in the face of the collapse of the stated central plank of his economic policy; sources friendly to Lamont
told the newspapers that he was singing in the bath with happiness at leaving the ERM. After Major left office and published his
memoirs, Lamont publicly denied Major's version of events, claiming that Major had effectively opted out of his responsibilities
and left Lamont to carry the can for that day's actions.
Whatever the political problems his policies caused, it was during his time as Chancellor that the basic principles which led
to Britain's economic success in the 10 years to 2005 were first spelled out [citation needed]. Conventional wisdom said that without membership of the ERM, there could
be no successful counter-inflationary policy in the UK. In fact, within a remarkably short space of time a formal inflation
target had been adopted, monetary policy had been given intellectual rigour and restoration of public finances had begun. All
these measures caused great unpopularity at the time. But they became the building blocks of economic policy under his
successors, who were able to reap the gain from the pain which he had inflicted on consumers.
During the autumn of 1992 Lamont also became a national laughing-stock, over a string of press stories: that he had not paid
his hotel bill for "champagne and large breakfasts" from the Conservative Party Conference (in fact his bill had been forwarded
on for settlement); that he was in arrears on his personal credit card bill (true); that he had used taxpayers' money to evict a
"sex therapist" called "Miss Whiplash" from a flat he owned (true, but it had been formally approved to allow him to obtain
expedited legal proceedings; there was never any suggestion beyond innuendo that he had ever met his tenant, let alone personally
made use of her services); and that he had called at a newsagent in a seedy area of Paddington late at night to purchase
champagne and expensive "Raffles" cigarettes. The last story in particular turned out to have been entirely invented.
During the Newbury by-election in May 1993, Lamont
was asked at a press conference whether he most regretted claiming to see "the green shoots of recovery" or "singing in his
bath". He replied by quoting the Edith Piaf song "Je ne regrette rien", a dry
response which raised a laugh at the press conference but which played poorly when quoted later on the television. When called to
defend him on Newsnight his friend the former Labour MP Lord Wyatt caused further merriment by claiming that Lamont could do an excellent impersonation of a
Scops owl. After the government's massive loss in the by-election Lamont left office
(declining a demotion to become Secretary of State for the Environment), throwing (by his own account) Major's letter of regret
at his departure unopened into the wastepaper basket, and giving a resignation speech in the House of Commons that made clear his feeling that he had been unfairly treated, saying that the
government 'gives the impression of being in office but not in power'; the then Party Chairman Sir Norman Fowler dismissed the speech as "dud, nasty, ludicrous and silly". Major and Lamont agree that
Lamont had offered his resignation immediately after Black Wednesday and that Major pressed him to remain in office. Lamont came
to the view that Major had sought his survival in office as a firebreak against the criticism of the ERM policy rebounding on
himself.
Lamont appeared on the 1993 British Comedy Awards to give an award, resulting in hissing from the audience. In December 1993
the comedian Julian Clary joked to host Jonathan
Ross "I've just been fisting Norman Lamont. Talk about a red box". This comment was well
received by the audience but, despite Ross' s attempt to make light of the remark by asking how Clary had "clawed his way to the
front of the queue", it led to Clary's career taking a big downturn.
In the following years Lamont became a fierce critic of the Major government. He is now regarded as a staunch euro-sceptic. In 1995 he authored Sovereign Britain in which he envisaged Britain's withdrawal
from the European Union, and was talked of as a potential leadership challenger to John
Major; in the event it was John Redwood who challenged for the leadership. He is the current vice president of the euro-sceptic Bruges Group.
Despite departing under a cloud, Lamont defends his budget record. The 1991 budget, in which he
seized the opportunity presented by Mrs Thatcher's retirement to restrict mortgage interest tax relief to the basic rate of
income tax and also cut the rate of corporation tax by two percentage points, was greeted by positive coverage in
The Economist which dubbed him a Nimble Novice. In the 1992 budget his proposal to advance to a 20% basic rate of income tax through a combination of a narrow initial
band, a cut in tax on deposit interest and curtailment of tax allowances was hailed as an elegant way of combining populism with
progressivism, though events were later to lend support to Nigel Lawson's view that this approach was strategically inept. His
final budget in 1993 was more sympathically received by financial specialists than John Major's 1990 budget or Kenneth Clarke's
budget of November 1993. Lamont attributes the large public sector borrowing requirement (ie fiscal deficit) of these years to
the depth of the recession triggered by his inability to cut interest rates sooner within the ERM.
1997 and beyond
In boundary changes enacted for the 1997 General Election
Lamont's constituency of Kingston upon Thames was split up. The northern parts were
merged with Richmond and Barnes to form Richmond Park, and
the southern parts merged with the larger Surbiton to form Kingston and Surbiton. Lamont lost the contest for the candidacy for
the new southerly seat to the incumbent Surbiton MP. He then embarked on a high profile search for a new constituency and was
eventually adopted as the Conservative candidate for Harrogate in Yorkshire. The move was seen as an attempt to
parachute in an outsider, with Lamont seeming like an opportunist next to Phil Willis, a
local teacher, and long-time local politician. When the General Election came his unpopularity and that of the Conservatives in
general, a massive tactical voting campaign occurred in the constituency and the Liberal
Democrats won the seat. He was not recommended for a peerage in John Major's resignation honours, but was the following year made a peer as Baron Lamont of
Lerwick, of Lerwick in the Shetland Islands. He is
currently a director of Scottish Annuity & Life Holdings, a reinsurance firm, and, since 1996, chairman of Le
Cercle, a foreign policy club which meets bi-annually in Washington, D.C..
In 1998 the former military dictator of Chile,
General Augusto Pinochet visited Britain to obtain medical treatment. This prompted a
debate about whether he should be arrested and put on trial over his human rights record.
Lamont joined with Margaret Thatcher in defending Pinochet[2], calling him a "good and brave and honourable soldier"[3] His stance was highly controversial[4][5]
In February 2005 it was reported in The Times that
Lamont and John Major had held up the release of papers concerning Black Wednesday under the Freedom of Information Act. The two
wrote to the paper to deny the reports.
In October 2006 he complained that the new party leader David
Cameron (Lamont's political adviser around the time of Black Wednesday) lacked policies.[6]
References
- ^ Hansard
- ^ "Pinochet death 'saddens' Thatcher" at BBC News
Online
- ^ Remember Chile
- ^ "His theme in all his interviews was that Pinochet, who was never elected,
was much preferable to Salvador Allende, the prime minister he toppled and killed, who was elected, twice.Paul Foot writing in The
Guardian
- ^ "Fifteen months ago, in the wake of Pinochet's arrest, the main chant of
Norman Lamont's bizarre chorus was that Chilean democracy was so fragile that an act of justice of this kind would bring it
crashing to the ground. [..] Fifteen months on, those opinions seem even more contemptible than they did at the time"Isabel Hilton in The
Guardian
- ^ The Guardian
Wikisource has original works written by or about:
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Bibliography
- Lamont, Norman (1999). In Office. Little Brown. ISBN
0-7515-3058-1.
(autobiography)
External links
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