Death of a Member: Baroness Thatcher

Lord Burns Excerpts

Wednesday 10th April 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Burns]

My Lords, like many other noble Lords, I owe Baroness Thatcher a huge debt of gratitude. Towards the end of 1979, on the advice of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Howe, I was appointed as chief economic adviser to the Treasury, a position that I held throughout the rest of Mrs Thatcher’s time as Prime Minister. During that 10-year period, I had the privilege of attending many meetings with her. I had enormous opportunities to watch the particular style of debate and the method that she used when challenged, something that I had never seen before.

Apart from late-night speechwriting sessions which I occasionally got involved in, most of my experiences were of accompanying the Chancellors of the day, initially the noble and learned Lord, Lord Howe, and then of course the noble Lord, Lord Lawson. By their very nature, we were dealing with the major issues of economic policy and, even more so by their nature, they were usually very controversial. We normally had these sessions because there were some difficult issues to sort out. They were very tense and very often there were tricky issues to resolve. At times one did not expect to reach resolution. On more than one occasion when I left she said to me, “I just want you to look as you go out at what it says on that door”, to remind me that it said First Lord of the Treasury. She was trying to indicate that, in the final analysis, it was going to be her word.

Of course, those people who did not work with Mrs Thatcher assume that by her very nature she began and ended with an entrenched position and refused to listen. The main point that I want to make today, like many noble Lords who have spoken, is that that is not at all how the process took place. Part of her enormous talent was her ability to question, challenge and press you on issues as a way of trying to find whether the views that she held herself could stand that stress-testing. I always felt that she was trying to test her own ideas and your ideas to see how they stood up to this process of questioning.

Like all very great leaders, she had a strong set of principles and values and a clear sense of what she wanted to achieve. But thinking back through some of the episodes and having spoken, sometimes at length, to people who have been writing biographies of Mrs Thatcher, the issues that we dealt with were looked at in enormous depth. The notion that these ideas were pulled off in a casual way and immediately pursued could not be further from the truth. They were issues that we went through time and time again, very often at meeting after meeting until all the aspects of the problem had been identified and she was satisfied that we had covered the issues. I often think that it was as a result of the extent of that process and the argument and debate that she gained strength in the end to make decisions and stick to them in the way that is well known.

As many people have pointed out, she was not always right. She often changed her position on issues. But whatever view you take of individual parts of it, I join with many others in thinking that her contribution in terms of the transformation of the British economy was enormous. I have little doubt that it came about by this combination of a very clear strategic mind and the ability to concentrate and look at issues in depth, stress-test them and go through them at great length before finally coming to a conclusion.

In recent days, I have heard it suggested that somehow the recent financial crisis has its origins in her approach to economic policy. Nothing could be further from the truth. Those who worked with Mrs Thatcher know that she disliked financial excess whether in the private or the public sector. In the early 1980s, when we were struggling with rapid growth of the money supply, she frequently asked why there could not be some limits to the leverage ratios of banks, even in a deregulated system. She was only very reluctantly put off this approach, which has now become much more fashionable after the events of recent years.

A surprised journalist said to me yesterday that after the events of recent years he had been looking at some of the things that Mrs Thatcher had said about the single currency and had been astonished to discover that most of the things that had occurred in the past few years were part of the debate that took place then and why she came to the view that the UK should not be part of the single currency.

Along with many others, I regard myself as enormously fortunate to have played a small part in those momentous years. As the noble Lord, Lord Butler, said, there was a real greatness about Mrs Thatcher and I feel very privileged to have watched that. I would like to hope that I learnt a great deal from those sessions and that extraordinary process of discussion, challenge and debate and really testing the ideas of the people you worked with.