Whether you agreed or disagreed with him, there was no denying that Nigel Lawson was a “big beast” of British politics in a way that few of his successors came close to matching — with the arguable exceptions of Gordon Brown and George Osborne.
He was one of the few Cabinet ministers with the self-confidence to stand up to Margaret Thatcher and his Budgets were genuinely dramatic Parliamentary set-pieces compared with today’s insipid pre-briefed statements.
