History of Baroness Margaret Thatcher - GOV.UK GOV.UK Baroness Margaret Thatcher Conservative 1979 to 1990 Born 13 October 1925, Grantham, Lincolnshire Died Conservative Major acts Housing Act 1980: gave security of tenure, and the right to buy homes, to tenants of local authorities and other bodies. Baroness Margaret Thatcher, the 'Iron Lady', was the first female British Prime Minister and the longest serving PM for over 150 years. Margaret Thatcher’s father, a shopkeeper and Mayor of Grantham, was a major influence in her childhood. She was educated at the local grammar school and studied Chemistry at Oxford University, where she became president of the university Conservative association. Thatcher read for the Bar before being elected as the Conservative MP for Finchley in 1959. She held junior posts before becoming Shadow Spokesperson for Education, and entered the Cabinet as Education Secretary in 1970. In Opposition she stood against Edward Heath for the party leadership in 1975 and won. Her victory was considered a surprise by many.

In 1979, the Conservative Party won the General Election and Thatcher became PM, taking over from James Callaghan. Her first 2 years in office were not easy - unemployment was very high, but the economy gradually showed improvement. She brought more of her supporters into the Cabinet, and added to her reputation by leading the country to war against Argentina in the Falkland Islands. The Conservatives went on to win the 1983 election by an overwhelming majority, helped by a divided opposition. Her government followed a radical programme of privatisation and deregulation, reform of the trade unions, tax cuts and the introduction of market mechanisms into health and education. The aim was to reduce the role of government and increase individual self-reliance. She also became a familiar figure internationally, creating a famous friendship with US President Reagan and gaining the praise of Soviet leader Gorbachev. One great difficulty during her time in office was the issue of Europe. Her long-serving Foreign Secretary, Sir Geoffrey Howe resigned in November 1990 in protest at her attitude to Europe. His resignation speech brought about events which were to lead to her exit from 10 Downing Street later that month.

Michael Heseltine challenged her for the leadership, and while he failed to win, he gained 152 votes – enough to make it evident that a crucial minority favoured a change. Thatcher was eventually persuaded not to go forward to the second ballot, which was won by her Chancellor of the Exchequer, John Major . She left the House of Commons in 1992, and was appointed a life peerage in the House of Lords in the same year, receiving the title of Baroness Thatcher of Kesteven. In 1995 she was appointed as Lady Companion of the Order of the Garter, the highest order of Chivalry in the UK. Her writings include 2 volumes of memoirs: The Downing Street Years and The Path to Power. Thatcher died on 8 April 2013 at The Ritz Hotel in London, after suffering a stroke. She received a ceremonial funeral including full military honours, with a church service at St Paul’s Cathedral.

More from the GOV.UK History of Government blog Chancellor of the Exchequer : definition of Chancellor of the Exchequer and synonyms of Chancellor of the Exchequer (English) British politics portal The Chancellor of the Exchequer is the title held by the British Cabinet minister who is responsible for all economic and financial matters. Often simply called the Chancellor, the office-holder controls HM Treasury and plays a role akin to the posts of Minister of Finance or Secretary of the Treasury in other nations. The position is considered one of the four Great Offices of State and in recent times has come to be the most powerful office in British politics after the Prime Minister . It is the only office of the four Great Offices not to have been occupied by a woman. The Chancellor of the Exchequer is now always Second Lord of the Treasury as one of the Lords Commissioners for executing the office of Lord High Treasurer . In the 18th and early 19th centuries it was common for the Prime Minister to also serve as Chancellor of the Exchequer if he sat in the Commons; the last Chancellor who was simultaneously Prime Minister & Chancellor of the Exchequer was Stanley Baldwin in 1923.

Formerly, in cases when the Chancellorship was vacant, the Lord Chief Justice of the King's Bench would act as Chancellor pro tempore. [1] The last Lord Chief Justice to serve in this way was Lord Denman in 1834. The Chancellor is the third-oldest major state office in English and British history,[ citation needed ] one which originally carried responsibility for the Exchequer , the medieval English institution for the collection of royal revenues. The Exchequer dates from the time of Henry I . The Chancellor controlled monetary policy as well as fiscal policy until 1997, when the Bank of England was granted independent control of its interest rates. The Chancellor also has oversight of public spending across Government departments. The office should not be confused with those of the Lord Chancellor or the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster , both Cabinet posts, the Chancellor of the High Court , a senior judge, or the Lord Chief Baron of the Exchequer , a defunct judicial office. The current Chancellor of the Exchequer is George Osborne .

Contents 6 External links Roles and responsibilities A previous Chancellor, Robert Lowe , described the office in the following terms in the House of Commons, on 11 April 1870: "The Chancellor of the Exchequer is a man whose duties make him more or less of a taxing machine. He is entrusted with a certain amount of misery which it is his duty to distribute as fairly as he can."The current chancellor right now in 2012 is George Osborne Fiscal policy The Chancellor has considerable control over other departments as it is the Treasury which sets departmental expenditure limits. The amount of power this gives to an individual Chancellor depends on his personal forcefulness, his status with his party and his relationship with the Prime Minister. Gordon Brown , who became Chancellor when Labour came into Government in 1997, had a large personal power base in the party. Perhaps as a result, Tony Blair chose to keep him in his job throughout his ten years as Prime Minister; making Brown an unusually dominant figure and the longest serving Chancellor since the Reform Act of 1832.

[2] This situation has strengthened a pre-existing trend towards the Chancellorship moving into a clear second among government offices, elevated above its traditional peers, the Foreign Secretaryship and Home Secretaryship . One part of the Chancellor's key roles involves the framing of the annual Budget , which is summarised in a speech to the House of Commons . Traditionally the budget speech was delivered on Budget Day , a Tuesday (although not always) in March, as Britain's tax year follows the Julian Calendar . From 1993, the Budget was preceded by an annual ' Autumn Statement ', now called the Pre-Budget Report , which forecasts government spending in the next year and usually takes place in November or December. This preview of the next year's Budget is also referred to as the "mini-Budget". The 1997, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2006, 2007, 2008 and 2012 Budgets were all delivered on a Wednesday. Monetary policy Although the Bank of England is responsible for setting interest rates, the Chancellor also plays an important part in the monetary policy structure.

He sets the inflation target which the Bank must set interest rates to meet. Under the Bank of England Act 1998 the Chancellor has the power of appointment of four out of nine members of the Bank's Monetary Policy Committee - the so-called 'external' members. He also has a high level of influence over the appointment of the Bank's Governor and Deputy Governors, and has the right of consultation over the appointment of the two remaining MPC members from within the Bank. [3] The Act also provides that the Government has the power to give instructions to the Bank on interest rates for a limited period in extreme circumstances. This power has never been used. Ministerial arrangements At HM Treasury the Chancellor is supported by a political team of four junior ministers and by permanent civil servants . The most important junior minister is the Chief Secretary to the Treasury , a member of the Cabinet, to whom the negotiations with other government departments on the details of government spending are delegated, followed by the Paymaster General , the Financial Secretary to the Treasury and the Economic Secretary to the Treasury .

Two other officials are given the title of a Secretary to the Treasury , although neither is a government minister in the Treasury: the Parliamentary Secretary to the Treasury is the Government Chief Whip in the House of Commons ; the Permanent Secretary to the Treasury is not a minister but the senior civil servant in the Treasury. The holder of the office of Chancellor is ex-officio Second Lord of the Treasury . As Second Lord, his official residence is Number 11 Downing Street in London, next door to the residence of the First Lord of the Treasury (a post usually, though not always, held by the Prime Minister ), who resides in 10 Downing Street . While in the past both houses were private residences, today they serve as interlinked offices, with the occupant living in a small apartment made from attic rooms previously resided in by servants. The Chancellor is obliged to be a member of the Privy Council , and thus is styled the Right Honourable (Rt. Hon.). Because the House of Lords is excluded from Finance bills, the office is effectively limited to members of the House of Commons. Perquisites of office Official residence The Chancellor's official residence is No. 11 Downing Street.

In 1997, the then First and Second Lords, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown respectively, swapped apartments, as the Chancellor's apartment in No. 11 was bigger and thus better suited to the needs of Blair (who had children) than Brown who was at that stage unmarried. So although No. 11 was still officially Brown's residence, he actually resided in the apartment in the attic of No. 10, and Blair — although officially residing in No. 10 — actually lived in the attic apartment of No. 11. Dorneywood Main article: Dorneywood Dorneywood is the summer residence that is traditionally made available to the Chancellor, though it is the Prime Minister who ultimately decides who may use it. Gordon Brown , on becoming Chancellor in 1997, refused to use it and the house, which is set in 215 acres (87 ha) [4] of parkland, was allocated to Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott . It reverted to the Chancellor in 2007, then Alistair Darling . [5] Budget box Budget box or Gladstone box, c.

1860 The Chancellor traditionally carries his Budget speech to the House of Commons in a particular red briefcase . The Chancellor's red briefcase is identical to the briefcases used by all other government ministers (known as ministerial boxes or " red boxes ") to transport their official papers but is better known because the Chancellor traditionally displays the briefcase, containing the Budget speech, to the press in the morning before delivering the speech. The original Budget briefcase was first used by William Ewart Gladstone in 1860 and continued in use until 1965 when James Callaghan was the first Chancellor to break with tradition when he used a newer box. Prior to Gladstone, a generic red briefcase of varying design and specification was used. The practice is said to have begun in the late 16th century, when Queen Elizabeth I 's representative Francis Throckmorton presented the Spanish Ambassador, Bernardino de Mendoza , with a specially constructed red briefcase filled with black puddings .[ citation needed ] In July 1997, Gordon Brown became the second Chancellor to use a new box for the Budget.

Made by industrial trainees at Babcock Rosyth Defence Ltd ship and submarine dockyard in Fife, the new box is made of yellow pine, with a brass handle and lock, covered in scarlet leather and embossed with the Royal initials and crest and the Chancellor's title. In his first Budget , in March 2008, Alistair Darling reverted to using the original budget briefcase and his successor, George Osborne, continued this tradition for his first budget, before announcing that it would be retired due to its fragile condition. [6] The key to the original budget box has been lost. [7] Budget tipple By tradition, the Chancellor has been allowed to drink whatever he or she wishes whilst making the annual Budget Speech to parliament. This includes alcohol, which is otherwise banned under parliamentary rules. Previous Chancellors have opted for whisky ( Kenneth Clarke ), gin and tonic ( Geoffrey Howe ), brandy and water ( Benjamin Disraeli ), spritzer ( Nigel Lawson ) and sherry and beaten egg ( William Gladstone ). [8] The current Chancellor, George Osborne , like his two predecessors, Alistair Darling and Gordon Brown , [9] opts for water.

In fact Darling drank what was named "Standard Water" in reference to, and support of, the London Evening Standard newspaper's campaign to have plain tap water available in restaurants at no charge to customers. [10] List of Chancellors of the Exchequer Colour key John Harris talks to past chancellors of the exchequer about their time in office | Politics | The Guardian Share on Messenger Close Times may be grim and getting grimmer, but things could be worse. We could, for example, be living in the mid-to-late 1970s, when Woolworths managed to remain in business but the world was reeling from quadrupling oil prices, the lights regularly went out, and around the corner were mass unemployment and social breakdown. Denis Healey, defence secretary in the Labour government of the 60s, became chancellor of the exchequer in March 1974, serving for five years under two prime ministers, Harold Wilson and James Callaghan.

His Tory predecessor had been the late and long-forgotten Anthony Barber, the humble servant of Edward Heath, whose most notable contribution to history was the Barber Boom, a mess of - and some of this may sound familiar - inflation, ramped-up government borrowing and a banking crisis. To make life even more painful, the Labour party was starting to tear itself apart, and Healey was bedevilled by out-of-control trade unions. When I meet Healey, now 91, at his Sussex home and reel off all these problems, he casts his mind back and cracks a smile worthy of the gallows. "To put it in a polite way," he says, "it was a fucking disaster." Aside from a brief upswing in 1978, his time at the Treasury was one long firefight. The insanity of it all is captured by an occasion in 1976 when Healey was en route to Heathrow, to fly to Hong Kong for a meeting of Commonwealth finance ministers. That day, the pound was falling fast and, rather than be out of contact for 17 hours, he had his ministerial car turned round and went back to work.

He awoke the next morning to hear that the British workforce of Ford had gone on strike, and - to quote from his memoirs - "for the first and last time in my life, for about 12 hours, I was close to demoralisation." I suggest that he must have lost a lot of sleep. "Yes, I did. Not only that, but I went to bed, as I always wrote in my diary, dog tired." You also think the job made you ill. "Yes," he says. "I got shingles." And that being chancellor made you deaf. "Yes. A little bit." And you got colds and flu a lot more. "That's right." You also say the job affected your teeth. "Well, I can now put my teeth on my nose." Just to prove it, he calmly removes his false front teeth and does exactly that. "I found it physically exhausting and very worrying," he says. "Shingles was the best example of that, because it's a nervous illness." Trying to break out of all this doom, I wonder whether the job had its positive aspects. Were there things about life at the Treasury that made it enjoyable? Healey gives a mirthless laugh. "No. I wouldn't say so.

The great thing about Defence was, I went to the most wonderful and interesting parts of the world. But the Treasury's just bloody hard work." So what kept you going? "Energy and determination, really. I wanted to make a success of the job. It was very tiring, but I'd been in the army for five years in the war, so I'd learned to put up with things." To be chancellor of the exchequer is to walk in the footsteps of giants: Gladstone, Disraeli, Lloyd George, Churchill. Given that no policy will fly without money, the job brings dizzying power, and close involvement in every aspect of government. All this is dramatised by the annual, very British ritual that is Budget Day: the red box held aloft, a long Commons speech, and the country on tenterhooks about tax, spending and the price of fags, booze and fuel. But then there is the downside. As Alistair Darling well knows, it is a quirk of the British system of government that the prime minister retains the title of First Lord of the Treasury.

As the Brown/Blair years proved, even supposedly clearcut agreements about who does what will never resolve the endless tensions between numbers 10 and 11. The chancellor is a victim of a particularly thorny problem: that despite having the whip hand over his colleagues' spending requests, he must ultimately defer to the man - or woman - next door. As Healey puts it, "If the chancellor is really making a cock of it, then the prime minister must stop him. But if the prime minister makes a cock of it, the chancellor has to resign." Worse still, he - and thus far it has only been he - is effectively in command of a huge army of producers and consumers who may not just ignore his orders, but respond in the exact opposite way. He will constantly find himself navigating between the demands of economic stability, and the cruder imperatives of politics (essentially, that elections demand tax cuts and low interest rates). The forecasts on which decisions are based will often turn out to be wildly wide of the mark, leaving yesterday's inspired decision looking like today's great mistake. A crisis of some kind will never be far away.

Oh, and the hours are cruel, and the chancellorship has long been known as the loneliest job in government. Really: who'd want it, least of all at a time like this? For the past few months, I have been meeting ex-chancellors. The record-breaking length of the current PM's time at the Treasury, and the Tories' dominance of the 80s and 90s, have led to the Tory-Labour ratio coming in at four to one - so as well as meeting Healey, I've sat in a Mayfair boardroom with Norman Lamont , taken tea at the House of Lords with Nigel Lawson, and shared the company of Kenneth Clarke and Geoffrey Howe. Some describe no end of anxieties, and the fretful business of pulling policy levers with precious little certainty about what will happen next. But some - all Conservatives, which may say something about a certain kind of Tory insouciance - claim they never lost sleep through their time at the Treasury, nor viewed their job with anything other than calm level-headedness.

When Jim Callaghan's Labour government was defeated by Margaret Thatcher's Tories in May 1979, she and her allies were gifted with one of those rare occasions when the balance of political forces allowed the people at the core of a government to do exactly what they wanted - and in the vanguard of their revolution was Geoffrey Howe. He remains a hero to all his Tory successors. Nigel Lawson and Ken Clarke name him as their most admired postwar chancellor; Lamont demurs only because he is torn between Howe and Lawson. "He took over the kind of thing that George Osborne will be taking over," Clarke says, "and he did lots of necessary things in the teeth of all the accepted wisdom, and he was right." At 30 years' distance, the eye-watering ferocity of Howe's decisions as chancellor is incredible. In keeping with the Tories' belief that it was better to tax spending than earnings - which, of course, meant the poor paying proportionally more than the rich - his first budget increased VAT, in most cases from 8% to 15%.

In 1981, there came that great slaying of postwar conventions: rising joblessness and social strife would have to be tolerated in the cause of tackling inflation. Moreover, these were the days when budgets contained small acts of class war: in 1980, for example, Howe announced that benefits paid to the families of people who went on strike would be cut by £12 a week, and made liable to tax. I spend 90 minutes talking to him in a windowless anteroom close to the House of Lords. We discuss it all: his fateful arrival at the Treasury ("I was very anxious - it was a hugely exciting, frightening, important moment"), the occasion when the Thatcher government lifted controls on foreign exchange and the worry kept him up all night, and one of the great ironies of the Thatcher years: that for all her branding as the resolute, not-for-turning Iron Lady, he and Lawson regularly found that she would fret about the possible fallout from some of their most radical moves and propose what amounted to half-measures (before Lawson dropped the top rate of tax from 60% to 40%, for example, she suggested 50% would be more sensible).

"Margaret was always more sensitive to the electoral consequences," says Howe, now 82. "Caution was quite frequent with her." So was behaviour that bordered on the imbalanced, as one story from the period proves. In late 1981, her government was feeling the pinch. Manufacturing capacity had fallen by a fifth, there had been a summer of riots and unemployment was nearing three million. It was time for the chancellor's autumn statement, and yet more bad news: rises in housing rents and prescription charges, and another upping of National Insurance, to pay for the ever-lengthening dole queues. Presentation was all-important. There is a famous door that links numbers 10 and 11 Downing Street, and as Howe and his aides worked on the speech, through it came the prime minister, spoiling for a fight. "We were drafting the statement," Howe says, "and she felt it was wrong, I forget in what respect. She came back in at 10 or 11 o'clock at night after a dinner engagement and behaved very intemperately... much worse than usual." In his memoirs, he recalls Thatcher "playing to the gallery outrageously".

At one point, he says, she turned to him and shouted, "If this is the best you can do, I'd better send you to hospital and deliver the Statement myself." Trying to put it all in context, he compares his 15-year spell as one of Thatcher's closest allies to a marriage, and says, "Some people put the cap on the toothpaste and some don't." His successor, Nigel Lawson, served as chancellor between 1983 and 1989, a time of momentous happenings: the frenzy of deregulation that included the Big Bang, the Thatcher era's iconic privatisations, successive cuts in income tax, and the so-called Lawson Boom, in which credit exploded and house prices ballooned, thus laying the ground for the recession of the early 90s. It all ended with the falling-out with Thatcher that defined his last 18 months in office, and warfare between numbers 10 and 11 over something that now looks rather arcane: his determination to keep sterling's rate within a ceiling of three deutschmarks to the pound, and his associated belief that the UK should join the European system of fixed exchange rates that preceded the euro.

Thatcher, encouraged by her quietly notorious economic adviser Alan Walters (who died, aged 82, a fortnight ago), was having none of it, a position dramatised by the infamous quotation that sealed Lawson's fate: "I must prevail." Lawson is now an admirably youthful-looking 76, around five stone lighter than during his time at the Treasury, and these days chiefly famed for his lonely war against the consensus on climate change (his book An Appeal To Reason, subtitled A Cool Look At Global Warming, was published last year). His falling-out with Thatcher, he says, was "grim - it didn't do me any good, it didn't do her any good, and it didn't do the government any good." On occasion, he tells me, Thatcher's behaviour was "bizarre", and the accusation in her memoirs that he ended up running exchange-rate policy in secret is "a lie". Trying to heal wounds 20 years on, he says, would be pointless - so on the occasions when the two now meet, the conversation amounts to "only politesse, nothing of substance." He comes to life when he talks about what might be called The Chancellor's Condition.

"If I wasn't incurring resentment among a number of the spending ministers," he says at one point, "it would mean I wasn't doing my job." Later on, he acknowledges that he has "always been, to some extent, a loner". By way of underlining his habit of wilful isolation, I remind him of an off-the-record judgment from an old Tory colleague: "For years, Nigel ignored everybody, and he was the best chancellor we ever had." "As chancellor, you have to have a curious combination of traits," he says. "You have to be both thick-skinned and sensitive. You can't let things get to you - but on the other hand, you have to be extremely sensitive to what's happening in the country, and what your colleagues' feelings are. But you don't want to show it; that would be a big mistake. "The other thing about me in particular," he goes on, "is that I never thought there would be any circumstances in which I would be prime minister. Perhaps it was a mistake, but I didn't - like many chancellors do - go around cultivating people and ingratiating myself in the hope that one day I would get their support for the top job.

That meant that when I was engaged in an argument in cabinet, I was less likely to get support." Towards the end of our conversation, Lawson comes up with one more requirement for a successful chancellor: "Never lose sleep over anything." This, I suggest, is surely impossible - did he never wake in the dead of night, worrying? "No," he shoots back. "I am really very good at switching off." Lawson finally went on his way in October 1989, and John Major began 13 months at the Treasury in which he managed to convince Margaret Thatcher to agree to Britain's membership of the ERM. Her acquiescence was one of many signs of the increasing weakness that led to her being toppled, whereupon Major became Tory leader, and his job was handed to Norman Lamont. Lamont's spell at the Treasury (whose ambience, he says, suggested a "Russian psychiatric hospital") amounts to a cautionary tale about the perils of high office.

His unfortunate place in modern history was sealed by a pantomimic run of stories, gleefully chewed over by the red-top press: the renting of a flat he owned to an S&M prostitute known as Miss Whiplash, the discovery by the Sun that he was in arrears on his credit card, the entirely made-up story of a mysterious late-night trip to a branch of Threshers in Paddington - and that memorable occasion, six months after his sacking, when he took the stage at the British Comedy Awards, and Julian Clary put his career on hold by telling the host - Jonathan Ross, appropriately enough - that he'd been backstage, "fisting Norman Lamont". Rather more auspiciously, it is one of the more notable details of his time at the Treasury that his close advisers included David Cameron, described in Lamont's memoirs as a "brilliant Old Etonian with a taste for the good life" - a description he proves very reluctant to flesh out, aside from the observation that "he liked jetskiing". "Some of what happened was ridiculous," Lamont says now. "The credit card story was ridiculous too: £200 overdrawn - so what?" He sighs.

"A lot of the tabloid silliness was just a product of the frustration people felt with the recession." What truly did for Lamont's reputation, of course, was Black Wednesday: that high-velocity run of events on September 16 1992 that saw millions tumbling through the foreign exchange markets, interest rates springing from 10% to 15% in a matter of hours, and Britain exiting the European exchange rate mechanism. Sixteen years on, he denies that he felt much anxiety. "It was just clinical," he says. "The patient was dead." Lamont is a fascinating interviewee: wryly funny, only too aware of the fact that though politics attracts those who seek power, events can render them impotent victims. When it comes to his legacy, he seems ambivalent: "I've always regarded the job of being chancellor as one in which you're likely to be pretty unpopular," he tells me. But he's also very keen to make his case.

The day after we meet, he emails me a document full of tributes to his time in the job, from a selection of journalists and economists, who salute his blazing of a trail that led to independence for the Bank of England, and the tax hikes in his last budget - most infamously, the introduction of VAT on fuel - that improved the state of the public finances. "Hopefully," says his accompanying note, "history will be written more by people like them than the tabloids." Thus far, fate has been much kinder to Lamont's successor, Kenneth Clarke. Credited with beginning the decade of economic sunshine in which Gordon Brown made hay, he is still an MP, and seemingly tipped each week for a return to frontline Tory politics (after pre-Christmas suggestions that he might take George Osborne's job as shadow chancellor, at the time of writing, fevered speculation surrounded his possible appointment as shadow business secretary). Having already taken care of health, education and the Home Office, Lamont's sacking led to him being shunted to the Treasury by John Major in May 1993 - whereupon he got to work on the public finances by introducing the biggest tax rises in at least two decades.

There were, he admits, "slight qualms of self-doubt: 'Am I going to make a pig's ear of this? Am I going to destroy my reputation by being overwhelmed?' " On the whole, however, he says he arrived in his last government job brimming with enthusiasm and ambition. "There was an air of crisis," he says. "Black Wednesday wasn't long behind us. It was just about possible to say we were coming out of recession. But the thing I was convinced would dominate my life - and it did - was the fact that we had a huge and growing budget deficit that was burgeoning out of control. So I realised that I was going to have to put up taxes and control public spending much more toughly, which was going to be tricky. I knew it was tin-hat time, not least because we'd just fought an election on tax cuts, which I told my colleagues at the time was a foolish platform.

I had privately said, 'Whoever wins this election is going to be putting taxes up, not cutting them' - something one might repeat in 2008." Two weeks after we meet, George Osborne and David Cameron serve notice of new Tory proposals for tax cuts - in which context, what Clarke says next might definitely give the two pause for thought: "Anybody who stands at the next election on a platform of tax cuts is asking for trouble." By comparison with some of his predecessors, Clarke seems to have been a rather laid-back kind of chancellor, as proved by two episodes in particular. In 1996, the Treasury was sent into a spin when the entire contents of the budget were leaked to the Daily Mirror - but Clarke's response was calmly to ask for the advice of a lawyer and go for a curry. The previous year, when Barings merchant bank crashed thanks to unauthorised dealing by the infamous Nick Leeson, his civil servants frantically did their best to find someone to buy the remains - and their boss, characteristically, was unimpressed. "I wasn't quite sure what we were supposed to be doing.

We were just sitting there trying to look important." That day, Clarke's beloved Nottingham Forest were playing at Queens Park Rangers, the team supported by his private secretary. Their west London ground was only a short drive away. "So off we went to the football." What made Clarke's breezy approach to the job all the more unlikely was the wider political picture: the Tory party ripping itself to shreds amid an insurgent Labour party. There again, within Major's fragile position, there lurked good reason for him to feel safe. "I felt confident because I thought I could keep John's confidence. And I also thought my independence was fairly well-assured because I'd succeeded a chancellor he'd sacked. I don't think any prime minister has ever sacked two." For the past three decades, we have lived under the dominance of the ideas that Thatcher and Howe pioneered, Lawson and Lamont stuck to, and even that not-exactly-Thatcherite chancellor Ken Clarke happily embraced: deregulation, easy access to credit, mortgages for all, the letting loose of the City, and no return to the days when governments rescued ailing businesses. Until recently, Brown, Blair and the other creators of New Labour were no exception.

It's an old Tory line, but it nails the essential point: as Geoffrey Howe tells me, "The importance of what we achieved was the transformation of the Labour party. That was the scale of our success." Now, these men have watched as the old rules have suddenly been shaken. Banks have been nationalised; there is talk of state aid for what remains of the British car industry; the name of John Maynard Keynes is back in fashion. All this might suggest the passage of the Tory old guard into irrelevance, though of late, the Conservative ex-chancellors have reportedly been tapped for advice by the new generation, including Norman Lamont who has recently been giving advice to his former aide David Cameron - a matter, he says, of "one or two meetings". Clarke, for what it's worth, has denied suggestions that he might be in line for Osborne's current job, though if some strange realignment of the universe happened and he faced our current problems as chancellor, he says it would be with relish. "The challenge would excite me," he says. "And because it's so desperately important, what's going on...

The idea of being able to sit at the table where the decisions are being taken to tackle the problem and improve the situation - that's what you go into politics for." Clarke - who, despite being 68, recently claimed he was in "mid-career" - has yet to publish any memoirs, which looks like a wise move. There are, after all, passages from ex-Tory chancellors' autobiographies that now look very shaky. In Nigel Lawson's, for example, the credit binge and "banking fever" of the late 80s are written about as an adjustment to deregulation from which lasting lessons would be learned: as he puts it, a "once-for-all occurrence". But it wasn't, was it? "No," Lawson says. "I was wrong about that. I saw it coming some time ago - the same sort of thing that had happened during my time, only worse." By way of explaining how we got to where we are, Lawson directs me to a speech he recently made in the Lords, which mentions "the folly of the bankers who, whether out of ignorance or greed... threw prudence to the wind".

Howe talks about people in the financial markets "taking reckless decisions, and allowing themselves to incur debts on a scale that should never have been undertaken." Lamont focuses on "a housing bubble, a credit bubble, financial innovation, too much leverage in the banking system, people unloading assets off-balance sheet". They each make equally unsurprising mention of the failures of financial supervision under Gordon Brown's chancellorship, and the perils of the government's ballooning budget deficit. But their great omission comes when I ask what they make of the idea that the current economic whirlwind was let loose under their watch. Read Lawson's autobiography and it's all there: a 10-point breakdown of the Thatcher period's great bonfire of regulation that includes the end of mortgage lending guidance, the legislation that allowed building societies to turn themselves into banks (among those who did were Northern Rock, Bradford & Bingley and the Halifax - those who remained as building societies have been nowhere near as troubled by the financial crisis) and the Big Bang. Isn't that where all this began? "I don't think there's anything in that at all," he says. "I think all those aspects of deregulation were absolutely right.

That's not to say that there are not both advantages and disadvantages - it's just that the advantages outweigh the disadvantages." Lamont makes much the same point. Only once does one of the Tory ex-chancellors come close to considering that our current problems might have started when they were in charge: I suggest to Geoffrey Howe that Britain's love affair with consumer debt decisively began in the Thatcher years, and he suddenly goes quiet. "That may be," he says. "I haven't really thought about it." Thankfully, one surviving ex-chancellor has detailed the obvious connections between out-of-control high finance and the politics that took root in the 80s - and he did so in rather visionary terms, in a memoir titled The Time Of My Life, published no less than 20 years ago. Back then, wrote Denis Healey, "most western governments followed the lead set by President Reagan and Mrs Thatcher in removing the restrictions which had hitherto prevented the various financial institutions... from competing with one another for the same type of business." This, he said, "led to cut-throat competition" between the big financial corporations, who "lent money on paper-thin margins, often in areas they did not understand". And there was more.

"As if this was not enough," he wrote, "the desire to hedge against unpredictable changes in exchange rates and interest rates led to a feverish rash of new financial instruments, starting with swaps, futures, options, and options on futures." One page later, there comes the coup de grâce: "Most of the new activities spawned by the financial revolution... assume that all trees grow up to the sky - that there will never be another recession. If the United States does have a recession, even one as modest as in the Carter years, its whole financial system could collapse like a pack of cards." Sitting in the drawing room of his Sussex home, Healey listens to it all, then turns to me with the happily fatalistic look of someone who has lived through no end of economic and political turnabouts. "Well, isn't it true?" he says. "There you are." For an ex-chancellor, the irony must be sweet indeed: here, for once, is an economic forecast that turned out to be right on the money.

Question: Holding the position from 1979 to 1983, who was the first Chancellor Of The Exchequer Under Margaret Thatcher ?
Answer: GEOFFREY HOWE