Speeches, etc.

Margaret Thatcher

Article for Sunday Times (tribute to Nicholas Ridley)

Document type: Speeches, interviews, etc.
Source: Sunday Times, 7 March 1993
Editorial comments: Item listed by date of publication.
Importance ranking: Major
Word count: 1129
Themes: Autobiographical comments, Executive, Conservatism, Conservative Party (history), Economic policy - theory and process, Privatized & state industries, Environment, Public spending & borrowing, European Union (general), Labour Party & socialism, Community charge (“poll tax”), Conservative (leadership elections), Transport, Trade unions, Strikes & other union action

Incomparable Nicholas

Nicholas Ridley, distinguished former cabinet minister and architect of Thatcherism, died last week. His former prime minister pays tribute to a brave and loyal colleague.

Nick Ridley combined virtues that are usually thought to be opposites. He was witty and serious, independent and loyal, attentive to detail and far-sighted, sensitive and brave. When other politicians proved weather vanes, he had strong beliefs and he fought hard for them. In private he was a kind and thoughtful counsellor. The world is colder and greyer for his passing.

I first met Nick when he entered the Commons in the 1959 election. He was a striking figure from the outset: tall, languid, aristocratic, droll and charming. With either a cigarette or a joke always on his lips, he could have been a figure from Wilde or Coward.

But in a parliament that included Gerald Nabarro and Maurice Edelman, it was the nature of Nick 's politics that really made him stand out.

At a time when ambitious Tory MPs stuck cautiously to the middle way between conservatism and socialism, Nick at once ran up the pirate flag of independent Toryism. Economics was his special interest. He was a passionate advocate of the free market in a party and a country that were still descending into corporatism.

Such heresy can be forgiven by the Establishment if it is confined to theory; but Nick took it to the lengths of canvassing support for Enoch Powell, then the champion of free market economics, in the 1965 leadership election. To spurn potential leaders in this way—Edward Heath winning ahead of Reginald Maudling—was brave; to do so in the cause of economic liberty was far-sighted.

And Nick was to prove both far-sighted and brave repeatedly in the years that followed. In opposition, when others were resigned to permanent trade union dominancem he was convinced that this was a transitory and unnatural phenomenon, disliked by ordinary union members among others.

He therefore produced a blueprint for defeating a political strike such as that organised by Arthur Scargill a decade later. Indeed, Nick was one of the most fruitful and clear-sighted of those Tories who used opposition to rethink Tory philosophy and to plan the programme for what became a great reforming Tory government.

Back in government, at the Treasury, Nick was a pioneering advocate of privatisation—a cause that has since swept the world, transforming the inefficient societies of Eastern Europe and the Third World into free economies hammering on the door of the European Community.

At transport he embarked on deregulation that has provided us with cheaper, more convenient and more flexible transport. And at the environment department he set in train the improvement of run-down council estates and the liberation of tenants from bureaucratic regulation at the hands of absentee council landlords.

It was also at the Department of Environment, however, that Nick ran into the severest criticism he faced—on both the community charge and the so-called “green issues” . Nick was not the father of the community charge; he inherited it as a solemn manifesto commitment with his appointment as secretary of state and steered it through the Commons with his customary thoroughness. But when it became unpopular he was almost the only minister who did not deny paternity. Nick was incomparably loyal. [end p1]

And on environmental issues he was incomparably rational. He would not adopt a burdensome regulation or make an expensive commitment of public money simply because a newspaper or a pressure group had asserted that it was the “green” thing to do.

He always asked such questions as: What benefits will it bring? How much will it cost? How solid is the scientific evidence underlying this claim?

He suffered much public obloquy because of his refusal to be swept away by fads; but every serious environmentalist owes him a debt for preventing their cause from being discredited by expensive follies. As does every taxpayer.

Nick was, finally, incomparably consistent. But on one important controversy he changed his mind. For the first 25 years of his parliamentary career, Nick was the most fervent advocate of European unity. When others hedged their bets, he raised the European flag in articles, speeches and pamphlets.

But he came to feel that the drift to a federal concept of European unity in the 1980s had about it a socialist character that was in conflict with his deeper passion for liberty. As he had foreseen the stagflation to which corporatism would eventually give birth, so he also foresaw Brussels reinventing the interventionist state that he had fought so hard to dismantle in Britain.

He became a mordant critic of this accelerating trend and when his views in a Spectator interview were grotesquely misinterpreted, he resigned to save the government from embarrassment. It was a typically selfless act.

In retrospect, however, it was a liberation for Nick. Freed from the constraints of cabinet government, he was able to argue against the federalist drift and, in particular, the Maastricht treaty, with all the vigour and wit at his command. I believe that his writings over the last two years will exercise an increasing influence as their prophetic character becomes more and more clear.

Nick 's passing forces us to reflect on the arbitrary falseness of public reputation. Nick was sometimes depicted as arrogant, aloof and out of touch.

These criticisms with utter inversions of the truth. Every junior minister who worked with Nick knew that when an unpopular statement had to be presented to the House of Commons, Nick would insist in presenting it himself. But he would leave the plums for his juniors to enjoy.

Every civil servant who worked with Nick knew that he was the most open and democratic of boses who gave his subordinates the credit for ideas that other ministers would have claimed as their own. Every parliamentary observer who looks at Nick 's career with an unbiased eye can see innumerable cases of when he was right against the trend of public opinion.

Throughout that career, and particularly during his recent illness, Nick was never less than brilliant company. I always looked forward to see him; I always enjoyed myself in his presence; I always missed him when he left. I will miss him enormously now that he will never return.