When the chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, delivered his first autumn statement last November, in the chaotic aftermath of Kwasi Kwarteng’s mini-budget, he name-checked Nigel Lawson several times. It’s a measure of the enduring influence of “the man who was surely the Conservatives’ most consequential chancellor of the 20th century”, says Stephen Bush in the Financial Times. Decades after his 1989 resignation, following a bitter row with Margaret Thatcher, none of Lawson’s successors has yet escaped his shadow. Some have rushed to embrace it. Rishi Sunak famously hung Lawson’s
