Necessary clever man
FIVE years of pugnacious opposition had to pass before he came, as Financial Secretary, to the Treasury. There he spent almost all his ten years in office (detouring briefly through Energy, where he took the state out of the North Sea and built the coal stocks which were to beat the strike) and there he was from time to time called lucky. I remember finding him engaged, as he said, on a stationary walkabout in the 1987 election, sure that his party would win it, and reasonably sure that he had won it for the party. I wrote here at the time that he was that recurrent phenomenon in the Conservatives' fortunes, the necessary clever man — a dangerous position in a party which resents cleverness and has long been taught to think of gratitude as a lively sense of favours to come. So it proved. The party which had hailed him as its economic and electoral miracle worker now finds in him its most convenient scapegoat. He might say, with Churchill, that history will be his judge and he will write the history, to be published once the election is out of the way.
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