LAMONTABLE PERFORMANCE

Norman Lamont's friends were right to urge him to keep his peace, says Max Hastings

LATE one night, a few months after Nor- man Lamont was sacked as chancellor, he worked himself into an emotional fever at a dinner table. He said that he had to write his memoirs so that the truth could be told. He was sick of hearing lies. He was fed up with newspaper people telling him to keep quiet, he added, glancing savagely at me, then editor of the Daily Telegraph. 'You don't run a newspaper,' he said. 'You run Pravda.'

His face was bloated and darkened by bitterness, as it has remained ever since. His anger has cooled, but his belief has persisted that he should justify himself. So he has now written his memoirs, so delivered yet another contemptuous blast at John Major between hard covers. And so many of us who were at least friendly acquaintances, if not friends, still believe we were right to urge him, for his own sake, to keep his peace.

It would be an exaggeration to call Nor- man Lamont a tragic figure, but his fate must command pity. Throughout his youth he was one of the most entertaining and best-liked figures in Tory politics: witty, self-mocking, intelligent, the best of com- pany. He became a competent junior min- ister, no less gossipy than of old, wearing his offices none too heavily. He seemed a natural boulevardier, an indefatigable party man, adding gaiety and sophistica- tion to the business of government as con- ducted by sombre souls of the Norman Tebbit persuasion.

The quality Lamont most conspicuously and happily lacked was gravitas. There are heavyweight politicians who can survive a highly publicised punch in the eye from a rival in love, but in Norman's case that episode was perceived not as a one-off but as an everyday story of life with Lamont. His capacity for scrapes, for getting him- self in tangles about money and embar- rassing flat tenants and off-licences and credit cards, entertained the nation and amused his friends. They made him the most implausible candidate to hold a great office of state.

A day or two after Lamont launched John Major's campaign to succeed Mar- garet Thatcher in the dramatic upheavals of November 1990, the penny suddenly dropped. As Major's campaign manager, he could expect his reward. Norman, yes good old always-up-for-a-jolly, life-and- soul-of-the-party Norman, would walk into No. 11 Downing Street to take over the stewardship of the nation's finances.

On the night of Major's triumph, I met Norman at a dinner. I said to him that for some while after I became editor of the Daily Telegraph I looked around in all direc- tions when somebody said they wanted the editor, because I found it hard to adjust to the notion that I was it. Didn't Norman feel a bit the same way about the idea that he was now Chancellor of the Exchequer? 'Absolutely,' he grinned, in the most endearing old-Norman fashion. And then he went off to start leading the Major gov- ernment's battle to keep Britain in the Exchange Rate Mechanism.

The Daily Telegraph supported the Major government's ERM policy almost until its collapse, and this despite the steady hostility of our chief City colum- nists, Neil Collins and Christopher Fildes, together with most of our political journal- ists of the old Thatcherite Right. I cannot say that Norman ever surpassed our expec- tations of him as chancellor, but on the two occasions when he called me in pri- vately, to urge no weakening of our sup- port for ERM, I assured him that we were still on side —just.

Those two encounters did have an influ- ence, however, after Norman's fall, when he announced that he had never really believed in the government's policy all along. In that case, I felt, he had displayed a certain excess of zeal by pleading with editors privately, as well as publicly, to believe that There Is No Alternative.

My own parting of the ways with Norman came on the morning after Black Wednes- day when he called me in to see him at the Treasury. He wanted to assure me, he said, that government policy on inflation was fixed, monetary targets remained unchanged, and so on.

'Fine, Norman,' I said. 'But who's going to do all this?'

'What do you mean, "Who's going to do it?"' 'Who's going to be chancellor?'

'lam.'

'But you can't be.'

'Why not?'

'Because nobody has any confidence in you any more.'

'The Prime Minister still has full confi- dence in me.'

'Nobody else does.'

'This was a completely unpredictable event.'

'It was widely predicted in print by a large range of City pundits, including our own City editor.'

'John takes the view that it would be quite unjust for any one person to bear responsibility for what has taken place.'

'Look, Norman, when a disaster of this magnitude has taken place, you and John Major can have a good argument about who walks the plank, but somebody has got to. It's time for a futile sacrifice, if you want to look at it that way. You and I have known each other for 20 years. All that time, everybody has been wondering whether you are a serious player, or simply a boulevardier. Now's your chance to show us. Resign now, take the rap, and every- body will say, "Good old Norman. He knows how to behave." And you can come back in a year with everybody thinking what a good fellow you are. Stay, and you'll simply be driven out.'

Norman smiled with cold, oriental cour- tesy. 'I am sorry if you take that view. I am sorry if the Daily Telegraph takes that view. The Prime Minister and I take a different view.' And so we parted, never to speak civilly again. The Daily Telegraph treated him as a discredited figure from the after- noon of Black Wednesday until his sacking. He bitterly resented his treatment at the paper's — at my — hands. But je ne regrette den.

I believed that, by his behaviour, he had shown himself not merely unfit to be chan- cellor, but unfit for high office. Norman himself, as he said at the time, sees the mat- ter differently. Now he has written an entirely sour, cross book to get his point across; above all, to shaft the man whom he made prime minister, and who alone would have made him chancellor of the exchequer. These two angry, foolish people are hence- forward inextricably bound together, like the victims of an Ealing Comedy stick-up. Neither should have given up the day job. Norman should have stayed in Notting Hill and Major at the Standard Chartered Bank.