Howes that

Geoffrey Howe will probably be first remembered as the politician who brought down Margaret Thatcher by delivering a devastating resignation speech to MPs. Its most famous line (see link above) is his description of negotiations with Europe

“It is rather like sending your opening batsmen to the crease, only to find... that their bats have been broken before the game by the team captain"

This cricket metaphor is one poor excuse for the title of the post: a second, equally poor excuse follows.

I personally will remember him as Chancellor when Margaret Thatcher came to power. In 1981 I was a young Treasury economist who happened to be in charge of calculating the economic effects of the budget using the Treasury’s macro model. I was too junior to go to most budget meetings involving ministers, but I did go to one. I was there as the technical backup in case the Chancellor asked a difficult question about the model simulations. I was naturally psyched up, but it turned out for no reason. There were no questions about the simulations, or even about any macroeconomic effects. The most technical any interrogation by the Chancellor got was to ask ‘how’s that figure arrived at?’, to which the reply was ‘by summing the numbers above, Chancellor’. As one senior civil servant told me afterwards, arithmetic was not Howe’s strong point.

Why was there so little interest in the macroeconomic effects of that notorious 1981 budget (of letter from 364 economist fame)? It is difficult to understate the culture shock that occurred in the Treasury after Mrs Thatcher’s election. Treasury ministers, including Nigel Lawson (who succeeded Howe as Chancellor and is now an active climate change sceptic), believed that Treasury advice - including anything from its macro model - was outdated Keynesian nonsense and that monetarism was the way forward. When internal Treasury model forecasts predicted their policies would create a recession within a year, they were dismissed with the assertion that the unemployment impact of tight monetary targets would be small and very temporary. (Unemployment doubled and only returned to 1979 levels in a sustained manner by the end of the century. We got classic Dornbusch overshooting, as this 1981 Brookings paper by Willem Buiter and Marcus Miller describes, probably followed by unemployment hysteresis.)

It may be that high unemployment was necessary to bring inflation down. It may even be that a contractionary budget in 1981 was sensible to achieve a better monetary/fiscal mix. What is almost certainly not true is that this was calculated by Howe, Lawson and Thatcher. Instead policy can best be described by another cricket metaphor. It was as if a batting side had made a respectable score not through skill, but instead by taking wild swings at the ball that went to the boundary by repeatedly just missing the hands of fielders.