THE former Tory Party chancellor Nigel Lawson, who died last week aged 91, had become better known in his later years as an indefatigable champion of the cause of climate change denial.

His efforts to minimise perceptions of the damage of greenhouse gas emissions, and forestall action on decarbonisation, played their own small part in condemning future generations to lives that will be harder and more squalid than they ever needed to be.

But it was as the primary architect of Britain’s free-market turn, and Margaret Thatcher’s sometime right-hand man, that Lawson can claim his true legacy.