Tim Lankester

Margaret Thatcher’s first private secretary for economic affairs Sir Tim Lankester provides an inside account of the early years of the Thatcher government when the prime minister rejected the old orthodoxies and pursued a previously untried monetarist policy backed by only a few economists.

Thatcher was faced with double-digit inflation, rising unemployment and flatlining growth. Monetarism argued that the only way of controlling inflation was by controlling the money supply. Lankester looks at the attitudes and decisions of the main players during a damaging period for the UK economy. It took three years to bring inflation down to single digits, unemployment more than doubled and manufacturing output fell by nearly a fifth.  Lankester looks at the origins of monetarism, explains why it failed and examines its legacy today.

Lankester went on to be Britain’s representative on the boards of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. He was permanent secretary at the former Overseas Development Administration, director of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, and President of Corpus Christi College, Oxford.