Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

What Baroness Thatcher told me about tax cuts

I have just been telephoned by the BBC about my “interview with Margaret Thatcher” where she laid into David Cameron. Em, not quite. It was a comment of hers I reported in my News of the World column in April and repeated on Coffee House yesterday. It was picked up on ConservativeHome and ran in the Evening Standard, and then the Press Association and now the Daily Mail online. My friends are now calling up to congratulate me on interviewing a woman who hasn’t spoken publicly for years.

The truth is far less glamorous. I met Baroness Thatcher after Lord Lamont’s excellent Keith Joseph lecture in April and asked her about the Cameroon slogan “stability before tax cuts.” She looked at me as if I had gone quite mad. “Oh no,” she said. “You can’t have stability if you don’t have tax cuts.”

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