From Thatcher's guru to Cameron's headache

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Famous for being the cabinet minister who brought Margaret Thatcher solutions, Lord Young last month brought David Cameron only headaches – but even if his comments on the recession and mortgages cost him his job, he is proud to have delivered on health and safety.

At the age of 18 I was a passionate communist.

I was a law student at the time, and clearly remember arguing that South Korea had invaded North Korea.

I had actually voted Labour until 1964, but when Harold Wilson started attacking property developers – they were the bankers of the day – I was put off.

My father was an immigrant, who arrived here from Lithuania in 1905. He was a small business person, and my mother wanted her children to be professionals.

I became a solicitor, but I didn’t really like the law. When I was offered a job in business I jumped at it.

I worked at Great Universal Stores for five years before starting my own business in 1961. It was an unusual thing to do in those days. I built up an industrial and property group, and sold it in 1970, the first year I voted Conservative.

Then the property crash came, and I went back to zero. Things got very bad, and in 1975 I was probably technically insolvent. I thought of emigrating, so we went across to Boston.

We arrived in September, hitting the first morning of the school bussing riots.

For the first time in my life I smelled tear gas. My wife said we would be mad to leave our friends and family for this place, so we caught the night flight back.

When Margaret Thatcher became leader of the Conservatives, I thought that had torn it – they would never elect a woman. That shows what a judge I am.

I then began to read Keith Joseph’s speeches about the need for entrepreneurs, and I volunteered to work for him. I became a director at the Centre for Policy Studies and then, in 1978, during the middle of the Winter of Discontent, I decided to help them as an adviser at the Department of Industry when we won the election.

My first job was to introduce privatisation – we called it ‘rolling back the frontiers of the state’. When Keith moved on to education in 1981, he asked me to go with him. I became a part-time adviser at that department.

Norman Tebbit asked me to take on the Manpower Services Commission, as in those days unemployment, particularly youth unemployment, was the political issue of the day.

If I succeeded as a businessman going into politics, it was only because I served a five-year apprenticeship as a full-time civil servant.

I became Secretary of State for Employment in 1985. When I sat in on my first cabinet I realised, to my horror, that I wasn’t a member of the Conservative Party. I joined later that afternoon.

I got on very well with my colleagues, but I’m not sure they were all that enamoured when Mrs Thatcher remarked that “only David brings me solutions”.

In the run-up to the 1987 election a set of rogue polls were published, and the gap between us and Labour seemed to be narrowing. It was the hardest six weeks of my life, and very exhausting.

Mrs Thatcher was very worried, but I thought it was important to bolster her confidence. Norman and I had a slight disagreement. Yes, it’s unfortunately true that I shook him by the lapels.

In 1989 we sold off the last of the industries. I didn’t think privatisation would go as far as it went, and in some respects – in the cases of some organisations like steel and even the railways – it probably went too far.

But what we started here then spread around the world. It was a social revolution as well as a business revolution.

I was trade and industry secretary at this point, and the papers were speculating that I might go to health or defence.

I realised, however, I was a one-trick dog, and I didn’t really want to become a normal politician. I told Mrs Thatcher that I would be better placed to help her from the outside, so she let me go.

I had to get back into the outside world. Everyone thought I was very comfortable, but for the bulk of those years I hadn’t drawn a salary: I needed to refill the well.

I retired in July. Six months later I joined the board of an American bank, and in October, I became chairman of Cable and Wireless. The criticism I received was ridiculous: they were attacking me to get at Mrs Thatcher.

I didn’t miss frontline politics for a second, but I remained politically active. I was one of the original six who started Business for Sterling, and I have always been very keen on us staying out of the euro.

David Cameron approached me before the election, and I started working on health and safety at the start of the year. The terrible thing is that I felt I was a 40-something like him. My bones told me differently though.

On November 18 David Cameron presented me with the Spectator’s Peer of the Year award, and 22 hours later I had offered my resignation.

Never complain, never explain, but I certainly didn’t say things in the bald way in which it was interpreted in the press. I was amazed, annoyed and hurt, but there was no point in battling on.

I am not part of government, and I don’t see any government papers. I had done my review on health and safety, I was just starting on a review into the relationship between small firms and government, and I was asked for my personal view.

As soon as I realised what was happening I offered my resignation. But I do not, in my heart, believe I made a mistake. It was the way the press interpreted it.

For God’s sake, it went round the world and ended up in the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times.

Utter nonsense. In three or four years’ time people should look at what I actually said: I am still receiving hundreds of letters which say that I was right.

Frankly, I think it’s very odd when a volunteer adviser has so much attributed to his words. It was a slow news day. If only Prince William and Kate Middleton had announced their engagement that day, no-one would have noticed.

My health and safety report could not have gone better though. Have you noticed?

The volume of health and safety stories in the papers has disappeared.

My concern now is to make sure that the changes will go through. I also have a great regret that I couldn’t do the small firms report. Do I have concerns?

Yes, but time will tell what will happen with it.

Politicians have changed enormously since I was first in government. At a fairly boring cabinet meeting in the 1980s I worked out that 11 out of 21 of us had at one point started a business.

We had a very real practical knowledge of the commercial world, but for the last 20 years there has been hardly anyone. That is really difficult.

We are taking lots of social steps, but there isn’t anybody to realise what effect it will have on the economy.

For example, we haven’t even begun to feel the effects of the equality legislation passed in the last Parliament. In some ways, though, things hadn’t changed as much as I feared.

I wasn’t conscious of there being ‘sofa’ government – and there was a tendency for that in Margaret’s day – and the civil service has just snapped back to the way it was.

In a sense, there was a wider coalition in the cabinet then than there is today: in the 1980s it was divided on Europe, and there were wets and dries.

I’ve still got a lot of business and charitable interests, and I collect books, travel, and am a keen photographer.

I’m not very active in the House of Lords, although the only thing that’s still in my favour is that I haven’t collected one penny’s expenses for at least 12 years.

The only saying of Harold Wilson’s which I value is that ‘seven days is a long time in politics’. It was certainly a long time a week or so ago. Who knows what the next seven days will bring.

Sam Macrory is political editor of The House Magazine, where this interview was first published.