A self-described “radical Tory,” Mr. Lawson could be bombastic and intentionally provocative, and he remained in the spotlight long after he resigned from Thatcher’s government in 1989 over a dispute with a fiscal policy rival.
He pushed for Britain’s divorce from the European Union — a break sealed in a 2016 referendum — and often issued pro-Brexit messages from his home in E.U. member France. “I love Europe,” he told the Guardian. “That’s why I live in France.”
On climate change, he didn’t fully deny global warming but insisted that it was not a crisis. He called former vice president Al Gore “just a propagandist” for raising alarms over a warming planet.
Mr. Lawson also had footholds in foodie culture. He was author of a 1996 healthy eating guide, “The Nigel Lawson Diet Book,” on recipes and habits he attributed to his 70-pound weight loss. He was the father of celebrity chef Nigella Lawson, whose personal upheavals sometimes gained more attention than her cooking.
“The fact that when she was young she was known as Nigel Lawson’s daughter, and now I am known as Nigella Lawson’s father, pleases me immensely,” he told the Daily Telegraph in 2009. “That’s how generations should pass.”
During his rise through the British Treasury ranks, Mr. Lawson was one of Thatcher’s ideological allies in her push to ease economic regulations and sell off state-run companies, including huge assets such as British Airways, British Steel and British Telecom. Mr. Lawson reached the top post, chancellor of the exchequer, in 1983 and put the Thatcher vision into full force by slashing taxes and interest rates.
He also spearheaded the London Stock Exchange’s “Big Bang” in 1986, which lifted many restrictions and threw open the market to electronic trading. It led to a surge in investments and related development, including the landmark Canary Wharf project. Without the move, Mr. Lawson said, London was at risk of becoming a financial “backwater.”
The soaring economy was dubbed the Lawson Boom. He left near its peak. In 1989, he resigned in a surprise rebuke of Thatcher — suggesting they were no longer in “agreement” and accusing her of favoring an economic adviser, Alan Walters. The dispute was attributed to Mr. Lawson’s support for pegging the British pound to the West German mark and a basket of other European currencies.
Hours after Mr. Lawson resigned, Walters stepped down. Thatcher had to act quickly to calm markets. Mr. Lawson’s vacated exchequer post went to John Major, a fast-rising Conservative Party member who would succeed Thatcher as prime minister in 1990.
The Lawson Boom came to a hard landing. By the early 1990s, British inflation had more than doubled to surpass 7 percent, and Britain drifted into a recession. Nearly two decades later, Mr. Lawson said the flurry of stock speculation and other changes in banking rules helped contribute to the global economic meltdown in 2008.
It was a rare expression of regret. Mr. Lawson remained a lifelong cheerleader of what he called the “Thatcherite revolution,” which he said unshackled the economic potential of Britain despite leaving unions and social programs weakened. Mr. Lawson saw Brexit as the next step in Thatcher’s legacy.
He helped form a group, Conservatives for Britain, to push the “leave” side in the 2016 Brexit plebiscite. For critics, he became a prime target for allegations of pro-Brexit hypocrisy. Mr. Lawson divided his time between London and his home in Armagnac in France’s southwestern Gascony region.
After the Brexit vote, Mr. Lawson applied for residency in France. For Paul Butters of the pro-E.U. Best for Britain group, “the idea that the chairman of Vote Leave has applied for his residency card in France takes the biscuit.”
Mr. Lawson was just as polarizing on climate issues. He made a second career out of taking potshots at activists and scientists who predict catastrophic consequences from a warming planet. In his 2008 book “An Appeal to Reason: A Cool Look at Global Warming,” Mr. Lawson blasted “the new religion of global warming.”
He used his Global Warming Policy Foundation to mock leading climate campaigners such as Gore and Greta Thunberg, and to promote his vision that humans will somehow learn to live with rising temperatures and effects such as higher sea levels. Mr. Lawson could stir added outrage with his glibness.
“I think that the ordinary bloke has an instinctive sense that it wouldn’t be too bad if the weather warmed up,” he told the Guardian in 2008. In his book, he recounted a heat wave in France in 2003 that killed 15,000 people, many elderly.
It was “perfectly tolerable,” he wrote, at his own house Gascony.
Nigel Lawson, also known as Lord Lawson of Blaby, was born on March 11, 1932, in London’s Hampstead district. His father owned a company involved in the tea trade, and his mother was the daughter of a wealthy stockbroker.
He graduated from Christ Church college at the University of Oxford in 1954 and then served in the Royal Naval Reserve for two years, rising to commander of a torpedo boat.
He began a career as a journalist, first writing for the Financial Times. After stints at the Sunday Telegraph and the BBC, he was named editor of the Spectator in 1966. He left in 1970 and unsuccessfully ran for Parliament.
He was making other inroads in politics. He served as special adviser and speechwriter to Prime Minister Alec Douglas-Home, who was in office from 1963 to 1964, and worked at Conservative Party headquarters. Mr. Lawson was elected to Parliament in 1974, representing Blaby in Leicestershire in the East Midlands regions. (He held the seat until 1992 and then was in the House of Lords.)
About the time he entered politics, he suffered a major financial loss after investing in a small merchant bank before a 1974 financial crash. After Thatcher became prime minister in 1979, he was appointed financial secretary to the Treasury and was named energy secretary in 1981. He called the 1982 Falklands War with Argentina — an overwhelming victory for England — “the rebirth of Britain.”
Mr. Lawson’s books include “The View From No. 11: Memoirs of a Tory Radical” (1992).
His marriages to Vanessa Salmon and Thérèse Mary Maclear ended in divorce. A daughter from his first marriage, Thomasina, died of cancer in 1993.
Survivors include three other children from his first marriage, Nigella, Dominic and Horatia; and two children from his second marriage, Thomas and Emily.
Despite Mr. Lawson’s divisive public style, he remained a luminary among some British conservatives. David Cameron, the British prime minister who put the Brexit vote in motion, wrote that Mr. Lawson’s impact spanned decades.
“One of the remarkable things about Nigel,” Cameron wrote, “was that even five, 10, 20 years after he left the Treasury, officials and ministers were still asking, ‘What would Lawson have done?’”
