Peter Cropper
Influential political adviser who did detailed work on tax reform for Chancellors Howe and Lawson
PETER CROPPER, who has died aged 92, was one of the driving forces behind economic Thatcherism, in opposition at the Conservative Research Department, then in government as a special adviser at the Treasury, ultimately to Nigel Lawson as Chancellor.
He was happiest in the backroom, where he was an acute and benevolent presence. He provided bullets for Sir Geoffrey Howe, Sir Keith Joseph and others to fire in The Right Approach to the Economy (1977), then made sure Treasury ministers grasped the need for coupling economic stringency with the occasional dash of populism.
Rated prior to 1979 “one of the few free-market men in the Research Department”, Cropper did much of the detailed work on tax reform for Sir Geoffrey, to whom he was particularly close. Margaret Thatcher credited him with reintroducing “rigorous standards” into the Research Department.
At one pre-press conference briefing during the 1983 election, she asked her advisers how much revenue would be lost if VAT were cut by one per cent. “Nobody knew”, one recalls, “then Peter chirped up with a figure (Heaven knows if it was accurate or not, but knowing Peter it probably was). Thereafter, Mrs T regarded Peter as the world’s greatest expert on VAT.”
Cropper’s personal manner was dry, but he possessed the rare ability to make sure anyone emerging from what had seemed an arid meeting with him remembered what he had said. He was also popular with his fellow special advisers, most of them much younger.
Despite his undemonstrative nature, and his role in Howe’s deflationary Budget of 1981, Cropper understood better than some other members of the team that the British public could not be served an unrelenting diet of economic gruel.
Two years before, he minuted the Chancellor that the Government had rightly “started out by displaying the bareness of the cupboard and emphasising the size of the job ahead”.
However, he suggested, there was a need to give the public the hope of “joy, wealth, national power, two acres and a cow, a second car in every garage, interesting jobs, leisure, comfortable trains, channel tunnels, atomic power stations, gleaming new coal mines, everyone a bathroom and patios for all”.
Cropper emphasised to Howe: “We must constantly remember that leadership consists largely in cheering people up, making them laugh and keeping them that way.”
Peter John Cropper was born on June 18 1927, the son of Walter and
Kathleen Cropper, and educated at Hitchin Grammar School. He joined the Royal Artillery at the very end of the war, then in 1948 went up to Gonville & Caius College, Cambridge.
Graduating in 1951, he joined the Conservative Research Department just before the general election at which Churchill returned to power. He stayed two years, then went into the City. For two decades he was a stockbroker, notably handling private clients at Kemp-gee.
After Mrs Thatcher’s election as leader in 1975, Howe persuaded Cropper to return to the Research Department – then separate from Conservative Central Office – to work on tax policies for government. He later wrote of the “formidable expertise at our command from a willing corps of volunteer professional advisers”, among them Cropper “with substantial City experience”.
After Mrs Thatcher led the party to power in 1979, Cropper joined Howe’s Treasury team as special adviser to the tax QC Peter Rees, who was Minister of State. He took with him the “Dossier for Incoming Ministers”, which analysed and summarised detailed proposals for 100 significant tax reforms.
Cropper’s duties at the Treasury were varied, and fluid. In June 1980 he was minuting Lawson and John Biffen with a proposal for a 5 per cent real cut in public sector pay.
That November he was taking the minutes when Alan Clark told the Conservative backbench finance committee that many Tory activists thought high unemployment was “giving the trades unions their deserts”.
The highly controversial Budget of 1981 put him on the spot when 364 economists issued a statement attacking the government’s economic and fiscal policies. A response was needed, but a hard-line insider sent Cropper a memo suggesting the Research Department was not Thatcherite enough to be trusted with the task. Cropper showed the memo to Howe.
This brought a furious response from the department’s director Alan Howarth (later a minister under Tony Blair). Howarth said that he had himself recommended to Cropper before the Budget the tough package that had emerged, and Cropper had no business “disseminating falsehoods”.
Cropper was, however, able to reassure the Chancellor the package had not had a totally negative reception. In his memoirs, Howe wrote: “My ever watchful adviser, Peter Cropper, reported his own modest piece of market research: ‘Breakfast at the Reform Club is normally a sepulchral time. Each of the last two mornings members have broken the rules to come over and say what a splendid Budget it was. So be of good cheer!’”
The following year, Cropper himself took over the Research Department, under Cecil Parkinson as party chairman. He played a major part in drafting the 1983 election manifesto, along with Ferdinand Mount, Howe, Adam Ridley, Parkinson, Joseph, Norman Tebbit and David Howell.
Despite Mrs Thatcher appreciating his work, Cropper was starting to have misgivings about her. At Central Office on the night of her third successive victory, he said, “she really did start walking on water. It was wonderful in a way, but the triumphalism horrified me.”
In 1984 he moved back to the Treasury as special adviser to Lawson. For the 1986 Budget, he persuaded the Chancellor – “primarily for political reasons” as Lawson later put it – to cut the standard rate of income tax from 30p to 29p.
When the Chancellor told Cropper he thought a 29p rate would be “silly”, his adviser said the very silliness of the figure was a strength and not a weakness. It was a sign that there was more to come, flagging up “an unqualified commitment to cutting the burden of taxation”.
For the 1987 election campaign, it was the meticulous Cropper who did the crucial calculations of the increases in taxation and National Insurance contributions that would be payable under a Labour government.
Lawson, in other respects a critic of the running of the Conservative campaign, said that when Cropper produced his figures, “those responsible realised that we had Labour on the run”.
Cropper left the Treasury in 1988, the year before Lawson’s resignation and two before Mrs Thatcher’s overthrow, and was appointed CBE.
When he was well out of politics, Cropper bemoaned to a former colleague that he never got any emails. “So I asked him: ‘Do you ever send any?’ ‘Oh, no’ he replied. ‘Never’”.
Peter Cropper married Rosemary Winning in 1965. She predeceased him, and he is survived by their son.
‘Leadership consists largely in cheering people up, making them laugh and keeping them that way’
Peter Cropper, born June 18 1927, died May 16 2020