Lord Young of Graffham
Entrepreneur turned Cabinet minister who abhorred red tape and helped to push through the reforms of the Thatcher government
LORD YOUNG OF GRAFFHAM, who has died aged 90, will be remembered as the outsider who found his way into Margaret Thatcher’s Cabinet and whom she commended as the man who brought her solutions, not problems.
Plucked from the Manpower Services Commission, he was given a peerage and served in the Government for five years, first as a Minister without Portfolio, and then as Secretary of State for Employment. He made his greatest mark, though, during two years as Secretary of State for Trade and Industry, when he set about transforming his department into “the Department for Enterprise” and developing his reputation as a cutter of red tape. His tenure at the DTI was not, though, an unmixed success, and a series of difficulties towards the end of his spell there showed it was much easier to help create small businesses than to control big ones.
For his work in pushing through into practice the theoretical reforms of Thatcherism, David Young became known as one of that creed’s high priests. His success in helping to lead this revolution, and the closeness to the Prime Minister it brought, made him an obvious target for envy among his political allies. It did not help, either, that he had become a Cabinet minister without serving the customary apprenticeship in the House of Commons, or in the junior ranks of Government. The residual antisemitism of the old Conservative Party also counted against him, and was seen at its most virulent when he made a bid to become Party Chairman after the 1987 election.
Although his style – which was very much non-whitehall – made him unpopular with some of his colleagues, his achievement within the DTI was recognised by its permanent officials and by the Prime Minister he served. The department had been somewhat jinxed throughout the Thatcher years, with a succession of Secretaries of State being forced to depart through misfortune or inability, and Young was the first for some time not just to steady the ship, but to put it on a profitable course.
David Ivor Young was born on February 27 1932, the son of a Jewish Lithuanian flour merchant and younger brother of Stuart Young, who later became a successful accountant and (after his brother had introduced him to Mrs Thatcher) chairman of the governors of the BBC. Young’s parents moved from Hackney to Finchley while he was growing up, and he attended Christ’s College in Finchley. His upbringing was orthodox Jewish, and he practised his faith seriously but unostentatiously throughout his life.
He read Law at University College, London, qualifying as a solicitor in 1956. Rather than practising the law, he chose instead to go into retailing, having met at his wedding Leonard Wolfson of Great Universal Stores. He became personal assistant to Sir Isaac Wolfson, Leonard’s father, the philanthropist.
Young had higher ambitions than working for someone else, though, and in 1961, aged only 29, he founded his own property and construction company, Eldonwall. When he sold out and founded a new company, Town and City Properties, in 1972, he had become a millionaire. However, his second company crashed along with the rest of the property market in 1974, and Young lost everything. He had been a Labour supporter in his youth, but with his fortune had come support for the Conservative Party. After Heath’s U-turn and capitulation to the miners in 1974, he thought of renouncing not just his political interests, but also Britain.
An exploratory visit to America made him realise that Britain was worth persisting with. He joined Manufacturers Hanover Property Services on his return and quickly restored much of his wealth. He acquired a new passion for politics, attracted back to the Conservative Party under the “new management” of Mrs Thatcher.
He became close to Sir Keith Joseph, helping to fund his Centre for Policy Studies, whose management board he joined in 1977. In 1979 he became its director, serving for three years. In 1979, also, he became special adviser at the Department of Trade and Industry to Joseph, the Secretary of State; it was unthinkable at the time that this adviser would return, within eight years, as the Secretary of State himself.
As an adviser, and in his work at the CPS, Young impressed those in Government with his ability to work quickly and effectively, and joined the inner circle of protoThatcherites long before his elevation to government. Another of this circle, Norman Tebbit, provided Young with the stepping stone this unconventional politician needed to reach high office. Tebbit and Young were later to become strong adversaries, but initially, while Tebbit was Employment Secretary and Young running the Manpower Services Commission, the partnership was extremely successful.
Young went to the MSC as unemployment was rocketing towards three million. It was his conviction that one of the reasons for the failure to arrest the problem was a lack of training schemes. Under him, the MSC developed initiatives such as the Youth Training Scheme and the Technical and Vocational Education Initiative that were to form the bedrock of the Government’s assault on the unemployment problem during the mid-1980s. “God helps those who train themselves” was one of Young’s more noted observations at the time.
Mrs Thatcher felt that Young was pursuing precisely the sort of policies the country needed in precisely the spirit required and his success at the MSC prompted her to take a major political gamble. In 1984 she gave him a life peerage and brought him into the Cabinet as Minister without Portfolio, with a roving brief to oversee general economic policy, with particular regard to employment and trade.
From the start Young was subject to the criticism that he would be “weak” because of his failure to come through the political ranks, yet experience was to show that his belief that management rather than political skills were required to run a Department of State was more or less borne out.
It was soon realised that if his position was vulnerable, it would not be helped by him having responsibilities that might easily cut across those of established Cabinet ministers. Therefore, having “played himself in” to the workings of Government, he was given the job of Employment Secretary, and set out on an ultimately successful course of reforming and freeing up the job market. He was fond of reminding colleagues that he now occupied the desk that had, a decade earlier, been Michael Foot’s, as he embarked upon a policy that could not have been more diametrically opposed to that of his predecessor.
He issued a succession of orders about cutting red tape, principally to lift from small businesses many of the regulations about employees’ terms and conditions of service that he felt were stifling enterprise. Continuing his belief in training, he worked closely in conjunction with the Department of Education and Science in trying to win support for the idea of City Technology Colleges, using some of his contacts in business to beg for private sector support for them.
He had an important input in Cabinet about the level of welfare benefits, believing that many of the unemployed would make more of an effort to find work if the cushion the state provided for them were made less soft.
The deliberate policy of increasing benefit only in line with inflation, rather than in line with the higher rate of increased average earnings, owed much to him, as did restrictions on the availability of “dole” to young people who refused to go on training schemes. By the time Young’s tenure at the Department of Employment came to an end with the 1987 General Election, he had made his mark over a wide range of socio-economic issues; most importantly, he had taken unemployment below the psychologically significant figure of three million, and started it on its downward path.
He had also been drawn into the centre of more overtly political activity. It became clear, once the 1987 election campaign was under way, that the organisation of Conservative Central Office was not responding adequately to the demands of the battle. Mrs Thatcher, anxious that the chairman, Norman Tebbit, would not be able to cope on his own, asked Young to go into Central Office in the later stages of the campaign to help to improve the image of the party in the country, and to try to make the campaigning more effective. This caused a major breach in Young’s relations with Tebbit, as Young sought to do what the Prime Minister expected of him at a time of crisis without too much regard for the sensibilities of others. Moreover, Young and Tebbit differed dramatically in their view of the future direction of Thatcherism, with Young (advised by the advertising mogul Tim Bell) pleading for a more emollient approach to the market economy.
The Conservatives were never in any danger of losing the election (their majority was 102), but a bad internal split had been caused. Tebbit’s strategy was countermanded, and after the election he resigned from the Government.
Young was appointed to head the Department of Trade and Industry. It was another ideal showcase for his entrepreneurial talents, and he spent his first few months there planning its relaunch as “the Department for Enterprise”. His spell in Central Office had, though, made him more politically ambitious, and he made it clear to the Prime Minister that he wished to be considered for the party chairmanship once Tebbit vacated it.
A fierce campaign was launched against Young from the centre-left of the party, claiming to base its opposition to him becoming chairman on the possibilities of a conflict of interest with his job as Trade Secretary; as the battle continued it became clear that other issues of personality rather than just policy were as important. Shortly before the decision on Tebbit’s successor was made, Young announced that he had asked not to be considered for the post. His high-profile interest in the job, coupled with the antipathy towards him of Conservatives in the Commons, had been his undoing.
While at the DTI, he was most proud at having denationalised all the industries for which he was responsible – notably British Steel and the Rover Group. The great mission of his years at the DTI, though, was preparing Britain for 1992 – the breaking down of barriers for trade with Europe in preparation for the single market. Young was a committed free-trader and in favour of the EEC for what it could do for free trade. After Mrs Thatcher’s watershed Bruges speech on the EEC, Young made a point of signalling that his department’s view of EEC relations coincided with hers.
A series of commercial troubles affected his department. The collapse of the Barlow Clowes financial empire led to suggestions that the DTI had not been as rigorous as it might have been in checking the credentials of the founders of the company. Young received a Monopolies and Mergers Commission investigation into the brewing industry initiated by the Office of Fair Trading, but its proposals for reform had to be diluted by him after a fierce campaign against them. And he was dogged by the battle between Lonrho and the House of Fraser, into whose activities an investigation had been ordered, but whose results he could not – because of criminal investigations – publish.
In 1989 Young announced that he wished to return to a business career, and resigned after two broadly successful years at the DTI. Other than his failure to become popular with MPS, which had cost him the chairmanship (though he became, on leaving the Government, deputy chairman of the party), he had defied those who said his transition from business to the Cabinet was doomed.
After leaving office he stayed close to Lady Thatcher. She owed much to him, and such was his reputation that in 2010 David Cameron appointed him enterprise adviser to the new Coalition Government, with a remit to encourage start-ups and cut back red tape that was holding back small and medium-sized businesses. He published a series of reports on business and enterprise and in 2015 was made a Companion of Honour.
Young was a warm, generous, unpompous, humorous but formidable man, who turned out to be far more charming and helpful when one met him than one may have been led, in advance, to believe. He was a fine golfer, playing off a handicap of one at one point, a keen photographer, and as a passionate enthusiast for Wagner was a regular visitor to Bayreuth, something his friends found strange in an orthodox Jew.
He was often accused of being personally ambitious, but his ambition was for ideas rather than for himself: he was easily wounded by suggestions to the contrary, and being thin-skinned and unable easily to take criticism was one of his few weaknesses.
He married, in 1956, Lita Shaw, who survives him with their two daughters.
Lord Young of Graffham, born February 27 1932, died December 9 2022