Jeremy Hunt could learn from Nigel Lawson how to inspire as Chancellor

SIR – You report (April 4) that Rishi Sunak, when Chancellor, kept a picture of the late Nigel Lawson above his desk.

With personal and corporate taxes at an all-time high, will a picture of Jeremy Hunt provide similar inspiration in a few years’ time?

Michael Staples

Seaford, East Sussex

SIR – Responding to the sad news of the death of Nigel Lawson, Tim Wright (Letters, April 5) says it would serve the country well if the Government honoured him by adopting his tax-reduction strategy to encourage growth in the economy.

Yet we did employ a tax-reducing MP called Liz Truss. Unfortunately she was shouted down by the Lefties.

Tony Ellison

Westcliff-on-Sea, Essex

SIR – Madeline Grant (“Britain is ruled by identikit political pygmies”, Comment, April 5) is right to commend Nigel Lawson for his willingness to change his mind. We should salute free-thinkers who have the courage not to have convictions.

As Friedrich Nietzsche wrote in Human, All Too Human (1878): “Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies.” Or, as he put it more succinctly 10 years later: “Convictions are prisons”.

Patrick West

Deal, Kent

SIR – On a postgraduate course I attended in an Oxford college, Nigel Lawson delivered a lecture as the Chancellor-in-waiting.

His audience were all future business leaders. We listened in drop-jaw astonishment as he described a future Conservative government privatising every major utility. Our lack of vision was summed up by no one being able to conceive of a house-owner soon being able to buy and plug in a telephone of their choice. Such was the entrenchment in the national psyche of state monopolies.

He was truly a revolutionary thinker who amazingly enacted his vision pretty much to the letter.

Neil Kerr

Pontrilas, Herefordshire

SIR – The greatest compliment to, and endorsement of, Nigel Lawson by the Conservative Party would have been for Conservative Chancellors to be more like him than Gordon Brown.

That’s what I voted for, but they failed miserably to deliver.

David Brinkman

Poole, Dorset

SIR – Paul Johnson’s article (Comment, April 6) on our cumbersome taxation system failed to mention the disadvantages for married women of individualising tax, which Lord Lawson was unable to rectify while Chancellor.

He knew transferable allowances were essential to avoid severely burdening single-earner couples with children, and campaigned assiduously for his successors to finish the reform he started at Margaret Thatcher’s urging. The Conservatives halfheartedly and meagrely allowed low earners to transfer only 10 per cent of unused allowances to a basic-ratetax-paying spouse, complicating the taxation system further.

Unused allowances should be fully transferable, given that the tax burden on single-earner British families is nearly 40 per cent greater than the OECD average.

Lord Farmer (Con)

London SW1

SIR – Yet again, Sir Keir Starmer is following, not leading.

His announcement that he will forgo his personal tax arrangement (report, March 24) has only been made following the revelation that he benefits from an advantage that he has pledged to deny to other people, and which is now politically embarrassing for him. This is not a moral conscience at work – if it were, he would not have accepted the deal in the first place. It is calculated political self-interest.

Jonathan Mann

Gunnislake, Cornwall