The path from the editor’s chair at The Spectator to 11 Downing Street was not untrodden when Mrs Thatcher asked Nigel Lawson to replace Geoffrey Howe as Chancellor of the Exchequer after the 1983 general election. Iain Macleod had made the same journey in 1970. But whereas Macleod died 13 days into the job, Lawson went on to become Britain’s most significant post-war chancellor, and the architect of high Thatcherism.