There was one belief which carried over for a while from my radical Keynesian phase to my counter-revolutionary one: that was in flexible exchange rates. In the summer of 1967 the Conservatives held an open conference on economic policy with speakers of all persuasions. I had been assured of free speech and I delivered an ideological tirade against the City for being willing to surrender every other kind of freedom, and indeed every other policy, for the sake of a particular currency ratio.

The men in grey suits became alarmed that the conference would turn into a demonstration on behalf of devaluation. During the lunchbreak, Edward Heath, who had not heard my speech, said to me: 'If you must talk bollocks, talk bollocks in private.' By the afternoon, the counter-attack was under way.

Paul Bareau - a very senior City journalist - eloquently warned that the Tories would 'rue the day' if they ever became the party of devaluation, which of course they did. But first Harold Wilson himself was forced to devalue in November the same year.

In 1970 a short book of mine appeared entitled The price of economic freedom: a guide to flexible rates (Brittan 1970a). The mistake was to issue it as a hardback, when it simply put forward what was by then a well-known academic point of view. A work designed to popularize, in however serious a way, an existing intellectual position is best issued as a think-tank paper or broadside.

My activities were not confined to public advocacy. In 1969-70, Keith Joseph, then Shadow Trade and Industry Secretary, asked me to join a small group, not limited to Conservatives, to consider UK balance of payments policy. Somehow I was able to persuade the committee to report in favour of a floating exchange rate - which may have contributed something to Heath's subsequent decision to make Joseph Secretary of State for Social Services instead of Trade and Industry.

It was also at the end of the 1960s that I got on to a few academic establishment committees such as those of the Royal Economic Society, the National Institute and PEP. I did not enjoy arguing about research frameworks for other peoples work; and I had far too bloated a respect for the senior economist members. Moreover, in practice, these committees spent time on matters such as determining the secretarys salary while she was out of the room. Although the committees were concerned with economics, I realized that any proposals to pay staff according to the state of the market would not have been welcome.

My membership several years later of the Armstrong Committee, set up by the Institute for Fiscal Studies to report on UK budgetary reform, was more interesting, although I was very much in the back seat (Armstrong report 1980). I took a greater part in the Peacock Committee which sat in 1985-6, ostensibly to consider the future of the licence fee. The basic idea of the committees report (HMSO 1986) was to establish in broadcasting the equivalent of a publishing market where viewers and listeners could pay directly. The detail can be found in an article I wrote for the Political Quarterly (Brittan 1987). I was left with the following reflections. First, the establishment of this market would depend far more on the growth of technology than anything we recommended. Secondly, committees of this kind waste most of their time listening to interested parties and pressure groups, whose views are known before they enter the room. Thirdly, the projections of the researchers were largely irrelevant to the findings, which depended much more on how people lined up on paternalism versus consumer choice. Fourthly, too many broadcasters reminded me of the Oxford don, who when asked by a soldier during the First World War what he was doing to defend their common civilization replied: 'My dear sir, you do not realize that I am the civilization that you are defending.' Fifthly, I remain pleased with my role in entrenching an indexed licence fee, which did more to protect the BBC from political interference than all the actions of the public service broadcasting lobby. Sixthly, the Home Office blamed me personally for what it regarded as the committees overwide interpretation of its terms of reference and blackballed me from future investigations. This was excessively flattering.

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