In the middle years of the 1970s, Peter Jay, who was then economic editor of The Times, and I were regarded by many in the British economic establishment as two terrible monetarist twins because of our scepticism of the Heath dash for growth. The charge was that, because of the coincidence of two people with such views having prominent positions in two heavyweight newspapers, half-baked journalism was undermining proper economics. Some of our articles were even given to students as set-pieces for demolition. But if British academics only knew of the post-Keynesian counter-revolution from press articles, they had themselves to blame for their own professional lag.

Jay and I had slightly different starting points. Nevertheless, unlike many purely technical monetarists, Jay never flinched from the implications of the new (or rediscovered) ideas on the ultimate futility of traditional full employment policies - witness his role in James Callaghan's famous speech to the 1976 Labour Conference in which the former Prime Minister delivered his much-cited speech about governments not being able to spend their way to prosperity.

The possibility of a government more committed to a market approach and less inclined to buying off the unions came into prospect when Margaret Thatcher first won the leadership of the Conservative Party in 1975 and then seemed to have a chance of winning the coming election, which she duly did in 1979. I did not, however, want to be considered for an advisory post.

One very modest part I did later play was as a member of the 'Gooies' (group of unofficial economic advisers), whom Nigel Lawson had assembled to advise him once every couple of months or so in the last two or three years of his Chancellorship in 1987-9. The mistake of the Gooies was not to insist on written minutes, as a lot could be learned about who was right and who was wrong on which issues and when. I was irate to find at my first meeting, when I warned of overheating, that I was fobbed off by other Gooies, because the monetary numbers were not then worrying them. Later on, my views on overheating were lost to sight because of the support I gave Lawson both in his campaign for Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM) membership and in shadowing the Deutschmark.

It is clear from my Financial Times articles that I believed in 'playing it long' on the valid grounds that, if sterling were linked to the Deutschmark, the UK could not have in the long-run a faster rate of inflation in traded products than Germany. But I should have paid more attention than I did to the official Treasury's line, which was to downplay inflationary threats even in the short-term. The lesson throughout my career has been that I should pay more attention to subtle differences with my allies of the moment and not worry about a common front against the rest.

The Thatcher government's economic record is discussed in Brittan (1989) and elsewhere, but to me personally the period was an embarrassment. I dreaded the name Thatcher coming up before the soup. I found most of the attacks on her ignorant and condescending. But as Margaret Thatcher sold a version of market economics as part of a package containing national reassertion abroad (symbolized by the Falklands victory) and something she called Victorian values at home, I could not line up as 'one of us'.

There was, however, a minefield for me in the core economic area. When the Keynesian establishment had earlier said that tackling inflation by monetary policies without an incomes policy would lead to one million unemployed, it was indignantly denounced by some of the more unwise monetarists. Yet in the early 1980s unemployment had shot up to near 3 million or 10 l/2 per cent. There was no shortage of post hoc rationalizations; but I almost avoided social occasions at which economic questions might arise.

I was, however, much less embarrassed than the technical monetarists by the coincidence of a very sharp, perhaps excessive, squeeze on inflation with a bad upward overshoot of monetary targets. This gave me an opportunity to write for the IEA, How to end the 'monetarist' controversy (Brittan 1981), which I afterwards incorporated in a book of essays, The role and limits of government (as Brittan 1983b). The paper was associated with the slogan of a nominal GDP objective. But too many participants in the debate treated this as if it were an alternative to existing monetary targets rather than the higher order goal which it was.

By then I was pretty sure that my natural mode of expression was something shorter than a book but longer than a newspaper column or speech; and I could not understand the aversion of publishers (with honourable exceptions such as Temple Smith and Edward Elgar) to collected writings. I find it much easier to absorb material reprinted in decently bound books than in the dreadful piles of copied conference papers, so much in vogue, which are difficult to store and impossible to find afterwards.

Presentational tactics apart, there was a sea-change in the financial press during the 1980s. One writer, Wayne Parsons (1989), compares it with the advent of the trans-Atlantic cable in 1866, which together with the growth of a wider investing public, encouraged a new brand of journalism for readers more interested in personal financial gain than in great debates on tariffs or currency theory. The change was also abetted by the professionalisation of economists, who became keener on academic respectability than on policy discussion.

The wheel has since turned full circle several times. Parsons believes that economic pundits have been among the casualties of the information revolution. Market economists should not complain about changes in the market they themselves face. But I cannot believe that the instant comment on the latest indicator by a City dealer in front of a computer terminal is the last word in human wisdom.

{17 Egg on my ERM Face >>>}