llowed Nigel Lawson's tax-slashing budget of 1988 had given way to gloomy forebodings about the return of the "British disease"--inflation and chronic uncompetitiveness. By October 1989, on the eve of the annual Conservative party conference at which Thatcher would celebrate her sixty-fourth birthday, the base interest rate had been raised to a punishing 15 percent as a means of squeezing out inflation but also of supporting the exchange value of the pound. Not long after that Nigel Lawson, the chancellor of the Exchequer, resigned from the cabinet in spectacular fashion, saying he had basic disagreements with the prime minister and her private advisers over monetary policy and the European Community (Sullivan 35).
This resignation came after a clumsy cabinet reshuffle in which Thatcher had abruptly removed Sir Geoffrey Howe from the Foreign Office because he wanted Britain to participate in the exchange rate mechanism of the European Monetary System and she did not. Her strident animosity toward European i
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