Downing Street files reveal how Oliver Letwin kept poll tax plans alive | Politics | The Guardian.
A young adviser to Margaret Thatcher who is now a minister for David Cameron explicitly suggested that Scotland be used as a testing ground for the introduction of the poll tax, the flagship policy that was eventually to topple her as prime minister.
Oliver Letwin, now a Cabinet Office minister, emerges in official papers publicly released on Tuesday as the man who single-handedly kept the idea of the poll tax alive in the mid 1980s despite attempts by two senior ministers to strangle it at birth.
Downing Street files for 1985 and 1986 released at the National Archivesshow that it was Letwin, then just 29 but already working in Thatcher’s policy unit, who argued that the poll tax – then known as the residence charge – could be introduced in two stages.
“If you are not willing to move to a pure residence charge in England and Wales immediately, you should not introduce a mixture of taxes but should rather use the Scots as a trail-blazer for the real thing,” Letwin told Thatcher in a memo written in November 1985. Letwin, whose parents knew Thatcher, had got his job on the recommendation of the cabinet minister Sir Keith Joseph.
