Chris McAndrew · CC BY 3.0

Margaret Thatcher's longest-serving Chancellor of the Exchequer, from 1983 to 1989, where he was the chief architect of her program of privatizing state-owned industries and cutting income tax rates, reshaping the British economy along free-market lines. He later became a prominent Eurosceptic and, after leaving frontline politics, founded the Global Warming Policy Foundation, a lobby group that argues against the scientific consensus on climate change. He was the father of food writer Nigella Lawson.