At Cambridge he was a contemporary of Michael Howard, Kenneth Clarke, Leon Brittan, and John Gummer all of whom became leading figures of the Conservative Party.
Lamont currently, in addition to his role as a working peer, is a director of and a consultant to various companies in the financial sector. He is a director of the hedge fund company RAB Capital, Scottish Re (a re-investment company quoted on the New York Stock Exchange), Balli Group plc (commodities trading house), and he is an advisor to Rotch Property Group. He is also Chairman of the East European Food Fund and a director of a number of investment funds.
On 16 May 1991, he stated in parliament that "Rising unemployment and the recession have been the price that we have had to pay to get inflation down. That price is well worth paying The remark is regularly, if not approvingly, recalled by commentators and other politicians.
During the autumn of 1992 Lamont became a national laughing-stock, over a string of press stories: that he had not paid his hotel bill for "champagne and large breakfasts" from the Conservative Party Conference (in fact his bill had been forwarded on for settlement); that he was in arrears on his personal credit card bill (true); that he had used taxpayers' money to evict a "sex therapist" called "Miss Whiplash" in June 1991, from a flat he owned (true, but it had been formally approved to allow him to obtain expedited legal proceedings; there was never any suggestion beyond innuendo that he had ever met his tenant, let alone personally made use of her services); and that he had called at a newsagent in a seedy area of Paddington late at night to purchase champagne and expensive "Raffles" cigarettes. The last story in particular turned out to have been entirely invented.
Three weeks after the government's massive loss in the by-election, on 27 May 1993, Lamont was sacked, (declining a demotion to become Secretary of State for the Environment), throwing (by his own account) Major's letter of regret at his departure unopened into the wastepaper basket, and giving a resignation speech in the House of Commons on 9 June, that made clear his feeling that he had been unfairly treated, saying that the government 'gives the impression of being in office but not in power'; the then Party Chairman Norman Fowler dismissed the speech as "dud, nasty, ludicrous and silly". Major and Lamont agree that Lamont had offered his resignation immediately after Black Wednesday and that Major pressed him to remain in office. Lamont came to the view that Major had sought his survival in office as a firebreak against the criticism of the ERM policy rebounding on himself.
Lamont appeared on the 1993 British Comedy Awards to give an award, resulting in hissing from the audience. In December 1993 the comedian Julian Clary joked to host Jonathan Ross "I've just been fisting Norman Lamont. Talk about a red box". This comment was well received by the audience but, despite Ross's attempt to make light of the remark by asking how Clary had "clawed his way to the front of the queue", it led to Clary's career taking a downturn.
In the following years Lamont became a fierce critic of the Major government. He is now regarded as a staunch euro-sceptic. In March 1995 he voted with the Labour party in a vote on Europe, and later that year he authored Sovereign Britain in which he envisaged Britain's withdrawal from the European Union, and was talked of as a potential leadership challenger to John Major; in the event it was John Redwood who challenged for the leadership. Lamont acted as Redwood's campaign manager instead. He is the current vice president of the euro-sceptic Bruges Group.
Despite departing under a cloud, Lamont defends his budget record to this day. The 1991 budget, in which he seized the opportunity presented by Mrs Thatcher's resignation to restrict mortgage interest tax relief to the basic rate of income tax and also cut the rate of corporation tax by two percentage points, was greeted by positive coverage in The Economist which dubbed him a Nimble Novice. In the 1992 budget his proposal to advance to a 20% basic rate of income tax through a combination of a narrow initial band, a cut in tax on deposit interest and curtailment of tax allowances was hailed as an elegant way of combining populism with progressivism, though events were later to lend support to Nigel Lawson's view that this approach was strategically inept. His final budget in 1993 was more sympathically received by financial specialists than John Major's 1990 budget or Kenneth Clarke's budget of November 1993. Lamont attributes the large public sector borrowing requirement (ie fiscal deficit) of these years to the depth of the recession triggered by his inability to cut interest rates sooner within the ERM.
He is currently a director of Scottish Annuity & Life Holdings, a reinsurance firm, and, since 1996, chairman of Le Cercle, a foreign policy club which meets bi-annually in Washington, D.C..
In 1998 the former military dictator of Chile, General Augusto Pinochet visited Britain to obtain medical treatment. This prompted a debate about whether he should be arrested and put on trial over his human rights record. Lamont joined with Margaret Thatcher in defending Pinochet, calling him a "good and brave and honourable soldier His stance was highly controversial
In February 2005 it was reported in The Times that Lamont and John Major had held up the release of papers concerning Black Wednesday under the Freedom of Information Act. The two wrote to the paper to deny the reports.
In October 2006 he complained that the new party leader David Cameron (Lamont's political adviser around the time of Black Wednesday) lacked policies.
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