ABSTRACT
The term “privatisation” has common public currency from the early 1980s. Prior to this date the description “denationalisation” was preferred when referring to the sale of state-owned industries. It is not entirely clear who first coined the term privatisation. The writer on management, Peter Drucker, claims to have used the word as early as 1969,1 but there are other claimants. A number of Conservative Ministers in the first Thatcher Government attribute the term to their shadow Cabinet colleague in the 1970s, David Howell, which suggests that Howell initiated the use of it within the Conservative leadership.2 Margaret (later Baroness) Thatcher, the Prime Minister from 1979 to 1990, is on record as disliking the word – “Not a word I’m particularly fond of. In fact a dreadful bit of jargon to inflict on the language of Shakespeare”.3 But it was used in Cabinet and Cabinet Committees after 1979 and in the two volumes of her autobiography.4
