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THE DAY after the British General Election in June 1987, I was summoned by Margaret Thatcher to No. 10 Downing Street and asked to take over the Department of Energy in the new Conservative government. In our election manifesto, we had committed ourselves to privatizing the electricity industry and introducing competition wherever possible.

At that time, the industry was wholly state-owned. It consisted of one generator, the Central Electricity Generating Board, which also owned the high-voltage distribution system covering the whole of England and Wales. Local distribution was handled by 12 regional companies, each of which held a monopoly in its own area and all of which bought all their electricity from the central generator.

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Cecil Parkinson

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THE DAY after the British General Election in June 1987, I was summoned by Margaret Thatcher to No. 10 Downing Street and asked to take over the Department of Energy in the new Conservative government. In our election manifesto, we had committed ourselves to privatizing the electricity industry and introducing competition wherever possible.

At that time, the industry was wholly state-owned. It consisted of one generator, the Central Electricity Generating Board, which also owned the high-voltage distribution system covering the whole of England and Wales. Local distribution was handled by 12 regional companies, each of which held a monopoly in its own area and all of which bought all their electricity from the central generator.