In the settling of scores that followed her dramatic defenestration of November, 1990, few of Margaret Thatcher’s former Cabinet ministers escaped unscathed.

But, alongside her loyal deputy Willie Whitelaw and ideological soulmate Sir Keith Joseph, David Young , who has died aged 90, was one of the select few in her memoirs not subject to the former prime minister’s wrath.

Mrs Thatcher’s admiration for Young was long-standing.

“Other people come to me with their problems, David Young comes to me with his achievements,” she was reported to have suggested shortly before elevating him to the House of Lords and appointing him to the Cabinet in 1984.

Young had caught Mrs Thatcher’s eye during his spell in the early 1980s as chairman of the Manpower Services Commission, the government body responsible for employment and training services.

As the jobless totals rose inexorably, Young’s initiatives — a high-profile drive to tackle youth unemployment and a push for greater vocational training in schools — were among the few emanating from Whitehall that appeared to win the government any positive press.

Warned the issue might cost her a third term, Mrs Thatcher unsurprisingly decided to tap Young to lead the assault on unemployment in the Cabinet. Downing Street’s spin that the political newcomer would be “Minister for Jobs” led one Tory to liken the appointment to “getting a call from the Vatican and being told you’re in charge of the anti-sin drive”.

lord Young of Graffham GettyImages-473411018

David Young with his insignia of membership of the Order of the Companions of Honour, which was presented to him by Charles, Prince of Wales, in 2015 (Getty Images)

Young, however, proved a success. With a host of new programmes and a national advertising campaign, the new minister exuded vigour in the fight against the government’s most pressing political problem. Aided by a booming economy, unemployment began to fall by the time Mrs Thatcher went to the polls again. She later credited his policies with her victory in 1987.

Such was her confidence in him that — despite his name never having appeared on a ballot paper — the Prime Minister drafted in Young to oversee the Tories’ general election campaign. It was not a happy experience. Resented by jealous colleagues — not least, the Tory party chairman Norman Tebbit — Young spent much of the election trying to calm the nerves of an increasingly fractious Mrs Thatcher, who had convinced herself that she was heading for defeat.

After the Tories secured another three-figure majority, Mrs Thatcher promoted Young to Secretary of State for Trade and Industry (DTI) and charged him with delivering on her pledge to “do something about those inner-cities”.

However, her attempt also to hand him the role of Tory party chairman was thwarted by Whitelaw, while his time at the DTI was overshadowed by the row over the privatisation of the Rover group. In 1989 Young told Mrs Thatcher he wished to leave the Cabinet.

In some regards Young’s journey to the highest levels of British politics was a ready-made Thatcherite morality tale. His father and grandparents had left the village of Yurevitch in what is now Lithuania in 1905. Arriving in Britain, they initially shared a two-room property in the East End with Young’s great-grandfather and his wife and three children. Over time,

Young’s grandfather was able to start a bakery, and then become a flour wholesaler. The family moved out to Stamford Hill.

In the 1920s, his father, now running the business, took up golf, married and set up home in Clapton Common.

During the war, he moved his wife and two sons — David and his younger brother, Stuart, the future chairman of the BBC Board of Governors — to Finchley, the constituency which Mrs Thatcher was to represent in Parliament for 35 years. Both sons were educated at Christ’s College, Finchley, but David left aged 16 to become articled to a solicitor, studying for a law degree in the evenings at University College London.

But Young wanted more than the comfortable suburban life his parents had provided for their sons. When an opportunity to work for Great Universal Stores came up, he happily abandoned his job as a solicitor.

Within months, he was assistant to the chairman, the prominent Jewish businessman, philanthropist and communal leader Isaac Wolfson, to whom he was distantly related. The experience allowed Young to discover his true “entrepreneurial nature”.

However, he soon began to find the constraints of the corporate world stifling, wanting to get out and “take the consequences of my own mistakes”.

Starting his own property company, Young embarked upon a roller-coaster ride. He made a fortune — he sold his company for £4million in 1970 — and lost a fortune: when the property market crashed in 1973 he was close to being wiped out. Young survived, however, helping to develop the European subsidiary of America’s fourth-largest bank.

Despite his prominence during the period when Thatcherism became ideologically ascendant, Young’s values, believed the historian John Vincent, stemmed less from the politics of the New Right and more from the “Jewish ethos of practical charity”, an ethos of which the Prime Minister herself was a great enthusiast.

Much of the work he would do in government was indeed intimately tied to his long association with ORT, a Jewish charity focused on training and vocational education. Young would later describe a trip to Israel in 1970 to visit ORT schools as the week that changed his life. It shaped Young’s conviction that an insufficient regard for vocational training lay at the root of Britain’s economic difficulties.

“An old saying from the Talmud,” he wrote in his memoirs, “continually went through my mind: ‘Give a man a fish and he will soon be hungry. Teach him to fish and he will never starve.’” ORT was also responsible for Young’s entry into politics.

Having voted Labour in the 1966 general election, he switched to the Conservatives, inspired by a speech Keith Joseph had delivered to the charity in the mid-1970s on the need for more entrepreneurs and a smaller state.

He soon became involved with Joseph’s think-tank, the Centre for Policy Studies, which laid much of the policy groundwork for Thatcherism. After the Tories won power in 1979, Joseph invited him to become his special adviser. The post was unpaid — Young did not draw a salary for the entire time he served in government — but it was the springboard for his entry into the Cabinet five years later.

After he left government, Young resumed his business career — he served for a time as executive chairman of Cable and Wireless and president of the Institute of Directors — and devoted himself once again to charity work and business and cultural enterprises. He was founder president of Jewish Care.

He was also chairman of the Chichester Festival Theatre board and director of the Royal Opera House.

When the Tories returned to power in 2010, David Cameron appointed him as his Enterprise Adviser. However, within a few months he faced criticism for repeating Harold Macmillan’s controversial phrase that people had “never had it so good”.

The incident had an unfortunate effect on him politically. Forced to withdraw the remark, he apologised to Cameron and resigned from his role as an adviser.

Margaret Thatcher was neither the first nor the last prime minister to decide that her government could do with a dose of business know-how. However, few of those appointments were as successful or significant as that of Young.

That reflected, in part, his sharp political acumen. As he later mused, his longevity as a prime ministerial favourite reflected the fact that, as a peer, he was “a political eunuch” who would never become a pretender to Mrs Thatcher’s throne.

While demonstrating his tendency to self-depreciation, Young’s assessment underplayed the qualities and skills that made him a success in business and in politics.

Young married Lita Shaw in 1956. She survives him with their two daughters Karen and Judith. His brother Stuart Young predeceased him in 1986.

David Young: born 27 February 1932, died 8 December 2022