"While the strength of demand in the British economy should have elicited higher interest rates from early 1987 onwards, Lawson was so fixated with his DM-shadowing policy that he not only refused to raise rates but actually cut them, first in October 1987 and then again in February and March 1987... By the early spring of 1988, Mrs Thatcher was growing increasingly worried about Lawson's attempts to hold sterling down. A row erupted in March, when the Prime Minister rightly criticized Lawson's intervention tactics, saying at Prime Minister's Question Time in the Commons that "you can't buck the market." With the weight of foreign buying growing ever greater, and his Prime Minister by now very much alive to the problem, a reluctant Lawson was forced to call a halt to intervention. Sterling surged through the top range of DM2.90 to DM3.00 that he had imposed. In mid-May, in an effort to stem the rise in the pound without again resorting to intervention, the Chancellor cut interest rates one last time (the Labour Party, one should not forget, was pressing for even bigger cuts). But even Lawson could no longer ignore the mounting evidence of inflationary pressure (in the form of rapid increases in demand and output, in house prices and – as unemployment fell very rapidly – in wages and labour costs). Having reduced interest rates to 7.5% in mid-May to restrain sterling, at the end of May he raised them to restrain inflation, apparently unwilling to recognize that the inflationary pressure was the result of his DM-shadowing policy. Sir Alan Walters, in a radio interview, presciently remarked that the Chancellor, by having delayed far too long in tightening policy, had condemned Britain to much bigger increases in interest rates in the future."