Nick Macpherson
British civil servant

Nicholas Ian Macpherson, Baron Macpherson of Earl's Court, (born 14 July 1959) is a former senior British civil servant. He served as the Permanent Secretary to the Treasury from 2005 to 2016.
Macpherson was Permanent Secretary to three Chancellors. He managed the department through the financial and wider economic crisis which began in 2007.
Macpherson was nominated for a crossbench peerage in David Cameron's 2016 resignation Honours, and joined the House of Lords on 4 October 2016.
Early life
Macpherson was educated at Ashdown House and Eton College. He later attended Balliol College, Oxford (where he read Politics and Economics) and University College London.
Career
Macpherson first worked as an economist at the CBI and Peat Marwick Consulting.
Treasury
Macpherson entered HM Treasury in 1985. From 1993 to 1997, he was Principal Private Secretary to the Chancellor of the Exchequer; he oversaw the transition from Kenneth Clarke to Gordon Brown as Chancellor.
“Nick Macpherson” enters the record as british civil servant. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Nick, Macpherson and British can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 22, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7025819. 2 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 1 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1959, 2005, 2016 and 2007.
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This entry incorporates text from “Nick Macpherson” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.