Lady Howe of Idlicote, progressive campaigner dubbed ‘second most powerful woman in the Conservative Party’ and source of counsel to husband Geoffrey – obituary

Lady Howe of Idlicote, who has died aged 90, was the widow of the former Chancellor of the Exchequer and Foreign Secretary Sir Geoffrey Howe (later Lord Howe); she charted an unusual course for the wife of a senior Conservative politician in becoming a prominent, sometimes strident, campaigner for women’s rights.

Elspeth Howe was known during the 1980s as “the second most powerful woman in the Conservative Party”; but her intellectual and social self-confidence, combined with her support for radical causes more usually associated with the Left, did not endear her to Margaret Thatcher. Indeed, the estrangement that developed between the Prime Minister and her Foreign Secretary during the late 1980s was widely attributed to the coolness of her relations with his wife.

Mrs Thatcher’s disapproval was first kindled, it was generally believed, in 1975, when Elspeth Howe was appointed by the Labour Government as deputy chairman of its new Equal Opportunities Commission, an organisation regarded with suspicion by many Right-wing Conservatives.

As Charles Moore records in the first volume of Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography, Lady Howe said Mrs Thatcher was “positively not interested” in women’s issues and suffered from “Queen Bee Syndrome – ‘I made it. Others can jolly well do the same.’ ”

Animosity on Elspeth Howe’s side, meanwhile, was thought to date from 1979 when her husband became Chancellor of the Exchequer and she was obliged to give up her job at the Commission under pressure from Mrs Thatcher, who was understood to want the Chancellor’s wife to play a more supportive, wifely role. “I wasn’t all that amused at that moment,” Elspeth Howe later confessed.

Her continued espousal of radical causes during the 1980s did nothing to improve her relationship with the PM, though Elspeth Howe always insisted that it was “perfectly amicable”. At one stage, the animosity between the two women was said to have become so marked that one Cabinet Minister compared them to “wasps in a jam jar”.

Margaret Thatcher was known to be furious when, in 1990, Elspeth Howe spent a night in a cardboard box, along with the Liberal Democrat leader Paddy Ashdown and others, to draw attention to the plight of London’s homeless.

For her part, Elspeth Howe was stung by Margaret Thatcher’s decision in 1989 to sack her husband as Foreign Secretary and cast him into political oblivion as Deputy Prime Minister and Leader of the House, doing irreversible damage to his chances of becoming Prime Minister.

Geoffrey Howe, it was believed, found himself increasingly torn between the two powerful women in his life, but it was his wife who had the final say in persuading him to resign from Mrs Thatcher’s cabinet in 1990.

The resignation speech in which he bitterly attacked Mrs Thatcher’s leadership style – a speech widely credited with precipitating her downfall – was assumed by many to have been written not by the generally mild-mannered Sir Geoffrey, but by his formidable wife. Elspeth Howe denied authorship, though she admitted to having advised her husband during its preparation.

Elspeth Howe was always regarded with suspicion by diehard Thatcherites. After Mrs Thatcher’s resignation, their opinion of her sunk lower still. She was dubbed “Lady Macbeth” and subjected to abuse. In 1990 the maverick MP Sir Nicholas Fairbairn observed: “Howe happens to be a four-letter word and Lady Howe two four-letter words. She is the sort of woman who would have espoused the cause of Communism in the Thirties.”

Never one to varnish the truth, Elspeth Howe admitted she did not feel at all sorry for Mrs Thatcher or regret her departure from office.

Elspeth Howe always described the idea of her being the power behind her husband’s throne as “absolute rubbish”, though Sir Geoffrey himself never made any secret of the fact that he regularly consulted his wife on matters of state. In 1988 he revealed that he had an out-tray on his desk at the Foreign Office in which he put papers for her consideration.

But if she was unpopular with the Right, she was greatly admired by others of many political persuasions for her bravery and determination in standing up for causes in which she believed, and liked for her personal qualities of sincerity and concern for others.

Her readiness to help in a crisis and her kindness at times of personal tragedy were legendary not just in Parliament, but also among staff at the Foreign Office, where her husband spent most of his Cabinet career.

She was born Elspeth Rosamund Morton Shand on February 8 1932. Her father, Philip Morton Shand, was an architectural historian, wine connoisseur, writer and wit. Known to his friends as “PMS”, he was a friend of Evelyn Waugh and confidant of John Betjeman, who hero-worshipped him.

Morton Shand was erratic, irascible and always short of funds; Elspeth’s mother, Sybil, was his fourth wife (Bruce Shand, the father of Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall, was his son by a previous marriage).

Sybil was also the family breadwinner. Elspeth recalled how, during the war, her father would insist on having a three-course dinner every night: “Somehow my mother managed, but the financial side was always a worry and she was working all her life to support us.”

Not surprisingly, young Elspeth did not always see eye to eye with her father: “He was a powerful personality, quite prickly, with a sarcastic tongue, and certainly he would use it on me. There was quite a lot of tension between us.”

Elspeth was sent to Wycombe Abbey, where she became head girl and was a star cricketer. She wanted to go to university but failed at her first attempt. Her father suggested she should become a librarian – “but I didn’t want to do anything my father wanted me to do”. So she took a secretarial course instead.

She met Geoffrey Howe at a party in Wimbledon given by his brother, when she was 20 and Howe was an impecunious 25-year-old barrister and founder of the Conservative Bow Group. Their first encounter, she recalled, meant leaving the presence of a “very attractive” young man who was playing the piano.

“Very reluctantly I dragged myself away from this Adonis to keep Geoffrey company in the kitchen,” she recalled. He charmed her with stories about his activities in the Bow Group: “I found him very amusing,” she said.

When she announced her engagement, her father did not approve: “His view was that you should never marry a Welshman, a lawyer or a politician, and Geoffrey was all three.” At first, her father refused to attend the wedding, but a family friend was deputed to make him come and to behave.

The wedding itself held other frustrations. Elspeth did not want to promise to “obey” her husband, so they had agreed to substitute the word “share”. When it came to the service, however, the clergyman refused to accept the change of wording and, faced with a choice between knuckling under or not getting married at all, she agreed to “obey”, though she confessed to having been “quite cross about it”.

After they were married, Geoffrey Howe’s witty stories “seemed to dry up”, but Elspeth Howe soon found other compensations in her three children, whom her husband helped to bring up. With the aid of an au pair, she created a busy life for herself as a magistrate, school governor, Tory committee chairman and much else besides.

As her husband’s political career blossomed, Elspeth Howe found herself increasingly concentrating on family and women’s issues. During the 1970s and 1980s she chaired Inner London juvenile courts in Southwark, Greenwich, Lambeth and Wandsworth, and, among other things, served on the Parole Board and as vice-president of the Pre-School Playgroups Association.

When the Labour Government created the Equal Opportunities Commission in 1975, she was appointed its first deputy chairman. There, she memorably warned head teachers that they risked prosecution under equal opportunities legislation if they taught boys metalwork and girls needlework.

After her husband’s appointment as Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1979, Elspeth Howe travelled the world with him, becoming a figure on IMF, World Bank and economic summit platforms, greeting leaders of the diplomatic and financial world as old friends.

When her husband moved to the Foreign Office she continued to travel with him and was known for her solicitous concern for the welfare of the wives and families of Foreign Office staff serving in remote corners of the world.

At their official residences of Dorneywood and later Chevening, the Howes were famed for their hospitality over country house-style weekends.

But if Mrs Thatcher had hoped that Elspeth Howe would take a back seat after 1979, she was sorely disappointed. In 1983 she campaigned against the closure of the South London Hospital for Women, threatened by NHS cutbacks. The same year, aged 50, she embarked on a three-year Social Science degree course at the London School of Economics.

When she arrived, she found it hard to get the necessary economics textbooks, so got her husband to borrow them from the House of Commons Library. A few weeks later the House Magazine expressed surprise that the Chancellor of the Exchequer had had to borrow such basic textbooks.

Her university course made her “examine her intellectual processes” and she graduated more determined than ever to fight for causes in which she believed.

She became a governor of the LSE in 1985 and began to contribute articles to the Left-leaning magazine New Society. In 1986, in article in the Financial Times, she attacked the Civil Service for its failure to appoint more women to top positions, singling out the Foreign Office for special disapprobation.

It was probably no coincidence that of the 14 ambassadorial appointments that went to women between 1970 and 1990, eight were made in the six years in which Sir Geoffrey Howe was Foreign Secretary.

In 1990 Elspeth Howe chaired a Hansard Society commission into opportunities for women. In its report, Women at the Top, she deplored the lack of women in senior positions in business and public life and set out ways of removing barriers that stood in their way. The report was notable for suggesting the childcare costs should be tax-deductible.

After her husband’s resignation, life changed for the Howes. They lost their official residences and other trappings of office, but Elspeth Howe’s career received a new lease of life after John Major became Prime Minister.

In 1991 she was invited to chair Business in the Community’s Opportunity 2000 initiative to “raise the quantity and quality of women in the workplace”. The same year, in Women on the Board, published by the Policy Studies Institute, Elspeth Howe questioned why it was that company chairmen agreed that women brought “extra value” to company boards, yet only five per cent of companies had any women board members.

In 1992 she was appointed to succeed Lord Rees-Mogg as chairman of the Broadcasting Standards Council. She used her position to call for more women to be appointed to top television jobs and to protest at the excessive use of bad language on television. From 1997 to 1999 she served as chairman of the Broadcasting Standards Commission. She was appointed CBE in 1999 and created a life peer, as Baroness Howe of Idlicote, in 2001.

Elspeth Howe was a strong supporter of the Church of England, but regretted that the churches had been exempted from equal opportunities legislation. She firmly believed that women should be allowed to become priests and dismissed the arguments of opponents as “just not respectable”.

In 1994 she chaired an Archbishops’ Commission into cathedral administration which proposed that deans and chapters should be made accountable to new diocesan councils chaired by the bishops.

Elspeth Howe continued to serve on numerous boards and quangos. In the late 1980s she became a director of Kingfisher, United Biscuits and Legal and General. She was chairman of the BOC foundation from 1990, and president of Unicef UK from 1993. She was a trustee of the Westminster Foundation for Democracy from 1992 to 1996 and a member of the Council of St George’s House, Windsor, from 1989 to 1993.

Always brisk and businesslike in manner, Elspeth Howe never wore her heart on her sleeve. Her greatest passion was for snappy Jack Russell terriers, of which the best known, Budget, became something of a media personality in the early 1980s while her husband was Chancellor of the Exchequer. Budget would famously take his master for a walk in St James’s Park on the morning of Budget day.

Lady Howe’s husband, Lord Howe of Aberavon, died in 2015. She is survived by their two daughters and a son.

Lady Howe of Idlicote, born February 8 1932, died March 22 2022