Geoffrey Howe, the close cabinet ally who became Thatcher’s assassin

Travelling with Geoffrey Howe when he made a foreign secretary’s tour of east Africa in the 1980s, I had to file copy home to the Guardian and there was only one phone with which to do so. The phone was in a waiting room at Nairobi airport and I had an audience as I delivered my story: Howe himself and his formidable wife, Elspeth. My story made mention of Margaret Thatcher. On hearing the reference to the prime minister, Elspeth looked over to me, rather angrily, and exclaimed: “What’s she got to do with it?” By now the relationship between Thatcher and Howe, once the closest of allies, was heading towards the dramatic denouement that would see his resignation from her government and then her ejection from Number 10.

In the Conservative cabinets of Thatcher, no other minister played a more significant part than Howe, 11 years at her top table at the Treasury and then at the Foreign Office. His was a uniquely double role in the history of that period. He was both the author of much of what became known as Thatcherism and the man who played the biggest part in bringing her down.

After the failure of Ted Heath’s government and its removal from office in 1974, Howe was one of the early adopters of new Tory thinking about the economy that rejected corporatism and Keynesian demand-management and emphasised competition, curbing trades unions, the control of debt and the defeat of inflation. That recommended him to Thatcher when she was looking for fellow warriors in her battle to break the postwar consensus. She made him her Treasury spokesman in opposition and then chancellor when the Conservatives came to power in 1979. The two were often rather lonely battlers against the world and against the dissenting “wets” within the cabinet in her early period, as they set about trying to balance the books and control inflation by deflating an economy that was already ailing. My colleague Bill Keegan dubbed it “sado-monetarism”. Unemployment topped 3 million, the Tories plummeted in the polls, and 364 economists signed a letter to the Times denouncing Howe’s defiantly tough 1981 budget – which cut spending and raised taxes in the face of a world recession – as a threat to political stability and the fabric of society.

To this day, Howe’s record is hotly contested between those who argue it caused unnecessarily brutal deindustrialisation and those who contend it was shock therapy that put Britain on course for the recovery that followed. In Tory folklore Howe became a hero, with a reputation as the unflinching Iron Chancellor who turned things around in close alliance with the Iron Lady.

In fact, the relationship between the two was more complex than that. There were obvious contrasts of temperament. Her signature style was strident. He was so soft-spoken that you sometimes had to strain to hear his words. Howe’s speaking style was often mocked as an antidote to insomnia. The New Statesman once ran a competition inviting readers to suggest the most depressing greeting you might hear on arriving at a dinner party. The winning entry was: “Do come in. Sir Geoffrey is on sparkling form tonight.”

The subsequent release of private papers has revealed that Howe was often a moderating influence on a prime minister who frequently complained that he resisted the even more draconian economic measures that she pressed on him.

After the Tory landslide victory of 1983 Howe’s reward was the Foreign Office. The most important negotiation of his time there was to agree the terms of the handover of Hong Kong to China, which secured promises from Beijing that it would allow a continuing degree of independence for the former colony.

What most marked his time at the Foreign Office was increasingly visible differences with Thatcher. A chasm opened up between them over Europe. He remained what he had always been: a passionately committed Tory believer in the European ideal. She was accelerating on her journey towards europhobia. In alliance with senior colleagues, Howe pushed Thatcher to agree to British membership of the European exchange rate mechanism by threatening to resign if she didn’t. She thought – rightly, as it turned out – that the ERM was going to be a disaster.

She took her revenge shortly afterwards, when she shunted Howe out of the Foreign Office that he loved to make way for John Major, a rising figure and, or so she supposed, a more pliant one. Howe was given the sop status of deputy prime minister, but any consolation that might have been was stripped away when Thatcher’s press secretary, Bernard Ingham, briefed the media that the title was essentially meaningless. Insult was compounded by injury when he was deprived of Chevening, the Foreign Secretary’s country residence, which he adored. Her displays of contempt for him in cabinet became so naked that they had other ministers wincing.

In November 1990 Howe’s legendary patience finally snapped. He quit and delivered a scorching resignation statement in the Commons that crystallised the fears about Thatcher now swelling in the breasts of many Tory MPs. He indicted her increasingly domineering style of leadership by likening her treatment of cabinet colleagues involved in European negotiations to a cricket captain who sends his team to the crease having first broken their bats in the changing room. The speech climaxed with a call to arms: “The time has come for others to consider their own response to the tragic conflict of loyalties, with which I have myself wrestled for perhaps too long.” The speech was the more devastating and dramatic for being delivered in his usual unhistrionic manner. Writing in the Guardian at the time, I described him as “the sheep that roared”. The ferocity of the attack penetrated even Thatcher’s armour-plating. She turned to Kenneth Baker, sitting beside her on the frontbench, and muttered: “Well, I didn’t think he would do that.”

The speech triggered the sequence of events that led to her downfall. Michael Heseltine had been hesitating over whether to launch a leadership challenge. Howe’s speech forced him to act. Thatcher just beat off that challenge, but fell short of the votes required to avoid a second round. The cabinet concluded she was a lost cause and queued up to tell her that she had to go. She went. The man who had been her closest cabinet ally had turned into her assassin, a conversion brought on by many things, not the least of them her boorish behaviour towards him.

His Labour sparring partner, Denis Healey – who, by a strange symmetry, died just a week ago – likened doing parliamentary battle with Howe to “being savaged by a dead sheep.” Howe later responded that being attacked by Healey was like “being nuzzled by an old boar.” The two of them and their spouses became good friends.

For while Howe was a dogged battler for his causes, he conducted his relations with others with great courtesy. Officials who worked with him admired him for his large appetite for work, his lawyerly mastery of a brief and the consideration he displayed to juniors. Fellow politicians frequently spoke of him as one of the most honest and decent practitioners of their profession. And that is not something that is often said about politicians, especially not by other politicians.