Richard Edward Geoffrey Howe, Baron Howe of Aberavon, CH, QC, PC (20 December 1926 – 9 October 2015), known from 1970 to 1992 as Sir Geoffrey Howe, was a British Conservative politician.

He was Margaret Thatcher's longest-serving Cabinet minister, successively holding the posts of Chancellor of the Exchequer, Foreign Secretary, and finally Leader of the House of Commons, Deputy Prime Minister and Lord President of the Council. His resignation on 1 November 1990 is widely considered by the British Press to have precipitated Thatcher's own resignation three weeks later.

Early life

Geoffrey Howe was born in 1926 at Port Talbot in Wales, to Charles, an economist, and Gwyneth. He was educated at three independent schools: at Bridgend Preparatory School in Bryntirion, followed by Abberley Hall School in Worcestershire and Winchester College in Hampshire.[1] He then did National Service as a Lieutenant with the Royal Corps of Signals in East Africa, by his own account giving political lectures in Swahili about how Africans should avoid communism and remain loyal to "Bwana Kingy George". Having declined an offer to remain in the army as a captain, he went up to Trinity Hall, Cambridge, where he read Law and was chairman of the Cambridge University Conservative Association, and on the committee of the Cambridge Union Society.

He was called to the Bar in 1952 and was made a QC in 1965. He stood as the Conservative Party candidate in Aberavon at the 1955 and 1959 general elections, losing in a very safe Labour Party seat. He became chairman of the Bow Group, an internal Conservative think tank of 'young modernisers' in the 1960s, and edited its magazine Crossbow.

In 1958, he co-authored the report A Giant's Strength published by the Inns of Court Conservative Association. The report argued that the unions had become too powerful and that their legal privileges ought to be curtailed. Ian Macleod discouraged the authors from publicising the report. Harold Macmillan believed that trade union votes had contributed towards the 1951 and 1955 election victories and thought that it would be inexpedient to adopt any policy involving legislation which would alienate this support.

Lord Howe described himself as quarter Scottish, quarter Cornish and half Welsh.

His widow Elspeth Shand is the paternal aunt of Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall.

Member of Parliament

Howe represented Bebington in the House of Commons from 1964 to 1966, Reigate from 1970 to 1974, and East Surrey from 1974 to 1992. In 1970 he was knighted[4] and appointed Solicitor General in Edward Heath's government, and in 1972 became Minister of State at the Department of Trade and Industry, with a seat in the Cabinet, a post he held until Labour took power in March 1974.

In Opposition between 1974 and 1979, Howe contested the second ballot of the 1975 Conservative leadership election, in which Margaret Thatcher was elected, and then was appointed by Thatcher as Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer. He masterminded the development of new economic policies embodied in an Opposition mini-manifesto The Right Approach to the Economy. Labour Chancellor Denis Healey in 1978 claimed an attack from Howe was "like being savaged by a dead sheep". Nevertheless, when Healey was featured on This Is Your Life in 1989, Howe appeared and paid warm tribute to Healey. The two men were friends for many years.

With Conservative victory in the 1979 general election, Howe became Chancellor of the Exchequer. His tenure was characterised by radical policies to correct the public finances, reduce inflation and liberalise the economy. The shift from direct to indirect taxation, the development of a Medium-Term Financial Strategy, the abolition of exchange controls and the creation of tax-free enterprise zones were among the most important decisions of his Chancellorship. Howe's famous 1981 Budget defied conventional economic wisdom at the time by disinflating the economy at a time of recession. At the time, his decision was fiercely criticised by 364 academic economists in a letter to The Times, who contended that there was no place for de-stimulatory policies in the economic climate of the time, remarking the Budget had "no basis in economic theory or supporting evidence". Many signatories were prominent members of the academic sphere, including Mervyn King who later became the Governor of the Bank of England.

The logic in his proposals was that by reducing the deficit which at the time was £9.3 billion (3.6% GDP), and controlling inflation, long-term interest rates would be able to decline, thus re-stimulating the economy. The budget did reduce inflation from 11.9% in early 1981 to 3.8% in February 1983. Long-term interest rates also declined from 14% in 1981 to 10% in 1983. The economy slowly climbed out of recession. However, unemployment, already extremely high, was pushed to a 50-year high of 12% by 1984, narrowly avoiding the figure reached during the Great Depression of 13.5%. Some have argued that the budget, although ultimately successful, was nevertheless over the top. Specialist opinions on the question, expressed with 25 years' hindsight, are collected in an Institute of Economic Affairs report.

Unlike Reaganomics, his macro-economic policy emphasised the need to narrow the budget deficit rather than engage in unilateral tax cuts; despite these measures the budget deficit remained on average 3% of GDP during Howe's tenure. His micro-economic policy was designed to liberalise the economy and promote supply-side reform. This combination of policies became one of the defining features of Thatcherism in power.

At the end of 2011, the release of confidential documents under the UK Government's 30-year rule revealed Geoffrey Howe's thoughts regarding the Toxteth riots of 1981. The papers reveal that he warned Mrs Thatcher "not to overcommit scarce resources to Liverpool". "I fear that Merseyside is going to be much the hardest nut to crack," he said. "We do not want to find ourselves concentrating all the limited cash that may have to be made available into Liverpool and having nothing left for possibly more promising areas such as the West Midlands or, even, the North East." "It would be even more regrettable if some of the brighter ideas for renewing economic activity were to be sown only on relatively stony ground on the banks of the Mersey." "I cannot help feeling that the option of managed decline is one which we should not forget altogether. We must not expend all our limited resources in trying to make water flow uphill." Speaking in response to the release of the documents, Howe stated that he had not advocated the "managed decline" policy and that he had merely been warning of the danger of concentrating excessive resources on one area of need.

After the 1983 general election Thatcher appointed Howe Foreign Secretary, a post he held for six years. His tenure was made difficult by growing behind-the-scenes tensions with the Prime Minister on a number of issues, first on South Africa and then on Britain's relations with the European Community. In June 1989, Howe and his successor as Chancellor, Nigel Lawson, secretly threatened to both resign over Thatcher's opposition to British membership in the exchange rate mechanism of the European Monetary System.

In the following month of July 1989, the then little-known John Major was unexpectedly appointed to replace Howe as Foreign Secretary, and the latter became Leader of the House of Commons, Lord President of the Council and Deputy Prime Minister. In the reshuffle, Howe was also offered, but turned down, the post of Home Secretary. Although attempts were made to belittle this aspect, Howe's move back to domestic politics was generally seen as a demotion, especially after Thatcher's press secretary Bernard Ingham belittled the significance of the Deputy Prime Minister appointment, saying that the title had no constitutional significance, at his lobby briefing the following morning.

Howe then had to give up the Foreign Secretary's country residence Chevening. The sceptical attitude towards Howe in Number 10 weakened him politically – even if it may have been driven to some degree by fear of him as a possible successor – a problem compounded by the resignation from the Treasury of his principal ally Nigel Lawson later in the same year. During his time as Deputy Prime Minister, Howe made a series of coded calls on Thatcher to re-position her administration, which was suffering rising unpopularity following its introduction of the poll tax, as a 'listening government'.

With pressures mounting on Thatcher, Howe resigned from the Cabinet on 1 November 1990, in the aftermath of the Prime Minister's position at the Rome European Council meeting the previous weekend, at which she had declared for the first time that Britain would never enter a single currency, and the next day after her famous "No. No. No." speech. Howe wrote a cautiously worded letter of resignation in which he criticised Thatcher's overall handling of UK relations with the European Community. After largely successful attempts by Number 10 to claim that there were differences only of style, rather than substance, in Howe's disagreement with Thatcher on Europe, Howe chose to send a powerful message of dissent. In a famous resignation speech in the Commons on 13 November, he attacked Thatcher for running increasingly serious risks for the future of the country and criticised her for undermining the policies on EMU proposed by her own Chancellor and Governor of the Bank of England. He offered a striking cricket simile for British negotiations on EMU in Europe: "It is rather like sending your opening batsmen to the crease, only for them to find, as the first balls are being bowled, that their bats have been broken before the game by the team captain". He called on others to "consider their own response to the tragic conflict of loyalties with which I have myself wrestled for perhaps too long".

Although Howe said subsequently that his intention was only to constrain any shift in European policy by the Cabinet under the existing Prime Minister, his dramatic speech is widely seen as the key catalyst for the leadership challenge of Michael Heseltine a few days later, as well as Thatcher's subsequent resignation as Prime Minister and party leader on 22 November 1990, after failing to win a vote in the first ballot by a sufficient margin to prevent a second ballot. Five days later, Chancellor of the Exchequer John Major was elected party leader and thus became prime minister. The change proved to be a positive one for the Tories, who had trailed Labour in most opinion polls by a double-digit margin throughout 1990 but soon returned to the top of the polls and won the general election in April 1992.

Howe retired from the House of Commons in 1992 and was made a life peer on 30 June 1992 as Baron Howe of Aberavon, of Tandridge in the County of Surrey. He published his memoirs Conflict of Loyalty (Macmillan, 1994) soon after. In the Lords, Howe continued to speak on a wide range of foreign-policy and European issues, and more recently led opposition to the Labour government's plan to convert the second chamber into a largely elected body. He retired from the House of Lords on 19 May 2015.

Following his retirement from the Commons, Howe took on a number of non-executive directorships in business and advisory posts in law and academia, including as international political adviser to the US law firm Jones Day, a director of Glaxo and J P Morgan, and visitor at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. His wife, Elspeth Howe, a former Chairman of the Broadcasting Standards Commission, was made a life peer in 2001, as The Baroness Howe of Idlicote. They were one of the few couples who both held titles in their own right. Lord Howe was a patron of the UK Metric Association and the Conservative Foreign and Commonwealth Council. Lord Howe was appointed a Companion of the Order of the Companions of Honour (CH) in the 1996 Birthday Honours. He was an honorary fellow of SOAS. From 1996–2006 he was President of the Academy of Experts and in November 2014 was made an Honorary Fellow of the organisation in recognition of his contribution to the development of methods of dispute resolution.

Howe was a close personal friend of Ian Gow, the former MP, parliamentary private secretary, and personal confidant of Margaret Thatcher. He delivered the principal appreciation of Gow at the latter's memorial service after Gow was assassinated by the IRA in 1990.

Howe's dramatic resignation speech in the House of Commons formed the basis of Jonathan Maitland's 2015 play Dead Sheep.

Howe died at the age of 88 on 9 October 2015 following a suspected heart attack.

Styles

• Mr Geoffrey Howe (1926–1964)
• Mr Geoffrey Howe, MP (1964–1965)
• Mr Geoffrey Howe, QC, MP (1965–1966)
• Mr Geoffrey Howe, QC (1966–1970)
• Sir Geoffrey Howe, QC (1970)
• Sir Geoffrey Howe, QC, MP (1970–1972)
• The Rt Hon. Sir Geoffrey Howe, QC, MP (1972–1992)
• The Rt Hon. The Lord Howe of Aberavon, PC, QC (1992–1996)
• The Rt Hon. The Lord Howe of Aberavon, CH, PC, QC (1996–2015)