Geoffrey Howe

The well-being of the British people and the health of our economy are far more important than any government's commitment to a particular strategy, but to change course now would be fatal to the whole counter-inflation strategy.

Richard Edward Geoffrey Howe, Baron Howe of Aberavon, CH, PC, QC (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, Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, and finally Leader of the House of Commons and Deputy Prime Minister. His resignation on 1 November 1990 is widely thought to have hastened Thatcher's own downfall three weeks later.

Quotes

• Britain's future depends, above all, on mastering inflation. That can be done, as the right hon. Member for Leeds, East (Mr. [Denis] Healey) well knows, only if we bring the money supply under firm control, progressively reduce the rate of monetary growth over the years and pursue the most rigorous restraint on public spending. The supposed alternatives to these policies are a delusion. None of those alternatives would be responsible and none would be sustainable. The action that I have taken today underlines the Government's total and continuing commitment to getting inflation down.
  • Speech in the House of Commons (15 November 1979)

• The well-being of the British people and the health of our economy are far more important than any government's commitment to a particular strategy, but to change course now would be fatal to the whole counter-inflation strategy.
  • "Chancellor determined not to change course in the fight against inflation", The Times (11 March 1981) p. 6.
  • 1981 budget speech.

• Denis Healey: Can he assure us there is no question of American military intervention as this could only make the situation worse?
  Sir Geoffrey Howe: There is no question of that.
  • "British and American warships standing by", The Times (25 October 1983), p. 4.
  • Answering a question on Grenada in the House of Commons (24 October 1983). The United States invaded that night.

• In this case, the United States had particular reason to consult most closely with those Caribbean countries which had called on it to help resolve the crisis. Nevertheless, their lack of consultation was regrettably less than we would have wished.
  • "Foreign Secretary regrets lack of consultation by US", The Times (27 October 1983); p. 4.
  • Remarks in the House of Commons (26 October 1983), on the United States' decision to invade Grenada (a Commonwealth country) without consultation with the United Kingdom.

• How on earth are the Chancellor and the Governor of the Bank of England, commending the 'Hard ECU' as they strive to, to be taken as serious participants in the debate against that kind of background noise? I believe that both the Chancellor and the Governor are cricketing enthusiasts, so I hope that there is no monopoly of cricketing metaphors. It is rather like sending your opening batsmen to the crease only for them to find, the moment the first balls are bowled, that their bats have been broken before the game by the team captain.
  • Hansard, House of Commons, 6th series, vol. 180 col. 464.
  • Personal statement in the House of Commons on his resignation (13 November 1990).

• The conflict of loyalty, of loyalty to my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister--and, after all, in two decades together that instinct of loyalty is still very real--and of loyalty to what I perceive to be the true interests of the nation, has become all too great. I no longer believe it possible to resolve that conflict from within this Government. That is why I have resigned. In doing so, I have done what I believe to be right for my party and my country. 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.
  • Hansard, House of Commons, 6th series, vol. 180 col. 465.
  • Conclusion of personal statement in the House of Commons on his resignation (13 November 1990). Howe's invitation to "others to consider their own response" was interpreted as a direct call to Michael Heseltine to challenge Margaret Thatcher for the leadership of the Conservative Party.

Quotes about Geoffrey Howe

• I start with the measures which the Government announced last Thursday, and which are the immediate occasion of today's debate, and to which the right hon. Gentleman finally came round – a trifle nervously, I thought - after ploughing through that tedious and tendentious farrago of moth-eaten cuttings presented to him by the Conservative Research Department. I must say that part of his speech was rather like being savaged by a dead sheep.
  • Hansard, House of Commons, 5th series, vol. 951 col. 1027.
  • Denis Healey, Howe's opposite number as Chancellor of the Exchequer in the Labour government, speaking in the House of Commons (14 June 1978)

• A fine mind, intellectual conviction, integrity, tenacity, resilience, great courtesy allied to almost ruthless ambition, more than made up for a somewhat colourless public personality (although he was far from colourless in private) and lack-lustre parliamentary performances. Although in no sense an economist, his experience of trying to implement the absurdities of a statutory prices and incomes policy as Minister for Consumer Affairs in the Heath cabinet, coupled with his liberal principles in the true sense of the word, meant that there was a ready meeting of minds. Very much a lawyer, he is a glutton both for work and for detail, and needs remarkably little sleep.
  This is something he shares with Margaret; but in other respects, they could scarcely be more different. For him politics is about being reasonable, and persuasion a matter of patient education. My manner, too, is very different from Geoffrey's, but I never felt his to be a sign of weakness, as she clearly did. Curiously, in the light of subsequent events, our only significant policy difference was over Europe, where the drift towards a United States of Europe was something that I viewed with deep foreboding, but which Geoffrey manifestly did not.
  • Nigel Lawson, The View from No. 11: Memoirs of a Tory Radical (1992), p. 16

• The third and last in this sequence of events was Geoffrey Howe's resignation speech of 13 November 1990... Always a deliberate man – one of his favourite sayings was that a government should proceed "at all deliberate speed" – he had spent the intervening period agonizing and drafting and redrafting. By agreement, I sat by his side when he delivered it; but I was wholly unprepared for what he had to say. It was, quite simply, the most devastating speech I, or I suspect anyone else in the House that afternoon, had heard uttered in the House of Commons... It was all the more powerful because it was Geoffrey, that most moderate, long-suffering and patient of men, who was uttering it.
  • Nigel Lawson, The View from No. 11: Memoirs of a Tory Radical (1992), p. 1000

• Geoffrey Howe from this point on would be remembered not for his staunchness as Chancellor, nor for his skilful diplomacy as Foreign Secretary, but for this final act of bile and treachery. The very brilliance with which he wielded the dagger ensured that the character he assassinated was in the end his own.
  • Margaret Thatcher, The Downing Street Years (1993), p. 840