Introduction: Beginnings and Endings

Summary

Geoffrey Howe was an unlikely political assassin. Portly and avuncular, his hair combed painstakingly into place, Howe had risen to serious political heights as Chancellor of the Exchequer (1979–83), Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs (1983–9) and Deputy Prime Minister of Britain (1989–90). Over that long and highly successful journey he had acquired two qualities useful for any regicide: proximity to power and toxic resentment of his leader. Howe was not alone in harbouring these attributes, but his trusted place within the Conservative Party meant that few others had the lethal combination of access and motive. Even so, when he rose in Parliament on 1 November 1990, to deliver his resignation speech, few could have predicted the consequences. Howe began modestly and moderately, feigning ‘astonishment that a quarter of a century has passed since I last spoke from one of the Back Benches’. Warming slowly to his task, he explained that he had decided to resign on matters of substance, the central element being Britain's economic relationship with Europe through the Exchange Rate Mechanism. From early on, though, the focus of his attack was manifest: Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, doughty defender of British ‘sovereignty’. Howe proposed that ‘we commit a serious error if we think always in terms of surrendering “sovereignty” and seek to stand pat for all time on a given deal – by proclaiming, as my Right Honourable Friend the Prime Minster did two weeks ago, that we have “surrendered enough”’. In happier times, Howe had likened Thatcher to Joan of Arc, playing perhaps on the combination of her gender and her fighting spirit against formidable foe. Here, though, he presented an analogy with a markedly different gender inflection. Thatcher's recurring dismissal of economic integration with Europe, while Britain's Chancellor of the Exchequer (John Major) and Governor of the Bank of England (Sir Bernard King) were trying to bring about that very thing, was, Howe thought, ‘rather like sending out 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’.