
Geoffrey Howe and British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in 1980. (Geoff Bruce/Central Press via Getty Images)
Geoffrey Howe, who served as British Treasury chief and foreign secretary in Margaret Thatcher’s government and who helped bring about her downfall after they parted ways over policy toward Europe, died Oct. 9 at his home in Warwickshire, north of London. He was 88.
The cause was an apparent heart attack, his family said.
Prime Minister David Cameron, a fellow Conservative, called Mr. Howe “the quiet hero of the first Thatcher government” who had shown “huge courage and resolve” in helping save the stumbling British economy.
Cameron, who today follows many of the same economic policies introduced by Thatcher, said Mr. Howe played a vital role by reducing borrowing, cutting tax rates and taming inflation. “Lifting exchange controls may seem obvious now, but it was revolutionary back then,” the prime minister said.
The owlish, avuncular-seeming Mr. Howe was not a riveting public debater. Denis Healey, a onetime prominent Labour Party leader, once described enduring a broadside by Mr. Howe as “like being savaged by a dead sheep.” But he was regarded as a skillful lawyer and negotiator and a trenchant steward of the economy in a turbulent era.
Mr. Howe took the helm at the treasury when Thatcher became prime minister in 1979, and he helped implement the free-market policies favored by her: Income-tax rates were lowered, and currency exchange controls were lifted.
Public spending was cut, and other unpopular measures, including a rise in the gasoline tax, were implemented during his tenure.
Mr. Howe become foreign secretary in 1983. He played a key role in the negotiations with the Chinese government over the future of Hong Kong. He eventually became deputy prime minister, but his relations with Thatcher had deteriorated while he ran the Foreign Office, primarily because of disagreements over England’s monetary policy with the European Community.
He was pro-European, willing to lay the foundations for an eventual move to tie England to a common European currency. Thatcher was adamantly opposed, causing tensions. They also seemed to have tired of each other’s style after a long period of harmony that had served both of them well, and Thatcher sidelined Mr. Howe in a cabinet shuffle, giving him in 1989 the largely ceremonial position of deputy prime minister.
Mr. Howe played an important role in Thatcher’s fall from power. He resigned in November 1990 and used his departure speech to challenge her fitness to continue serving as party leader. He called on Conservatives to reconsider their backing of Thatcher, who was seen as increasingly imperious after being in power for more than a decade.
He used a famous cricket comparison that has since become part of Britain’s political lexicon to describe Thatcher’s tactics.
“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 said.
Thatcher resigned three weeks later after losing the Conservatives’ backing, paving the way for then-Finance Minister John Major to succeed her. Mr. Howe’s stunning public rebuke was seen as a turning point in Thatcher’s bid to remain in office.
Richard Edward Geoffrey Howe was born in Port Talbot, Wales, on Dec. 20, 1926. His parents were lawyers, and they enjoyed rare prosperity in a coal-mining region amid the Depression.
He showed academic promise and spent his formative years at Winchester College, a preparatory school. After his graduation in 1945, he spent three years in the British army and then entered the University of Cambridge. He chaired the university Conservative Association, earned a degree in law in the early 1950s and commenced a legal practice in Wales, specializing in industrial accident cases.
He made a succession of bids for the House of Commons over the next two decades, becoming his party’s spokesman for labor and welfare matters when he held seats in Parliament. He distinguished himself on committees examining racial discrimination and industrial relations, and he led a forceful inquiry looking into allegations of abuse against mental patients at a hospital in Cardiff, Wales. He received a knighthood in 1970.
In the Conservative government of Prime Minister Edward Heath from 1970 to 1974, Mr. Howe was solicitor general and minister for trade and consumer affairs.
He entered the House of Lords in 1992 and formally retired in May.
Survivors include his wife, the former Elspeth Shand, and three children.
