History of England 1-6

On 1 November, having been effectively demoted and disparaged, Howe resigned as deputy prime minister and lord president of the council. He asked to speak in the House to explain his decision, and in soft tones began to dismantle his colleague and former ally, the prime minister. His first remarks were suffused with quiet irony. ‘If some of my former colleagues are to be believed, I must be the first minister in history who has resigned because he was in full agreement with government policy.’ Thatcher sat still, head cocked, an indulgent smile on her lips. ‘Not one of our economic achievements,’ he continued, ‘would have been possible without the courage and leadership of my right hon. Friend.’ Thatcher’s smile did not alter. He invoked too their former collaboration in Europe, ‘from Fontainebleau to the Single European Act’. Then, with the preliminary courtesies performed, he began the attack. ‘There was, or should have been, nothing novel about joining the ERM.’ He told the House that he and Lawson had consistently urged Mrs Thatcher to join the ERM, before assuring it that he did not ‘regard the Delors Report as some kind of sacred text’. He invoked Macmillan, who in 1962 had urged the nation to take its place at the heart of the EEC. Howe protested that we should not ‘retreat into a ghetto of sentimentality about our past and so diminish our own control over our own destiny in the future …’ He went on to say that ‘had we been ready, in the much too simple phrase, to surrender some sovereignty at a much earlier stage … we should have had more, not less influence, over the Europe we have today. We should never forget the lesson of that isolation.’ A choice between a Europe of entirely independent states and a federal one was ‘a false antithesis, a bogus dilemma … as if there were no middle way. We commit,’ he urged, ‘a serious error if we think always in terms of surrendering sovereignty.’ He contrasted Churchill’s stance with ‘the nightmare image sometimes conjured up by my right hon. Friend … who seems sometimes to look out upon a continent … scheming, in her words, to “extinguish democracy”, to “dissolve our national identities” and to lead us “through the back-door into a federal Europe”. What kind of vision is that, Mr Speaker … for our young people?

‘None of us wants the imposition of a single currency,’ he assured the House. ‘The risk is not imposition but isolation … with Britain once again scrambling to join the club later, after the rules have been set … Asked whether we would veto any arrangement that jeopardized the pound sterling, my Right Honourable Friend replied simply, “Yes.” The question of the ecu would be addressed “only by future generations. Those future generations are with us today.”’ Visibly warming to his theme, Howe decided that a cricketing metaphor might be apt. The chancellor and the governor of the Bank of England, he suggested, had been placed in the position of ‘opening batsmen … 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’.

The House laughed loud and long. Nigel Lawson, in the row behind Howe, permitted himself the briefest flash of a grin. He then quoted a letter to him from a British businessman living and working on the Continent, trading in Brussels and elsewhere, who wrote that ‘people throughout Europe see our Prime Minister’s finger wagging and hear her passionate, “No, No, No”, much more clearly than the content of the carefully worded formal texts.’ A little later, Howe’s reserve broke. ‘Cabinet government is all about trying to persuade one another from within … the task has become futile.’ If there had been any doubt as to Howe’s real intent, it was dissolved by his final words: ‘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 House heard the simple words of a man honestly aggrieved. It was a reliably devastating device.

The next day, Michael Heseltine formally challenged the prime minister for the leadership. He had had a mixed career under Thatcher’s rule. While he had done much to invigorate Liverpool and the Docklands area, and had served well as the government’s ‘ambassador’ in its dealings with environmental groups, he was perhaps too flamboyant and ambitious to garner very much affection in the House. He was also a passionate Europhile at a time when such a loyalty seemed suspect. Less than five years previously, he had resigned from the cabinet over the so-called ‘Westland affair’, a controversy so involved and intricate that Thatcher later reflected, ‘I can’t even remember what the actual Westland thing was about now.’ Few could.