"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."
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Members of the Parliament of the United KingdomPolitical leadersGovernment ministersPoliticians from WalesConservative Party (UK) politicians
Original Language: English
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Sources
Nigel Lawson, The View from No. 11: Memoirs of a Tory Radical (1992), p. 16
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Geoffrey_Howe
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Geoffrey Howe
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 [[w:Deputy Prime Minister of the United Kingdom|Deputy Pri
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