Geoffrey Howe

"Britain's future depends, above all, on mastering inflation. That can be done, as the right hon. Member for Leeds, East ([[Denis Healey|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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."