Howard, Michael

▪ 2005

      In 2004 Michael Howard, leader of the United Kingdom's Conservative Party (CP) since November 2003, had an immense task on his hands. The Tories had suffered two crushing defeats in successive general elections, and despite growing dissatisfaction among the electorate with Prime Minister Tony Blair, the CP showed few signs of recovery.

      Howard was born in Gorseinon, South Wales, on July 7, 1941. His father, Bernat Hecht, was a Jewish Romanian-born shopkeeper who had emigrated in 1939 and changed his name to Bernard Howard. (Other members of the family remained behind, including Howard's grandmother, who later died in a Nazi concentration camp.) After graduating from Peterhouse, Cambridge, Howard became a barrister. His ambition, however, was always to become a politician, and he fought unsuccessfully for a seat in the House of Commons in the 1966 and 1970 general elections. In 1983 he was elected MP for the south coast seat of Folkestone and Hythe.

      In 1985 Howard joined Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's government as a junior minister at the Department of Trade and Industry. He won respect for overseeing the deregulation (known as the Big Bang) of London's financial district; in 1987 he was promoted to minister for local government. This position brought him to national prominence when he introduced legislation to abandon Britain's traditional form of local taxation, the property-based “rates” system, and replace it with a poll tax, or “community charge,” in which every adult not on welfare benefits was to be charged the same amount for local services. Although Howard succeeded in securing the passage of the bill, the poll tax was immensely unpopular. It contributed to Thatcher's downfall in 1990, and one of the first decisions taken by John Major, her successor as prime minister, was to scrap the poll tax and revert to a property-based system of local taxation. Howard, however, survived the storm and in 1990 joined the cabinet as employment secretary. In 1993 he was promoted to home secretary, a position in which he gained a reputation as a right-winger. He introduced stricter policies on both immigration and prisons.

      Following the Labour Party victory in 1997, Howard stood for the Tory leadership, but he was eliminated in the first round, following the remark by one of his former Home Office colleagues that he had “something of the night” about him, alluding to his demeanour and to the fact that his ancestry, like Dracula's, was Romanian. He did not stand when the vacancy arose in 2001, but the new CP leader, Iain Duncan Smith, failed to improve the party's fortunes. When Conservative MPs voted to eject Duncan Smith in October 2003, Howard, then the party's shadow chancellor, was the only candidate to replace him and was elected unopposed. Howard's repeated criticisms of Blair (and, implicitly, U.S. Pres. George W. Bush) for having issued false information ahead of the U.S.-led war in Iraq, made him unpopular in Washington. Early in his leadership, he suffered the embarrassment for a Conservative of being told that he would not be invited to Washington to meet President Bush.

Peter Kellner

▪ 1994

      During 1993 the U.K.'s home secretary, Michael Howard, established himself as the most prominent right-wing member of Prime Minister John Major's (q.v.) Cabinet. In particular, Howard led a campaign to revive the reputation of the Conservative government in two areas: family values and law and order.

      Howard was born on July 7, 1941, in southern Wales. He studied law at the University of Cambridge, where he formed enduring friendships with a number of other people who would become Conservative Cabinet ministers in the 1980s, such as Norman Lamont, Norman Fowler, John Gummer, and Kenneth Clarke (q.v.). After almost two decades as a barrister, Howard entered Parliament in 1983 as member for Folkestone & Hythe, southeast of London. Howard's talent, robust debating skills, and right-wing commitment brought him to the attention of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who gave him his first ministerial job only two years later.

      After the 1987 election, Howard was promoted to minister of state (the number two position) at the Department of the Environment, where he steered through Parliament controversial legislation privatizing the U.K.'s water companies. His reward was a place in Thatcher's Cabinet in January 1990 as employment secretary, a role in which he piloted through legislation that restricted trade union rights and limited workers' rights to take strike action. A prominent skeptic of European integration, Howard also played a leading role in resisting the application of the European Community's social chapter on employment rights to the U.K.

      In May 1993, Major appointed Howard home secretary. He swiftly gained a reputation as a hard-liner, reversing previous policies that had sought to minimize the use of jail for young offenders. In October he announced the building of six new prisons to contain the expected increase in the numbers sentenced to jail. In the same month, at the Conservative Party's annual conference, Howard aroused controversy by stating that unemployment and poverty had nothing to do with the causes of crime—but that family upbringing did. He argued for a return to the nuclear family, on the grounds that children who were brought up by only their mothers lacked suitable adult male role models and, as a result, were more likely to turn to crime. Howard's argument infuriated the U.K.'s liberals as much as it delighted the Conservative right-wingers, who increasingly saw Howard as their standard-bearer in any future party leadership contest.

      (PETER KELLNER)

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