Michael Howard

Howard gained quick promotion, becoming Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State at the Department of Trade and Industry in 1985 with responsibility for regulating the financial dealings of the City of London. This junior post became very important, as he oversaw the Big Bang introduction of new technology in 1986. After the 1987 general election, he became Minister for Local Government. Following a proposal from backbench MP David Wilshire, he accepted the amendment which would become Section 28 (prohibiting local governments from the "promotion" of homosexuality) and defended its inclusion.

Howard guided the 1988 Local Government Finance Act through the House of Commons. The act brought in Margaret Thatcher's new system of local taxation, officially known as the Community Charge but almost universally nicknamed the "poll tax". Howard personally supported the tax and won Thatcher's respect for minimising the rebellion against it within the Conservative Party. After a period as Minister for Water and Planning in 1988–89, during which he was responsible for implementing water privatisation in England and Wales, Howard was promoted to the Cabinet as Secretary of State for Employment in January 1990 following the resignation of Norman Fowler. He subsequently guided through legislation abolishing the closed shop, and campaigned vigorously for Thatcher in the first ballot of the 1990 Conservative Party leadership contest, although he told her a day before she resigned that he felt she wasn't going to win and that John Major was better placed to defeat Michael Heseltine.

He retained his Cabinet post under John Major and campaigned against trade union power during the 1992 general election campaign. His work in the campaign led to his appointment as Secretary of State for the Environment in the reshuffle after the election. In this capacity he encouraged the United States to participate in the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, but shortly afterwards he was appointed Home Secretary in a 1993 reshuffle precipitated by the sacking of Norman Lamont as Chancellor.

As Home Secretary he pursued a tough approach to crime, summed up in his sound bite, "prison works". During his tenure as Home Secretary, recorded crime fell by 16.8%.[5] In 2010 Howard claimed a 45% decrease in crime since a 1993 study by Home Office criminologist Roger Tarling proved that prison worked though the prison population rose from 42,000 to nearly 85,000. Ken Clarke disagreed, pointing to a 60% recidivism rate amongst newly released prisoners and hinting that factors such as better household and vehicle security and better policing could be influencing crime rates, not just the incapacitation effect of removing offenders to prison.[6]

Howard repeatedly clashed with judges and prison reformers as he sought to clamp down on crime through a series of 'tough' measures, such as reducing the right to silence of defendants in their police interviews and at their trials as part of 1994's Criminal Justice and Public Order Act. Howard voted for the reintroduction of the death penalty for the killing of police officers on duty and for murders carried out with firearms in 1983 and 1990.[7] In 1993, he changed his mind and became opposed to the reintroduction of the death penalty and voted against it again in February 1994.

In 1993, after the murder of James Bulger, two eleven-year-old boys were convicted of his murder and sentenced to be detained at Her Majesty's pleasure, with a recommended a minimum term of eight years. Lord Taylor of Gosforth, the Lord Chief Justice, ordered that the two boys should serve a minimum of ten years.[8] The editors of The Sun newspaper handed a petition bearing nearly 280,000 signatures to Howard, in a bid to increase the time spent by both boys in custody.[9] This campaign was successful, and the boys were kept in custody for a minimum of fifteen years,[9][10] meaning that they would not be considered for release until February 2008, by which time they would be 25 years of age.[8]

A former Master of the Rolls, Lord Donaldson, criticised Howard's intervention, describing the increased tariff as "institutionalised vengeance ... [by] a politician playing to the gallery".[8] The increased minimum term was overturned in 1997 by the House of Lords, which ruled it was substantively "ultra vires", and therefore "unlawful", for the Home Secretary to decide on minimum sentences for young offenders.[11] The High Court and European Court of Human Rights have since ruled that, though Parliament may set minimum and maximum terms for individual categories of crime, it is the responsibility of the trial judge, with the benefit of all the evidence and argument from both prosecution and defence counsel, to determine the minimum term in individual criminal cases.[10]

His reputation was dented on 13 May 1997 when a critical inquiry into a series of prison escapes was published. In advance of the publication, Howard made statements to assign blame to the prison service. Television interviewer Jeremy Paxman asked him the same question fourteen times in all during an edition of the Newsnight programme. Asking whether Howard had intervened when Derek Lewis sacked a prison governor, Paxman asked: "Did you threaten to overrule him?" Howard did not give a direct answer, instead repeatedly saying that he "did not instruct him" and ignoring the "threaten" part of the question.[12] Paxman resumed his question in another interview in 2004. A surprised Howard remarked: "Oh come on Jeremy, are you really going back over that again? As it happens, I didn't. Are you satisfied now?" Secret Home Office papers partially vindicated Howard but show that Howard asked a top civil servant if he had the power to overrule the Prison Service director general.[13]

Shortly after the 1997 Newsnight interview, Ann Widdecombe, his former minister of state at the Home Office, made a statement in the House of Commons about the dismissal of then-Director of the Prison Service, Derek Lewis, and remarked of Howard that there is "something of the night" about him.[14] This much quoted comment is thought to have contributed to the failure of his 1997 bid for the Conservative Party leadership, including by Howard and Widdecombe,[15][16] and led to him being caricatured as a vampire, in part due to his Romanian ancestry.[17] Such characterisations caused discontent among members of Britain's Jewish community. In 1996 Howard controversially signed the early release of well known drug trafficker John Haase in the form of a Royal pardon. He served 11 months into 18-year prison sentences for heroin smuggling, having provided information leading to the seizure of firearms. The Home Secretary, Michael Howard, was criticized for the decision. [18]

Following the 1997 resignation of John Major, Howard and William Hague ran on the same ticket, with Howard as leader and Hague as Deputy Leader and Party Chairman. The day after they agreed this, Hague decided to run on his own. Howard also stood but his campaign was marred by attacks on his record as Home Secretary.

Howard came in last out of five candidates with the support of only 23 MPs in the first round of polling for the leadership election. He then withdrew from the race and endorsed the eventual winner, William Hague. Howard served as Shadow Foreign Secretary for the next two years but retired from the Shadow Cabinet in 1999, though continued as an MP.

After the Conservative defeat at the 2001 general election, Howard was recalled to frontline politics when the Conservative Party's new leader, Iain Duncan Smith, appointed him Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer. His performances in the post won him much praise; indeed, under his guidance, the Conservatives decided to debate the economy on an 'Opposition Day' for the first time in several years. After Duncan Smith was removed from the leadership, Howard was elected unopposed as leader of the party in November 2003. As leader, he faced much less discontent within the party than any of his three predecessors and was seen as a steady hand. He avoided repeating such managerial missteps as Duncan Smith's firing of David Davis as Conservative Party Chairman and imposed discipline quickly and firmly: for example, he removed the party whip from Ann Winterton after she joked about 23 Chinese migrants' deaths.

In February 2004, Howard called on then-Prime Minister Tony Blair to resign over the Iraq War, for failing to ask "basic questions" regarding WMD claims and misleading Parliament.[19] In July, the Conservative leader stated that he would not have voted for the motion that authorised the Iraq War had he known the quality of intelligence information on which the WMD claims were based. At the same time, he said he still believed in the Iraq invasion was right because "the prize of a stable Iraq was worth striving for".[20] However, Howard's criticism of Blair was not received favourably in Washington, D.C., where President of the United States George W. Bush refused to meet him. Bush's advisor Karl Rove reportedly told Howard, "you can forget about meeting the president. Don't bother coming."[21]

Howard was named 2003 Parliamentarian of the Year by The Spectator and Zurich UK. This was in recognition of his performance at the dispatch box in his previous role as Shadow Chancellor. However, twelve months after he became party leader, neither his personal popularity nor his party's with the public had risen appreciably in opinion polls from several years before.

Howard was part of discussions for British Airways to resume flights to Pakistan in 2003, this was until their final departure in 2008 the only European airline serving the nation.[22]

In November 2004, Newsnight again concentrated on Howard with coverage of a campaign trip to Cornwall and an interview with Jeremy Paxman. The piece, which purported to show that members of the public could not identify Howard and that those who recognised him did not support him, was the subject of an official complaint from the Conservative Party. The complaint argued that the Newsnight team spoke only to people who held opinions against either Michael Howard or the Conservatives and that Paxman's style was bullying and unnecessarily aggressive. In this programme, Paxman also returned to his question from 1997. Howard returned briefly to Newsnight on Jeremy Paxman's final episode on 18 June 2014 for a cameo.

At the 2005 general election, Howard's Conservative Party suffered a third consecutive defeat, although the Conservatives gained 33 seats (including five from the Liberal Democrats) and Labour's majority shrank from 167 to 66. The Conservatives were left with 198 seats to Labour's 355. The Conservative share of the national vote increased by 0.6% from 2001 and 1.6% from 1997. The party ended with 32.4% of the total votes cast, which was within 3% of Labour on 35.2%.

The day after the election, Howard stated in a speech in the newly gained Conservative seat in Putney that he would not lead the party into the next general election as, already aged 63, he would be "too old" by that stage, and that he would stand down "sooner rather than later", following a revision of the Conservative leadership electoral process. Despite Labour winning a third term in government, Howard described the election as "the beginning of a recovery" for the Conservative Party following Labour's landslide victories in 1997 and 2001.[23]

Howard's own constituency of Folkestone and Hythe had been heavily targeted by the Liberal Democrats as the most sought after prize of their failed "decapitation" strategy of seeking to gain seats from prominent Conservatives. Yet Howard almost doubled his majority to 11,680, while the Liberal Democrats saw their vote fall.

During the 2005 general election campaign, Howard was criticised by some commentators for conducting a campaign which addressed the issues of immigration, asylum seekers, and travellers. Others noted that the continued media coverage of such issues created most of the controversy and that Howard merely defended his views when questioned at unrelated policy launches.

Some evidence suggested that the public generally supported policies proposed by the Conservative Party when they were not told which party had proposed them, indicating that the party still had an image problem. Conservative John Major's 30% lead in 1992 amongst the sought after ABC1 voters (professionals) had all but disappeared by 2005.[24]

The campaign focus on immigration may have been influenced by Howard's election adviser Lynton Crosby, who had run similar tactics in Australian elections earlier.[25] Crosby was later re-hired by the Conservative Party to run their successful campaign in the 2008 London mayoral election.

In the lead up to the election campaign, Howard continued to impose strong party discipline, controversially forcing the deselection of Danny Kruger (Sedgefield), Robert Oulds and Adrian Hilton (both Slough) and Howard Flight (Arundel & South Downs).[26]

Despite his impending resignation after the 2005 general election, Howard performed a substantial reshuffle of the party's front bench in which several rising star MPs were given their first shadow portfolios, including George Osborne and David Cameron. This move cleared the way for Cameron (who had worked for Howard as a Special Advisor when the latter was Home Secretary) to stand for the Conservative Party leadership.

The reforms to the party's election process took several months and Howard remained in his position for six months after the election. During that period, he enjoyed a fairly pressure-free time, often making joking comparisons between himself and Tony Blair, both of whom had declared they would not stand at the next general election. He also oversaw Blair's first parliamentary defeat, when the Conservative Party, the Liberal Democrats and sufficient Labour Party rebels voted against government proposals to extend to 90 days the period that terror suspects could be held for without charge. Howard stood down as Leader of the Conservative Party in December 2005 and was succeeded by David Cameron.

In 2015, Soma Oil and Gas, which Howard chairs, was investigated by the Serious Fraud Office.[42] On 14 December 2016, The Serious Fraud Office closed its investigation of Soma, citing insufficient evidence of corruption.[43]

Howard is a keen supporter of the hospice movement and was chairman of Hospice UK from 2010 until 2018.[44]