Was Geoffrey Howe a nice man? Perhaps, in personal life, he could be. On the one occasion that I ever met him, in his extreme old age, he was utterly inoffensive.
But there is no excuse for the outpouring of implicit and explicit suggestions that he was economically and politically less harsh or damaging than Margaret Thatcher.
On the contrary, he was the key figure in the economic changes of the early 1980s. She was the spectacularly successful front-of-house act for what we now call Thatcherism. But he and Nigel Lawson were the brains.
Thatcher was a great entertainer, and, since she was clever enough to know what she was doing, she was culpable for its consequences. But no one ever accused her of having a brilliant intellect.
The trick was to be repeated by Tony Blair, although he understood far less, and by the people who made similar use of him as others had of her.
Thatcher's dependence on Lawson and Howe meant that she suffered a body blow when one of them resigned, and was gone within a week after the other had done so.
But by then, their damage was done.
Important stuff.
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