Geoffrey Howe

Died: October 9 2015

Geoffrey Howe, who has died aged 88, was a capable and good-humoured Conservative politician who served reliably in a number of front-bench positions over 20 years. But he is most famous for his devastating resignation speech which triggered the leadership challenge against Margaret Thatcher and her eventual fall from power in 1990.

He was born in Port Talbot, the grandson of a tinplate worker, and studied classics at Cambridge on a scholarship before entering the legal profession. After a brief fling as MP for Bebington in the Wirral from 1964 to 66, he came back in 1970 as member for Reigate, later transmuted by carve-ups into East Surrey, and stayed there until the peerage in 1992.

Before the 1970 election, he worked on Ted Heath's elaborate policy plans in opposition and emerged, after a surprise general election victory, as Solicitor General in charge of trade union reform. He brought in the Fair Trading Act, and with it the Office of Fair Trade as well as the excellent Consumer Credit Act, which obliged the display of the full cost of credit.

After Margaret Thatcher won the leadership, the two of them worked together quite well. He moved from shadowing health and social security to the post of Chancellor of the Exchequer after the Tories won the election in 1979. He began by ending exchange controls, he cut the top rate of taxation and almost doubled VAT.

However, while Howe had affinities with free markets, lower taxation and the rest, he lacked the qualities to be what Mrs Thatcher called "one of us" and he was ill at ease with the insistent partisanship of the continuous counter-revolutionaries.

Once Howe moved from the Treasury to Europe in 1983, a voluntary and welcome change, it would gradually become harder for him and Thatcher to agree. But again over his six years in the job, he did a full quota of sensible, painstaking work. He recognised early on that Britain could not hang onto any share of power in Hong Kong after 1997. He also helped create the Anglo-Irish agreement of 1985, something to which Mrs Thatcher surprisingly took a shine and which Enoch Powell denounced as treason.

Over the great Westland row, disclosure, almost certainly at Thatcher's bidding, of a law officer's private advice in her personal struggle with Michael Heseltine, Howe was honourably in the middle. He supported her and tried to tone down her behaviour at the same time. On South Africa he always stood a polite distance from Thatcher's belief that the regime was the alternative to Communism and managed toward the end to speak sympathetically about the ANC.

He was an also uncomplicated good European, but as Thatcher grew so much more than an institutional critic of Europe, she and Geoffrey Howe would fall out more often.

He got on Thatcher's nerves on a number of occasions by arguing quietly and relentlessly and she went out of her way in a television interview in 1988 to say that her successor should come from a younger generation, a message that she would stop Howe.

Eventually her simmering antipathies boiled over and she abruptly demoted him in the summer of 1989 to Leader of the House and some committee chairmanships. The universal expectation was that Lord Howe who had taken so much, would go on taking it. Had not Denis Healey, at the beginning of the decade, famously likened an attack by Howe to being "bitten by a dead sheep"? Not a bit of it: cheered to the rafters when he next appeared in the Commons, he lingered only a few months before resigning to make the resignation speech of all resignation speeches.

Directed at Thatcher's intrusions over ministerial heads in Europe, he talked of going to the wicket with a bat which had been broken by the team captain. The reaction was tumultuous - and his words worked like a detonator. Michael Heseltine was precipitated into the candidacy which, falling short for him, brought Thatcher down. A less likely assassin was unimaginable.

It was impossible for Howe to be rewarded with a place in the Major government, and having done the necessary, he probably did not want one. He went quietly to the House of Lords in 1992 as Lord Howe of Aberavon and a life of Harvard and Stanford visiting professorships, foundations, charities, symposia and projects, a little business, and a nice collection of European national honours.

Lord Howe is survived by his wife Elspeth Howe, who was created a life peer as Lady Howe of Idlicote in 2001, and their three children.