It will have come as little surprise to most observers at the annual cricket match played between the Foreign Office and the Commonwealth Secretariat when Elspeth Howe, the wife of the foreign secretary, took her place at the crease in the game played in the grounds of Blenheim Palace in 1986 and was not out after batting what was described as a magnificent five overs.
She was privately teased within her family for her public reputation for being formidable, but it was a characteristic she had carried all her life, even before she captained the Wycombe Abbey cricket XI as a schoolgirl.
Howe, who has died of cancer aged 90, attracted such adjectives (redoubtable was another favourite) because they were irresistible when describing a woman who was both strong-minded and forceful, intellectually independent and politically powerful, as a result both of her own public activities and her partnership with Geoffrey Howe, the politician whom she married when she was 21 and whose own career she helped to mastermind in tandem with her own.
When he was selected as the Conservative parliamentary candidate for the hotly contested safe seat of Reigate, Surrey, before the 1970 election, Elspeth told the selection conference that MPs “need slightly more love and attention than most other breeds of husband”. Julian Critchley, later himself a Tory MP but reporting the event as a journalist, described her contribution as unquestionably the best speech of the evening.
All her life she was a committee woman, most notably chairing the Broadcasting Standards Commission from 1997 until 1999 and the Broadcasting Standards Council for four years before that. Her career was garlanded with honours, and in 2001 she became Lady Howe of Idlicote in the first list of “people’s peers”. She and her husband – who had become Lord Howe of Aberavon in 1992 – were among the few couples to sit in the Lords each in their own right.
She was committed to public service, in particular to improving educational opportunities for girls and women, and to securing equality at work for women. Her first important public appointment was as the first deputy chair, effectively representing the Conservative party, on the newly established Equal Opportunities Commission, set up by the then Labour government in 1975 to enforce the Sex Discrimination Act passed that year.
Her experience strengthened the independence of her thinking and gave her an international platform. Once, when she addressed a group of Kenyan women, her speech was reported under the headline “British Sex Act Explained”. However, when her husband was appointed chancellor in 1979, she felt obliged to resign and attracted some derogatory criticism from the feminists of the day for so doing.
Her political influence was not restrained by her lack of public office, however. One of her greatest achievements, almost completely unnoticed and certainly unsung, was to set in train a reform of the tax system to give equal treatment to married women. She persuaded her husband of this case and he spent four years attempting unsuccessfully to change the system, battling against the opposition of Margaret Thatcher.
According to Nigel Lawson, who succeeded Geoffrey Howe at the Treasury, it was the prime minister’s belief that Elspeth Howe was behind the move for such a long overdue reform that fuelled her rejection of it. A further five years of negotiation took place before Lawson was able to announce the radical step of introducing independent taxation of married women in his 1988 budget.
Elspeth Howe was never going to be the sort of woman that Thatcher would like, even if she had not campaigned in support of the homeless and in direct criticism of the government by sleeping in the streets of Westminster in a black bin liner, something that went down badly at No 10. But she was not only fierce in pursuit of a feminism that Thatcher did not recognise, but also a representative of the sort of intellectual elite of which the prime minister was inherently suspicious.
In addition, Thatcher was, of course, only too aware of the potential threat of Elspeth’s aspirations for her husband, who had stood unsuccessfully for the leadership of the Tory party in 1975 and who was eventually to prove Thatcher’s nemesis. But despite Alan Clark’s bitchy assertion that Geoffrey’s devastating Commons’ resignation speech showed “Elspeth’s hand in every line” and that the “entire text is the work of Elspeth”, Geoffrey himself rebutted this and claimed that his wife had asked of the speech: “Are you sure you need to go that far?”
Elspeth spent her childhood in Bath. She was the daughter of the fourth marriage of Philip Morton Shand, the author, architectural critic, bon vivant and food writer. He married her mother, Sybil (nee Sissons), eight days after divorcing his third wife and it was related that this was the happiest of his marriages. His first marriage had produced a son who became the father of Camilla Shand, now the Duchess of Cornwall.
P Morton Shand was an exotic character with distinguished friends and his children benefited in consequence. Elspeth recalled him as a brilliant conversationalist and a great intellect. He was much given to declamations such as “a woman who cannot make soup should not be allowed to marry” and told Elspeth that she could marry anyone she liked “so long as he isn’t a lawyer, a politician or a Welshman”. He accepted her decision to marry, in 1953, a man who was all three of those things but there was a last-minute crisis which says much about Elspeth and her upbringing.
She had told her future husband that she was not prepared to undertake to obey him, according to the text of the traditional marriage service, but he had forgotten about this until the day of their wedding in London, when he was already seated in St Peter’s, Vere Street. He then discovered that the officiating minister was not prepared to accept the change. The news was broken to the bride by the best man on the steps of the church, but she agreed to go ahead nevertheless, while relating later that she gave her vows with her fingers crossed.
After their three children were born, she became involved in London and Conservative politics in the Bow Group. She was a magistrate and served on a number of bodies dealing with legal aid, parole and the appointment of other magistrates. She held positions on numerous committees in local government, the representation of women, the profession of nursing, the future of education and local government. She was also a director with a number of significant business appointments and still managed to be in the Commons whenever her husband had to make an important speech.
When Geoffrey was chancellor, Elspeth became a mature student at the London School of Economics and took a degree in economics and social administration. This led to some misplaced comment after she asked her husband to borrow a book on her behalf from the Commons library and questions were asked about why the chancellor of the exchequer had asked for a book on The Principles of Elementary Economics.
She was still at the LSE when he became foreign secretary and one of her contemporaries, a fellow mature student called Kurt Stengl, reputedly an Austrian fridge engineer, who attended “student parties” at the foreign secretary’s residence at No 1 Carlton Gardens, was later revealed to be a KGB placeman.
Elspeth, known as “Heppy” to her friends, never relented from her commitments. Even in her 80s, she was one of the most active members of the Lords, with a record of participation far exceeding most of her colleagues. She retired in 2020, aged 88.
Geoffrey Howe died in 2015. Elspeth is survived by their three children, Cary, Amanda and Alec.
• Elspeth Rosamund Morton Howe, Lady Howe of Idlicote, public servant, born 8 February 1932; died 22 March 2022
