Conflict of Loyalty - Hardcover

Rezensionen

Lord Howe served in senior Cabinet positions under Margaret Thatcher and was her true-blue political servant for ten long years. In late 1990, he publicly broke with her government over the issue of Europe and her unreliable temperament. Shortly thereafter he delivered a devastating speech to the House of Commons, which effectively demolished her political career. In this informative but overlong autobiography, Howe hurries past his early years and concentrates (for over 500 pages) on the Thatcher years (1979-90). Many readers will want to read about why "her most loyal, most long suffering, most stable Cabinet Minister" finally renounced the Iron Lady. "Her tragedy," he writes, "is that she may be remembered less for the brilliance of her many achievements, than for the recklessness with which she later sought to impose her own increasingly uncompromising views." This is a good choice for anyone interested in the arcania of British politics. Recommended for larger libraries.?Kent Worcester, Social Science Research Council, New York
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

This political autobiography affords a scathing look at Britain's "Thatcher revolution" by the man who well-nigh engineered it. Cambridge-educated Tory Sir Geoffrey Howe, born in 1921 in a Welsh town, was successively Treasury chancellor, foreign secretary and deputy prime minister during Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's 11-year reign. He and the "Iron Lady," however, became estranged when Howe's support for a single European market clashed with Thatcher's narrow nationalism, leading to his dismissal as foreign secretary, followed by his bitter resignation as deputy P.M. in 1990, which triggered the collapse of Thatcher's government. Howe provides a detailed reappraisal of his uneasy partnership with Thatcher, whom he portrays as a bullying, self-destructive autocrat. He makes a cogent case that he was instrumental in many of her reforms, including deregulation of key industries. Photos.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.