Going astray

Every now and then I am invited into a world that is not my own. Thus it was that this evening I was at Middle Temple in London, headquarters of the Knights Templar until they were dissolved in 1312, and now one of the four Inns of Court to which all English barristers must belong. It is a place where both the language and the costumes belong to another era, and I was at a ‘Reader’s Feast’ surrounded by people wearing black gowns.

At the pre-dinner drinks a venerable Master of the Bench bounded up to me and asked whether I’d seen Sir Geoffrey Howe’s coat of arms, because if I hadn’t, I had to. The whole corridor and the whole of the Hall was covered in Coats of Arms and even if I’d wanted to, I had no way of knowing whose was there nor how to find it, but I was up for a story about Geoffrey Howe.

He was an urbane Tory grandee and, as Chancellor of the Exchequer, Foreign Secretary, Leader of the House of Commons, Deputy Prime Minister and Lord President of the Council, mostly provided a mild-mannered counterpoint to his combative boss, Margaret Thatcher. He is now best known among us outsiders for being the butt of Labour politician Dennis Healey’s 1978 comment that being criticised by Howe was 'like being savaged by a dead sheep'.

Halfway down the gloomy corridor we stopped and sure enough, there at the top of a coat of arms, was a white splodge which, with the Master of the Bench’s guidance, we could make out to be a dead sheep. As we were admiring his self-mockery, a younger man came up to us, introduced himself as Geoffrey Howe’s nephew (I told you I was in a world not my own) and pointed out that in fact the splodge was a wolf in sheep’s clothing, making off with Labour’s red flag.

Not so mild-mannered after all. More in the tone of his resignation speech when he said that working with Thatcher was ‘rather like sending your opening batsmen to the crease, only for them to find, as the first balls are being bowled, that their bats have been broken before the game by the team captain.’ This speech was credited with causing her resignation three weeks later.