Michael Howard

I came in 2005 during the election.

I was with Michael Howard, who was the Conservative leader at the time.

He said, what a dump.

He said, they're never going to vote for Conservative there.

I'm pretty certain William Hague might have mentioned it.

You could probably go back to Michael Howard, Peter Lee.

The, the reason you never do it is that frankly there's no evidence to suggest unemployed people spend all their money on fags and booze.

It just isn't there.

And when Next Steps agencies were set up, the prison service was a case in point.

When prisoners escaped from prisons, there was an attempt to get Michael Howard, who was the relevant minister at the time, to resign.

And he refused to do so because he said, well, it's the chief executive's responsibility.

And that was a sort of case study in a way.

Who Anne

Widdicombe famously wasn't attracted to.

And he didn't send her flowers all the time, contrary to what Michael Howard briefed out.

No, well, this was the incident where Anne Widdicombe said that Michael Howard had something of the night about him because she revealed that he had been dabbling in the management of this agency.

Getting to speak and speaking well are two different results, and only one of them shows up in the next conversation you have with that person.

So Jeremy Paxman's 1997 Newsnight interview with British Home Secretary Michael Howard is still the most famous example of refusing to let a question disappear.

Paxman kept asking whether Howard had threatened to overrule the head of the prison service, and The Guardian later counted 12 versions of the same question without a real answer.

Paxman added a production detail years afterward that changes how I read it.

The greatest hits, they wheel out.

Jeremy Paxman asking Michael Howard, did you threaten to overrule times, I think, 12 in total and maybe 14.

Extraordinary interview.

Yeah.

[laughing]

The former leader of the Conservative Party, Lord Howard, had asked the House of Lords library to produce estimates for the cost of peers attending a minimum of one in five sitting days.

The highest estimate had been...

Nearly ten million pounds, my Lords.

Is that the best use of taxpayers' money? Has the Chancellor been told? Could this be the straw that breaks the camel's back for the bond market? [laughing]

Lord Howard.

And that's it from us for now.

I'm Alicia McCarthy.

So, um, uh, there was a, an attempt to detoxify the Tory party that might have become a bit sort of stale and talking about immigration a bit too much.

Um, I mean, the leader before, um, uh, David Cameron, obviously Michael Howard, who, uh, had a very, uh, you know, um, tough on immigration stance during the 2005 general election campaign.

It didn't work out.

So there was a determined shift in the Conservative Party-

In 1994, a year after converting to Catholicism, Ann was promoted to employment minister by Prime Minister John Major.

A year later, in a government reshuffle, she became prisons minister at the home office under Home Secretary Michael Howard, a role she held until the conservatives lost power at the 1997 general election.

With Howard a strong contender to take over as Tory leader, Ann launched a very public campaign against him, including this devastating commons attack.

541 prisoners were released before the end of their sentence.

So we made some badges saying, "Doris Karloff for Tory leader," because that had become her nickname.

She heard about this and came in and bought 50 of them.

And then a few weeks later, we made this sort of rather, um, tasteless set of political underwear with knickers and boxer shorts with slogans across the front, and we made one with something of the night, which was, of course, the famous phrase that she used, uh, against Michael Howard.

And, um, she came in one day, so I presented her with a pair of these black lacy knickers and she said, "But they're too small.

Tony Blair wasn't there, but the Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw, was.

Michael Howard, the leader of the Conservatives at the time, was there.

Charles Kennedy, the leader of the Liberal Democrats, was there as well.

And so was Margaret Thatcher, the person who had removed Ted Heath.

But to speak to somebody who was one of the first Jewish leaders of any political party, of course you can go back to Disraeli with the Conservative Party.

You can go back to Michael Howard with the Tory party.

But as I understand, Ed Miliband was the first leader of any political party outside the Conservatives.

To say to him, "Look, you're not Jewish because you're not going to synagogue this weekend,"