The dead sheep finally bit back, and with wounded courtesy and a broken cricket bat brought down the Iron Lady within a fortnight.

By November 1990 the Thatcher premiership, eleven years old and visibly fraying, had reached the point where its own longest-serving loyalists could stand it no longer. The poll tax was burning through Conservative support, the economy was sliding back towards recession, and the Prime Minister's 'No, No, No' to Brussels at the despatch box a fortnight earlier had confirmed a European posture that her senior colleagues found strategically ruinous. Geoffrey Howe—Chancellor, Foreign Secretary, Deputy Prime Minister, the most patient and put-upon of her lieutenants, once described by Denis Healey as being savaged by him like being 'savaged by a dead sheep'—had finally resigned. What followed was the most consequential resignation statement in modern British parliamentary history. Delivered from the back benches he had not occupied for a quarter of a century, in a tone of wounded courtesy that made the blade all the sharper, it was a masterpiece of controlled devastation. The cricketing metaphor that came moments after this excerpt—of batsmen sent to the crease only to find their bats broken by the team captain—would become the most quoted image in the story of Thatcher's fall. The chamber understood instantly what it was hearing: not a lament but an incitement. Howe closed by inviting others to 'consider their own response to the tragic conflict of loyalties'—an unmistakable summons to Michael Heseltine. Heseltine declared his challenge the next day. Within a fortnight Margaret Thatcher, the longest continuously serving Prime Minister of the twentieth century, was gone, brought down not by the electorate nor by Labour but by the accumulated grievances of the mildest man in her Cabinet. Howe's warnings about isolation from Europe proved eerily prescient across the following three decades, culminating in the very rupture he spent his career trying to prevent. Read now, the speech is a study in how quiet men, pushed too far, can end an era with nothing louder than a raised eyebrow and a broken cricket bat. It remains the definitive demonstration that in British politics, style and substance are indeed two sides of the same coin.

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