Thatcher Foes Gloating After Howe Pulls Out

Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s opponents had a field day today after her deputy, Sir Geoffrey Howe, quit in protest of her resistance to Britain’s integration into the European Community.

“Instead of having a leader who holds the party together . . . we have one who unfortunately allows the party to break up,” said ex-Prime Minister Edward Heath, who was himself ousted by Thatcher as party leader in 1975.

Publicly, key aides in Thatcher’s 22-member Cabinet rallied round, although they take a more conciliatory policy than the prime minister in the drive toward European union.

Education Secretary John MacGregor was chosen today to replace Howe as leader of the House of Commons. It was not known whether anyone will assume Howe’s additional title of deputy prime minister.

Thatcher, her government in disarray and looking increasingly embattled, was closeted at her 10 Downing Street office “working on a couple of speeches for next week,” a spokeswoman said.

Howe stormed out of Thatcher’s Cabinet late Thursday, vexed by Thatcher’s implacable refusal to cede British sovereignty to the European Community, the 12-nation trading bloc.

He could no longer serve honorably in her government, he said, because of the strident tone in which she rejected an accord in Rome last weekend by the other EC leaders to work for a single European currency in the late 1990s.

Foes gloated that the “Iron Lady” might soon be on the way out. An election must be held by mid-1992 while some of her own Conservative legislators floated the idea of a party leadership poll this December.