Combative climber of the greasy pole

Michael Howard, the Home Secretary, has had a turbulent and relatively short political career, during which he has risen to one of the great offices of state.

He was elected to the Commons in 1983, and became a minister two years later, quickly making a reputation for himself as a sure-footed parliamentary performer. A barrister, like Tony Blair, who entered Parliament at the same time, he soon took responsibility for two of the most controversial policies of the third Thatcher administration, the poll tax and water privatisation.

Professor David Butler, in his analysis of the poll tax, "Failure in British Government", described him as "a combative debater with a penchant for the sarcastic one-liner [who] owed his promotion to the Cabinet in 1990 to his skills at the despatch box in the Commons, exhibited to good effect in defending the two most unpopular measures of the 1987 Parliament".

Previously a party centrist, he acquired a reputation as a Thatcherite right-winger. Once in the Cabinet as Secretary of State for Employment, he confirmed his status as a Euro-sceptic by pressing John Major not to sign the Social Chapter in the Maastricht negotiations in 1991.

The Home Office turned out to be the plateau of his career, however, as it has increasingly become a graveyard for politicians rather than a stepping-stone to the top. He was given the job after losing to Kenneth Clarke in a fight for the Chancellorship when Mr Major sacked Norman Lamont.

As Home Secretary he was brought face to face with his former Department of Employment shadow, Mr Blair, who had just started using a snappy slogan proclaiming that Labour was "tough on crime and tough on the causes of crime".

Mr Howard quickly discovered that it was more than just a slogan, and found it impossible to fight back against an opponent who was developing a startling programme which would soon take him to the leadership of the Labour Party.

At the 1993 Tory party conference, Mr Howard launched his 27-point plan for getting "tough on crime", but was soon bogged down in serious opposition from the judiciary and the House of Lords. To make matters worse, he suffered an unprecedented series of defeats in the courts, which repeatedly found that he had exceeded his powers or contravened European human rights law.

Michael Howard, master of escapes

The scrapes

1986 First ministerial job

at Trade and Industry: as

former Lloyd's underwriter piloted financial services

law which exempted Lloyd's insurance market

1988 Took the poll tax legislation through Commons committee stages

1989 Responsible for water

privatisation - the one sell-off which has not become more accepted after the event - through the House of

Commons

1990-92 Defended cuts in the

training budget as unemployment started rising again

1992-93 As Environment Secretary he went to the Rio Earth Summit, but avoided doing anything much to

reduce greenhouse gas emissions

1994 Five IRA prisoners leave behind their lobster takeaways and make an armed breakout from Whitemoor prison in Cambridgeshire

January 1995 Three "lifers" escape from Parkhurst - after Judge Stephen Tumim had warned Howard about

security lapses at the jail

April 1995 Law Lords ruled that Howard had flouted the will of

parliament to bring in a cheaper

compensation scheme for the

victims of crime

Lord Taylor, the Lord Chief Justice, said Howard's sentencing plans in his speech to Tory conference last week were "inconsistent with doing justice in each case"

How he escaped

1987 Promoted to Minister of State in the Department of Environment

His boss Nicholas Ridley, and Margaret Thatcher, took all the blame. Later Labour attempts to pin it

on him failed

1990 No one remembers it was him - promoted to the Cabinet as

Secretary of State for Employment

His shadow, Tony Blair, somehow failed to make the charges stick

1993 Norman Lamont's departure saw Howard promoted to Home

Secretary (to find him up against

Blair again)

Having already landed one of the great offices of state, Howard runs

out of promotions.

Parkhurst governor was sacked, and this week Derek Lewis, Prison Service head, went too - but is Howard in the clear?

Howard begins to run out of road - new shadow Jack Straw at the Labour conference described him as a "repeat offender, still out on

the streets"

But the Tory conference loved his speech, and gave him the longest standing ovation of the week -

excluding Major and including

Thatcher