[6] Bernat Hecht was a synagogue cantor who worked for his wife's family drapery business, later establishing himself as a prominent local businessman, owning three shops in Llanelli.

[citation needed] According to Kenneth Clarke, Howard briefly defected to the Labour Party in 1961 in protest against the former's invitation to Oswald Mosley to speak to the CUCA.

[citation needed] In the 1970s, Howard was a leading advocate of British membership of the Common Market (EEC) and served on the board of the cross-party Britain in Europe group.

In June 1982, Howard was selected to contest the constituency of Folkestone and Hythe in Kent after the sitting Conservative MP, Sir Albert Costain, decided to retire.

Howard gained quick promotion, becoming Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State at the Department of Trade and Industry in 1985 with responsibility for regulating the financial dealings of the City of London.

Following a proposal from backbench MP David Wilshire, he accepted the amendment which would become Section 28 (prohibiting local governments from the "promotion" of homosexuality) and defended its inclusion.

The act brought in Margaret Thatcher's new system of local taxation, officially known as the Community Charge but almost universally nicknamed the "poll tax".

He subsequently guided through legislation abolishing the closed shop, and campaigned vigorously for Thatcher in the first ballot of the 1990 Conservative leadership election, although he told her a day before she resigned that he felt she was not going to win and that John Major was better placed to defeat Michael Heseltine.

In this capacity he encouraged the United States to participate in the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, but shortly afterwards he was appointed Home Secretary in a 1993 reshuffle precipitated by the sacking of Norman Lamont as Chancellor.

[15] Howard repeatedly clashed with judges and prison reformers as he sought to clamp down on crime through a series of 'tough' measures, such as reducing the right to silence of defendants in their police interviews and at their trials as part of 1994's Criminal Justice and Public Order Act.

[17] The editors of The Sun newspaper handed a petition bearing nearly 280,000 signatures to Howard, in a bid to increase the time spent by both boys in custody.

[17] A former Master of the Rolls, Lord Donaldson, criticised Howard's intervention, describing the increased tariff as "institutionalised vengeance ... [by] a politician playing to the gallery".

[24] Shortly after the 1997 Newsnight interview, Ann Widdecombe, his former minister of state at the Home Office, made a statement in the House of Commons about the dismissal of Derek Lewis and remarked of Howard that there is "something of the night" about him.

[25] This much quoted comment is thought to have contributed to the failure of his 1997 bid for the Conservative Party leadership, including by Howard and Widdecombe and led to him being caricatured as a vampire, in part due to his Romanian ancestry.

In 1996 Howard, as Home Secretary, ordered the release of John Haase and Paul Bennett with royal pardons after 10 months of their 18-year prison sentences for heroin smuggling, after they had provided information leading to the seizure of firearms.

[30] Robert Oulds and Adrian Hilton were successively sacked as candidates for Slough–Oulds after he was photographed with a number of firearms and dubbed a "Tory gun nut" by The Sun; and Hilton after a piece he wrote for The Spectator in 2003 came to public attention, in which he claimed that "a Catholic EU will inevitably result in the subjugation of Britain's Protestant ethos to Roman Catholic social, political and religious teaching".

[32][33] In February 2004, Howard called on then-Prime Minister Tony Blair to resign over the Iraq War, for failing to ask "basic questions" regarding WMD claims and misleading Parliament.

[34] In July, the Conservative leader stated that he would not have voted for the motion that authorised the Iraq War had he known the quality of intelligence information on which the WMD claims were based.

Howard was part of discussions for British Airways to resume flights to Pakistan in 2003, this was until their final departure in 2008 the only European airline serving the nation.

The piece, which purported to show that members of the public could not identify Howard and that those who recognised him did not support him, was the subject of an official complaint from the Conservative Party.

The complaint argued that the Newsnight team spoke only to people who held opinions against either Michael Howard or the Conservatives and that Paxman's style was bullying and unnecessarily aggressive.

[38] Howard's own constituency of Folkestone and Hythe had been heavily targeted by the Liberal Democrats as the most sought after prize of their failed "decapitation" strategy of seeking to gain seats from prominent Conservatives.

noted that the continued media coverage of such issues created most of the controversy and that Howard merely defended his views when questioned at unrelated policy launches.

[citation needed] Despite his impending resignation following the 2005 general election, Howard performed a substantial reshuffle of the party's front bench in which several rising star MPs were given their first shadow portfolios, including George Osborne and David Cameron.

This move cleared the way for David Cameron (who had worked for Howard as a Special Advisor when the latter was Home Secretary) to run for the Conservative Party leadership.

During that period, he enjoyed a fairly pressure-free time, often making joking comparisons between himself and Tony Blair, both of whom had declared they would not stand at the next general election.

On 19 June 2006 it was reported that Howard would become chairman of Diligence Europe, a private intelligence and risk assessment company founded by former CIA and MI5 members.

[44][45] On 23 October 2006, Howard said that he had voluntarily been questioned as a potential witness as part of the investigation into the Cash-for-Honours scandal relating to fundraising for the 2005 election campaign.

[50] In February 2011 there was increased speculation that Cameron would reshuffle his cabinet, with Lord Howard brought in to replace Kenneth Clarke as Secretary of State for Justice.

[53][54] A few days after Article 50 was triggered for the United Kingdom to leave the European Union, Howard was interviewed on 2 April 2017 by Sophy Ridge for her programme on Sky News.