“Being savaged by Geoffrey Howe is like being savaged by a dead sheep.” – Denis Healey One of the greatest political stories of modern times is that of how the Iron Lady, Margaret Thatcher, was ultimately brought down by her most loyal acolyte, Geoffrey Howe. The man who had been described by playwright Jonathan Maitland as Thatcher’s ‘political soulmate’ became her Brutus, her assassin with a resignation address that opened the floodgates to the growing dissent that had already been rumbling in the Conservative government.  ‘Dead Sheep’, which opened at the Birmingham Rep last night, looks into the intrigue, the key political characters of the time, and also the premise…