Howard was selected as Liberal candidate for the Eskdale division of Cumberland at the 1906 General Election. As part of the Liberal landslide victory he gained the seat for the party, ousting the sitting Conservative Claude Lowther with a wing of 6%. In 1909 he was appointed private secretary to the Parliamentary Secretary to the Board of Trade, Harold Tennant. The Liberal Party lost ground at the January 1910 general election, but Howard held his seat, and was appointed private secretary to the Prime Minister H. H. Asquith. Another General Election followed 11 months later but this time Howard lost his Eskdale seat to Claude Lowther. Out of Parliament, he was keen to make a return as soon as possible. In 1911 a vacancy occurred in the Westbury division of Wiltshire when the sitting Liberal MP resigned to take up a diplomatic appointment. Howard was chosen as the Liberal candidate for the resulting by-election and retained the seat with a slightly-reduced majority. In 1911 Asquith appointed him Vice-Chamberlain of the Household, a post he held until 1915. He then served as a Junior Lord of the Treasury from 1915 to 1916. In 1916 Asquith was replaced as Prime Minister by Lloyd George and went into opposition to the Coalition Government. Howard followed Asquith into opposition. As a result, when the Coalition was endorsing candidates for the 1918 General election, at Westbury, endorsement was given to his Unionist opponent George Llewellen Palmer, who defeated Howard by a margin of 17%. At the 1922 general election, he sought a return to Parliament in his old stomping ground of Cumberland when he contested the unionist-held North Cumberland. However, he lost narrowly, by a margin of 1.6%. The next year, at the 1923 general election, Howard fought the Luton division of Bedfordshire. The Liberals were experiencing something of a revival nationally, which helped him win the seat from the sitting Unionist Sir John Prescott Hewett. Another general election followed a year later in 1924, and with the Unionists in the ascendency, he lost his seat. This effectively ended Howard's parliamentary career as he did not contest another parliamentary seat. Apart from his political career Howard was also a Justice of Peace and a temporary lieutenant in the Royal Naval Division in 1914. In 1931 he became Lord Lieutenant of the North Riding of Yorkshire, which he remained until his death four years later.
