Summary: The effect of thermal gradient and tangency coefficient on the stability of a pre-twisted, tapered, rotating cantilever with a tip mass and subjected to a concentrated partial follower force at the free end is investigated. The non-selfadjoint boundary value problem is formulated with the aid of a conservation law using Euler-Bernoulli theory. The associated adjoint boundary value problem is introduced and a variational principle is derived. Approximate values of critical load are calculated on the basis of this variational principle and the influence of different parameters on the stability of the system is studied.