Keith Joseph
Keith Sinjohn Joseph, Baron Joseph,
Bt,
CH ,
PC (
17 January 1918–
10 December 1994) was a
British barrister,
politician, and
Conservative Cabinet Minister under three different Ministries. He is widely regarded as the "power behind the throne" in the creation of what came to be known as "
Thatcherism". He was known for most of his political life as
Sir Keith Joseph.
Joseph was the son of Sir
Samuel Joseph, who had founded the construction company
Bovis and served as
Lord Mayor of London in
1942-
1943. At the end of his term he had been created a
baronet. On his death on
October 4,
1944, his son inherited the baronetcy with the right to be called
Sir Keith. He had attended
Harrow School and
Magdalen College, Oxford where he studied
Jurisprudence, obtaining first class honours. Shortly thereafter he was elected a Fellow of
All Souls College.
During
World War II, he served as a Captain in the
Royal Artillery, was wounded in
Italy, and mentioned in despatches. After the end of the war, he was called to the Bar (
Middle Temple). Following his father he was elected as an
Alderman of the City of London. He also served as a Director of Bovis, becoming Chairman in
1958, and became an underwriter at
Lloyd's of London. Joseph, after losing the marginal seat of Baron's Court in West London by 125 votes in the
1955 election, was elected to parliament in a
by-election for
Leeds North East in February
1956. He was very swiftly appointed as a Parliamentary Private Secretary.
After
1959 Joseph had several junior posts in the
Macmillan government at the
Ministry of Housing and the
Department for Trade. In the 'Night of the Long Knives' reshuffle of
July 13,
1962 he was made Minister for Housing and Local Government, a cabinet position. Joseph introduced a massive programme to build
council housing, which aimed at 400,000 new homes per year by
1965. He wished to increase the proportion of owner-occupied households by offering help with mortgage deposits. Housing was an important issue at the
1964 election and Joseph was felt to have done well on television in the campaign.
In opposition, Joseph acted as spokesman on Social Services, and then on Labour under
Edward Heath. Despite Joseph's reputation as a right-winger, Heath promoted him to Trade spokesman in
1967 where he had an important role in policy development. In the run-up to the
1970 election Joseph made a series of speeches under the title "civilised capitalism" in which he outlined his political philosophy and hinted of cuts in public spending. At the Selsdon Park Hotel meeting, the Conservative Party largely adopted this approach.
When the Conservatives won the election, Joseph was made
Secretary of State for Social Services, which put him in charge of the largest bureaucracy of any government department but kept him out of control of economics. Despite his speeches against bureaucracy, Joseph found himself compelled to add to it as he increased and improved services in the
National Health Service. However, he grew increasingly opposed to the Heath government's economic strategy, which had seen a 'U-turn' in favour of intervention in industry in
1972.
Following the
1974 election defeat, Joseph worked with
Margaret Thatcher to set up the
Centre for Policy Studies as a think-tank to develop policies for the new free-market Conservatism which they both favoured. Joseph became interested in the economic theory of
monetarism as formulated by
Milton Friedman and persuaded Mrs Thatcher to support it. Despite still being a member of Heath's Shadow Cabinet, Joseph was openly critical of his government's record.
Many on the right-wing of the Conservative Party looked to Joseph to challenge Heath for the leadership, but when Joseph made a misguided speech at
Edgbaston on 19 October 1974 which sounded like an argument against lower-class families having children, he accepted that he had no chance of winning and urged Mrs Thatcher to stand. Joseph claimed he received 2,000 letters after this speech, with critics outnumbered by fourteen to one by supporters. The day after the speech
Mary Whitehouse said that she was "tremendously grateful" to Joseph and that "the people of Britain have been like sheep without a shepherd. But now they have found one."
[Ibid, p. 267.]Thatcher was later to refer to Joseph as her closest political friend. In 1975 he claimed that "It was only in April 1974 that I was converted to Conservatism. (I had thought I was a Conservative but I now see that I was not really one at all.)"
[Andrew Denham and Mark Garnett, Keith Joseph (Acumen, 2002), p. 250.], a remark that expressed Joseph's feeling of failure during the Heath government. Heath and his cabinet took office believing they were Conservative, setting up policies strengthening government control on industries and creating an intricate system to control wages and dividends. All of this was contrary to the "Conservative" ideals, not to be confused with a "political moderation" in Joseph. Having done a great deal to promote Mrs Thatcher, when she won the leadership in
1975 she determined to put him in a position to have a profound influence on Conservative Party thinking.
In Mrs Thatcher's
Shadow Cabinet, Joseph was given the overall responsibility for Policy and Research. He had a large impact on the eventual Conservative manifesto for the
1979 election although frequently a compromise had to be reached with the more moderate supporters of Edward Heath such as
James Prior. In government, he was appointed
Secretary of State for Industry. He began to prepare the many nationalised industries for privatisation by bringing in private sector managers such as Ian McGregor, but was still forced to give large subsidies to those industries making losses.
As
Secretary of State for Education and Science from
1981 he started the ball rolling for
GCSEs, and the establishment of a national curriculum. His attempts to reform teachers' pay and bring in new contracts were opposed by the trade unions, leading to a series of one-day strikes. In
1985 he published a White Paper on the university sector,
The Development of Higher Education into the 1990s, which advocated an appraisal system to assess the relative quality of research, and foresaw a retrenchment in the size of the higher education sector. Both proposals were highly controversial.
Joseph stepped down from the Cabinet in
1986, and retired from Parliament at the
1987 election. He received a life peerage as
Baron Joseph, of Portsoken in the City of London, in the dissolution honours list.
Joseph's political achievement was in pioneering the application of monetarist economics to British political economics, and in developing what would later become known as '
Thatcherism'. He knew his own limitations, remarking of the prospect of his becoming Leader of the Conservative Party that "it would have been a disaster for the party, country, and me", and he rated himself a failure in office. His political philosophy speeches, which led to him being nicknamed
"The Mad Monk", were ridiculed at the time but they were profoundly influential within the Conservative Party and in practice did set the tone for politics in the
1980s.
*
Joseph's speech at Edgbaston*
Excerpt from Commanding Heights by Daniel Yergin and Joseph Stanislaw
