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.

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Rt. Hon. Sir Keith Joseph, Bt, MP, PC

Background

Joseph was the son of the British Jew 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.

Housing

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.

Heath's government

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.

Influence on Thatcher

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."

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.)", 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.

Education Secretary

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 1984 his public spending negotiations with his Treasury colleagues resulted in a proposed plan for extra research funding for universities financed through the curtailment of financial support to students who were the dependent children of more affluent parents. This plan provoked heated opposition from fellow members of the Cabinet (in particular Cecil Parkinson) and a compromise plan was found necessary to secure consensus. This involved the abandonment of Joseph's plan to levy tuition fees while preserving his aspiration to abolish the minimum grant. The resulting loss to research funding was halved by a concession of further revenue by the Treasury team.

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.

Legacy

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.

External links

• Joseph's speech at Edgbaston
• Excerpt from Commanding Heights by Daniel Yergin and Joseph Stanislaw