Keith Joseph by Andrew Denham and Mark Garnett Acumen, 458 pp., $39.50 JUST twenty-five years ago, Britain stood on the brink of economic disaster as the “sick man of Europe.” One of its two major parties was chained to socialist dogma, and the other was intellectually bankrupt. It’s fitting that credit for the profound transformation of the 1980s should go to Margaret Thatcher. But it was Sir Keith Joseph who did the most to bring into being Thatcher’s Conservative party–as Lady Thatcher herself has acknowledged. Joseph is largely forgotten today, even in the country he served as cabinet minister in four governments between 1962 and 1986. In “Keith Joseph,” the first full-length biography of the man, Andrew Denham and Mark Garnett portray him as a brilliant eccentric whose career followed a conventional path for a Tory politician: Harrow, Oxford, wartime combat, and entry into a family business. In some ways, however, Joseph was anything but conventional. For one thing, his brilliance as a student won him a highly coveted fellowship to All Souls College, an association he would keep until his death in 1994. For another, he was Jewish, and upon his entry into Parliament following a by-election victory at Leeds North East in 1956, Joseph was only the second Jewish Tory elected since World War II. Raised in privilege, he entered British politics with a passion to eradicate poverty. But he would come to understand, as so few others of his time did, the welfare state’s perpetuation of poverty, and his most significant achievement was to break the bipartisan postwar consensus that made Britain one of the West’s largest welfare states. For his efforts he would incur not only the wrath of the British left but, more significantly, of many of his own party colleagues who regarded him as a dangerous ideologue. Joseph was born into a close-knit extended family descended from German-Jewish immigrants, who agreed in the 1870s to pool their assets under an arrangement known as “The Fund” which was to prove highly successful. From his father–who turned the struggling construction company Bovis into a major enterprise, became lord mayor of London, and literally worked himself to death–Joseph inherited a hard-driving commitment to succeed. At the time he entered Parliament, the Tories were seeking to move beyond their patrician image. Although his background in some ways fit the party stereotype, the authors note that “his religion, his apparent lack of any sympathy for the landed interest, and his meritocratic outlook encouraged commentators to regard him as one of a new breed of Tories.” In 1959, Joseph had his first encounter with Margaret Thatcher. It was during her first successful Parliamentary campaign, when she invited him to speak on her behalf in the sizably Jewish North London constituency that she would represent for over three decades. Three years later, Joseph would be promoted from junior minister to head of the Department of Housing and Welsh Affairs following the infamous “night of the long knives,” when Prime Minister Harold Macmillan summarily sacked seven cabinet ministers. It was a remarkably swift rise, and Joseph was hailed by the Times as “one of the party’s progressive intellectuals.” The 1950s and 1960s were the era of “Butskellism,” the convergence of the two major political parties behind the idea of a large full-service welfare state. Looking back on that period, Joseph characterized the process by which Labour governments moved the economy toward greater and more intrusive bureaucratic control, only to be ratified by their Conservative successors, as a “socialist ratchet.” In her reflection on that period in her diaries, Lady Thatcher notes that: “Almost every post-war Tory victory had been won on slogans such as ‘Britain Strong and Free’ or ‘Set the People Free.’ But in the fine print of policy, and especially in government, the Tory Party merely pitched camp in the long march to the left. It never tried seriously to reverse it. . . . Taxation? Regulation? Sub-sidies? If these were cut down at the start of a Tory government, they gradually crept up again as its life ebbed away. The welfare state? We boasted of spending more money than Labour, not of restoring people to independence and self-reliance.” Joseph would later look back with regret on his career at the Housing Ministry, where he endorsed economic stimulation and regional planning, going along with fashionable policies that earned him the nickname “Little Sir Echo” by the Labour party’s new leader, Harold Wilson. It was Joseph’s first period in opposition following the Tory defeat in 1964 that would expose him to serious economic ideas, particularly through an association with the Institute for Economic Affairs, a think tank promoting free-market principles. In the 1967 speech his biographers call the opening of his “first economic crusade,” Joseph took his party to task for not freeing private enterprise when it returned to power six years after the war. The crusade would be interrupted by the Tories’ return to power in 1970. This time he would have the opportunity to put his compassionate conservatism into practice as secretary of state for social services. His social welfare policies made him one of the most popular members of Edward Heath’s cabinet, and he was widely mentioned as a possible future leader of the party. Joseph, as it turned out, would never rise to such a position of prominence. Following the defeats in 1974 that returned his party to opposition, he knew the time had arrived for the Conservatives to move beyond such disasters as the failed incomes policies of the Heath government. His biographers make much of their discovery that what has heretofore been regarded as Joseph’s epiphany was nothing more than a continuation of his first crusade of the 1960s. Whatever the case, this time he had a more ambitious plan, namely, to convert his party to the concept of limited government. The think tank he created for this purpose, the Centre for Policy Studies, carried on where the Institute for Economic Affairs left off by translating the theories of its economists into concrete policy proposals. TO HELP HIM in his new venture he turned to a former Marxist, conservative journalist Alfred Sherman. It was to be an association of lasting significance. Using the platform of his think tank and Sherman’s aggressive advocacy of the free-market, Joseph began a tireless campaign of issuing White Papers, briefing journalists, and, most boldly, delivering public lectures at leftist-dominated universities (where he was subjected to both verbal and physical assault), in which he outlined a program of recovery that included–but was by no means limited to–Friedmanite policies of monetary restraint. To Joseph’s detractors such as Sir Ian Gilmour, the Tories were never “explicitly and primarily a capitalist party” and ideological thinking of any kind was to be discouraged. Thus, the battle lines were drawn between the monetarists and the “wets,” as Mrs. Thatcher would come to characterize dissenters within her cabinet such as Gilmour and Employment Secretary James Prior following the party’s return to power in 1979. In siding with Gilmour and Prior, Joseph’s new biographers go to great lengths to find inconsistencies in Joseph’s arguments. It’s ironic that at a time when a Labour chancellor of the exchequer extols fiscal prudence and praises the role of the entrepreneur, a biography of Keith Joseph tries to resurrect the wet Tories’ indictment of Thatcher’s economic policies of the 1980s. Nonetheless, to their credit, Denham and Garnett do not allow their criticism to diminish their admiration for Joseph’s integrity and moral courage. In describing his battles just to be heard on university campuses in the 1970s, they contrast his calm defense of economic freedom with the boorishness of those who attempted, usually unsuccessfully, to shout him down. They are less flattering when assessing Joseph’s abilities as a political leader and manager (including his poor showing
in both of the cabinet roles he assumed under Thatcher), but here they are on firm ground. Looking back on his career with characteristic modesty a year after his retirement from government in 1986, Joseph told an interviewer that had he been selected as party leader following the Tories’ 1974 defeats, “it would have been a disaster for the party, the country, and for me.” Although Thatcher would contradict that assessment at his memorial service eight years later, the fact is that Joseph lacked both the temperament and the political skills essential for the task. He was too honestly introspective, haunted throughout his adult life by a strong sense of guilt and self-doubt. Despite all the intellectual courage he displayed during the opposition period in the 1970s, Joseph’s inclination was to avoid tough political showdowns. A good example was his hasty retreat on the issue of vouchers in the early 1980s while school-related issues were under his jurisdiction during his tenure as education secretary. Though Joseph had been a strong advocate of parental choice, he reversed himself when it became clear that he would have to overcome a broad and well-entrenched opposition. IN THE END, it is the force of his ideas that will stand as the legacy of this son of privilege whose radical vision helped nurse the sick man of Europe back to health. “Power,” Sir Keith Joseph once argued, “grows out of the barrel of a gun. A gun is certainly powerful, but who controls the man with a gun? A man with an idea.” David Lowe heads the President’s Office at the National Endowment for Democracy.
