How Keith Joseph made Britain what it is today

His background was strikingly different from that of most British Jews living in somewhat poor circumstances in Leeds, Manchester, or the East End of London. Joseph grew up, not in the East End, but in the West End, in Portland Place, where he was born. His father was Sir Samuel Joseph, a prosperous businessman, who became, in 1942, the sixth Jewish Lord Mayor of London.

Joseph’s family was not observant and, as he put it, `denied him’ a barmitzvah – something he later regretted. But he had no sympathy with Zionism nor with the Conservative Friends of Israel. Perhaps – though this is of course speculation -his lack of a secure identity contributed to that nervous and tense disposition which many who met him noticed.

Nevertheless, Joseph always regarded himself, and was regarded by others, as Jewish. One of his favourite novels was C.P.Snow’s under-rated, `The Conscience of the Rich’ which illustrates the dilemmas of a wealthy Anglo-Jewish family. Anyone reading that novel will gain a good idea of Joseph’s family background.

Unlike most British Jews at that time, Joseph was a Conservative, in an era when the party was much less sympathetic to Jews than it is today. When elected in 1956, he joined just one other Jewish Conservative in the Commons, also a hereditary baronet, Sir Henry d’Avigdor Goldsmid,

As well as being an unusual Jew, Joseph was also a highly unusual politician. Most politicians boast about their often non-existent achievements. Joseph did the opposite. When he left government for the last time in 1987, he was asked by a journalist whether he was proud of his achievements. `No’ was his reply.

He also had the habit of apologizing for legislation for which he had been responsible – high rise flats, creation of the Greater London Council and the first of many reorganisations of the National Health Service, none of which seem to have produced any obvious benefit.

In 1978 he delivered a speech at the annual Conservative Conference a day after Yom Kippur. The journalist, Simon Hoggart, declared that it was `a sign of Sir Keith’s growing confidence that this is thought to be the first time he has atoned for a speech before making it’!

Joseph served under four Conservative Prime Ministers – Harold Macmillan, Sir Alec Douglas-Home, Edward Heath and Margaret Thatcher – and was at one time thought to be a candidate for the leadership, But, with characteristic self-deprecation, he declared, that this `would have been a disaster for my party, my country and myself'.

He was not in fact a particularly successful minister. Like many intellectuals – he was a Prize Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford - he was ruthless in stating principles, but soft-hearted in following them up.

His significance lies less in his time in government than in his speeches in opposition in 1974 and 1975 when he provided an intellectual challenge to the post war settlement that has never been satisfactorily answered.

That settlement was based on a mixed economy buttressed by a large nationalized sector with high public spending, and an incomes policy to control wages. Successive Labour governments had expanded the state, while Conservatives had tended to accept the Labour dispensation; so there was a ratchet effect by which the role of the state continually increased.

Joseph believed that it was a mistake to look to the state to solve social and economic problems. All it could do was to create a framework within which individuals could become more responsible for their own lives and their communities. The entrepreneur would then be freed from burdensome regulation. The entrepreneur, Joseph believed, was `the character who works the magic, the Aladdin who creates the jobs’.

Joseph was the main intellectual influence on Margaret Thatcher, who was elected Conservative leader in 1975, the guru of Thatcherism, supplementing her instincts with his ideas. He gave the Conservatives something they had not enjoyed since the days of Joseph Chamberlain at the beginning of the 20th century - intellectual self-confidence, a conviction that the left could be defeated in the battleground of ideas. He played the same role for the Conservatives as Harold Laski and the Fabians when they provided the intellectual framework for Labour’s election victory in 1945. The Conservatives need someone similar today!

Joseph’s influence was not, however, confined to the Conservatives. He is crucial also to an understanding of New Labour, a product of the consensus which Joseph, more than anyone else, helped to create. Joseph had sought to construct a new `common ground', based on the market economy, and in this, his fundamental aim, he did not fail. His heirs were not only Margaret Thatcher and Geoffrey Howe, but Tony Blair and Gordon Brown.

`We are only trying’, Joseph told the 1975 Conservative Conference, `to achieve by argument what many European social democrats have long understood – that you cannot make the mixed economy work at all effectively if you cripple the private sector and lose control of the public sector’. By 1997, voters were asking not -– which industries will Labour nationalize but which will it privatise. The Conservatives, former Foreign Secretary, Douglas Hurd declared, lost the 1997 election having won the argument. In 2006, the Blair government’s official document supporting Britain’s bid for the world cup, could declare `Britain is a nation of entrepreneurs’.

The Britain we live in remains in large part the Britain that Keith Joseph helped create.

Vernon Bogdanor is Professor of Government, King’s College, London. Sir Keith Joseph is one of the exhibits in his book, Making the Weather: Six Politicians who Changed Modern Britain, published by Haus.