Keith Joseph, RIP - British politician

National Review, Jan 23, 1995 by Ralph Harris

TO THE outward eye, Keith Joseph seemed no more than an exceptionally dashing exemplar of the conventional British Tory establishment. Educated at Harrow and Oxford, brought up in the highest Jewish tradition of public service, and inheriting a baronetcy at 25 from his fater--a former Lord Mayor of London--he looked every polished inch the model paternalist. After a good war in which he was wounded and mentioned in despatches as an artillery officer, he joined the family building firm, simultaneously passing his bar exams and being elected a Fellow of All Souls. From such a privileged background, adoption for a safe Conservative seat at the age of 38 seemed a cinch, as perhaps did his first ministerial appointment in 1959. But prompt elevation to the cabinet as Minister of Housing in 1962 undoubtedly owed more to growing recognition of his talents, experience, and industry. Likewise, when the Conservatives under Edward Heath defeated Harold Wilson's Labour Government in 1970, Keith Joseph slid easily into a senior post as Secretary of State for Social Services.

It was Heath's failure that provided the springboard for Joseph's subsequent fame. Having been elected on a radical anti-socialist prospectus, Heath was stampeded by rising unemployment back to the postwar collectivist consensus of phony Keynesian expansion, industrial policy, open-handed subsidies, and tightfisted incomes policy. Keith had first consulted Arthur Seldon and me at the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA) in 1964, almost casually seeking guidance on free-market literature. It appeared to bear fruit in the program of reform on which the Conservatives had won the 1970 election. So when KJ (as he was increasingly known) courteously asked for an appointment on the morrow of Heath's collapse ten years later, he opened the conversation with a confession of abject failure. He would quite understand, he plainly hinted, if we did not wish to waste further time on such a sinner, however repentant.

But, displaying a fierce determination to do better, he confided a plan for a new "think tank" on the model of the IEA, but aiming to carry academic, educational teaching out into the political, campaigning arena. Here was the origin of the Center for Policy Studies, which spearheaded a reformulation of Conservative economic policy based on monetary discipline, tradeunion reform, denationalization, lower taxes--what KJ was to trumpet up and down the land as the new "enterprise culture."

He was a perpetual student; a five-star intellectual rather than a man of decisive action. Therein lay his weakness as a minister: he relished debate and invited ceaseless seminars with senior civil-service advisors, who exploited his knack of seeing both sides of an issue to fend off uncomfortable reforms. But once his subtle intelligence had gripped the essentials of market analysis and producer competition in the service of consumer choice, within a stable (and thus moral) monetary framework, he did not shrink from such unpopular concomitants as inequality, unemployment, and bankruptcy on the way to prosperity.

Despite shrill abuse and occasional peltings, he reveled in confronting students with the paradox of political good intentions leading to economic disasters. Of all the letters of congratulation on my recent seventieth birthday, there is none I cherish more than Keith's brief note, written with difficulty shortly before his death following a second stroke in December at the age of 76. It illustrates his exceptional--and, for most observers, unsuspected-combination of teasing wit with moral earnestness, a down-to-earth grasp of essentials with an elevated spiritual compass, and an overriding modesty against expecting permanent benefits from any human endeavor.

You are still a young man and have time yet to make your mark! Meanwhile, I want to say how lucky the private sector has been to have you as an ambassador in the struggle between monopoly and competition these last decades.

You will know all the time that you were serving spiritual as well as material needs ... If it is any comfort, it will all have to be done again each generation.

The miracle of Thatcherism came about after 1979 because a man of fearless thought was set in leading harness with a woman of fearless action. KJ shared with Margaret Thatcher a degree of moral and physical courage unequaled in British politics since Churchill in that other war. He was also the most scrupulously upright and engaging companion I have known. In short, a rare hero, one truly worthy of heroworship.