For those who lived through her 11-year premiership, the names of the big beasts of the Thatcher era — Geoffrey Howe, Nigel Lawson or Willie Whitelaw — are easy to recall.
Less well-remembered among their ranks is Sir Keith Joseph, who led the Industry and Education departments until he left the Cabinet in 1986.
Alongside the Prime Minister herself, however, Sir Keith was perhaps the most important figure in the Thatcher years and the shaping of the modern Tory party. He was also the most influential Jewish politician of the past half-century.
Despite the close bond they formed, Sir Keith, who died 25 years ago this month, was by temperament and background a very different figure from Mrs Thatcher. The son of a former Lord Mayor of London, he hailed from a well-established, wealthy Anglo-Jewish family.
By contrast, the future Prime Minister was the daughter of a shopkeeper and Methodist lay preacher who rose to become mayor of his beloved Grantham. And while Mrs Thatcher was famously strong-minded and confrontational, Sir Keith was indecisive and had, in the words of his fellow Jewish friend and ally, Sir Alfred Sherman, “a tendency to wilt under pressure”.
Nonetheless, they were to form a partnership at the most senior levels of British politics — one not just of shared purpose, but sealed by mutual admiration and respect — that was uniquely harmonious.
In part, it rested on a sense that they were both outsiders. In a Tory Party once dominated by upper-class, patrician grandees, Mrs Thatcher — female, middle-class and provincial — faced sexism, disdain and snobbery.
Although Sir Keith’s talents had seen him promoted to Harold Macmillan’s Cabinet within six years of entering Parliament, he too was, in the view of many in his party, not really “one of us”. One of only two Jewish Tory MPs for many years, Sir Keith was regarded, one observer suggested, as “almost alien” and, according to another, “something of an outsider”.
During the first decade they shared together in Parliament — although a friend, he was very much the “senior partner” in their relationship, Mrs Thatcher would later write — there were few signs that the pair would go on to upend the post-war consensus.
Sir Keith himself combined a liberal social outlook with a strong belief in the importance of entrepreneurship which, as the JC put it in 1974, made him “the acceptable face of Toryism”. There was, in short, little in Sir Keith’s character or beliefs to indicate he had the disposition of a revolutionary.
Nonetheless, it was Sir Keith who, in the wake of the Tories’ defeat at the hands of the miners in February 1974, lit the touchpaper which, as Sir Alf Sherman put it “sparked off the Thatcher revolution”.
Like Mrs Thatcher, he was depressed and disoriented by the failure of the Heath government. And like her, too, he was determined to learn the lessons from it.
But, while she remained largely silent, Sir Keith delivered a series of high-profile, hard-hitting speeches in which he eviscerated his party’s record for much of the period since 1945. The country, he declared in the first, had had “altogether too much socialism” and the Tories had attempted too often to simply “make semi-socialism work”.
He later went on to accuse his party of confusing “a distinctive Conservative approach with dogmatism”.
With Mrs Thatcher as his vice-chair, he established the Centre for Policy Studies; Sir Alf, its driving-force, argued that the new think-tank should “question the unquestioned, think the unthinkable and blaze a trail”.
When the Tories suffered a second defeat at Harold Wilson’s hands in October 1974, Mrs Thatcher urged Sir Keith to challenge Mr Heath for the Tory party leadership. The media furore which followed an ill-advised speech he gave on the “cycle of deprivation” ended Sir Keith’s still-embryonic campaign.
Mrs Thatcher stepped into the breach and, to the consternation of the Tory old guard, defeated Mr Heath. However, as Sir Alf later wrote: “If it hadn’t been for Keith, Heath’s position would not have been shaken, and Margaret would not have become leader.”
Winning the leadership, however, was just the beginning. Over the next four years in opposition, Sir Keith led the “battle of ideas” which Mrs Thatcher believed needed to be waged if a future Tory government was to avoid the timidity, u-turns and humiliation which had eventually befallen the Heath government.
Sir Keith became the new leader’s intellectual outrider. He urged a break with “the path of consensus” with a then-radical mix of lowering taxes and public spending, breaking the power of the trade unions, and embracing what he called the “common ground”.
This territory was not the centrist politics embraced by “One Nation” Conservatives. Instead, it was an altogether more populist agenda — of tax cuts, union-bashing, patriotism and robust anti-Communism — aimed squarely at traditionally Labour, working-class voters who would later form a key element in the coalition which enabled the Tories to win a record-breaking four consecutive general elections after 1979.
As Mrs Thatcher later acknowledged, Sir Keith’s key contribution was to restore the right’s “intellectual self-confidence”. His task, he believed, was to articulate her “beliefs, feelings, instincts and intuitions into ideas, strategies and policies”.
Moreover, while he wined and dined high-profile potential converts to the Thatcherite cause, he also led from the front. In just three years Sir Keith delivered 150 speeches before predominately left-wing student audiences on the “moral case for capitalism”.
On becoming Tory leader, Mrs Thatcher had suggested “we must have an ideology”.
For a party which had long distrusted such notions and preferred instead pragmatism, compromise and adaptability, this was a radical departure. It was, though, a demand which, more than anyone else, Sir Keith sought to answer and fulfil. For good or ill, the result — what became known as Thatcherism — has moulded and guided the Conservative party ever since.
It’s a legacy and mindset which has brought the party both great victories and humiliating defeats over the past four decades.
For the former Prime Minister, her comrade-in-arms in the Thatcher revolution was “one of England’s greatest men”. Without doubt, Sir Keith was one of its most significant.
