Keith Joseph’s lesson to today’s political pygmies

Ray

In many way (certainly in Mandelsonian terms), Sir Keith Joseph was an anti-politician.

And yet, on account of the honesty and integrity that Peter has rightly recounted, he achieved more for his country and his party than most of his contemporaries.

That he never held the highest office merely contrasts those towering achievements with the grubby and increasingly sickening spectacle of the present incumbent saying and doing anything that will shaft his political opponents - irrespective of the long term price to be paid by future generations in terms of mounting indebtedness, social breakdown and economic paralysis.

As Edmund Burke might have said of Sir Keith - "magnanimity in politics is not seldom the truest virtue" (or, of Brown, "a great empire and little minds go ill together").

Tom Burroughes

Sir Keith's ruthlessly honest diagnosis of the stagflation problems of the 1970s would have stood him in good stead to comment about today's absurd re-embrace of Keynesian economics.

Sir Keith was not a greatly effective administrator, but he ranks alongside Margaret Thatcher, Geoffrey Howe and Nigel Lawson as one of most important senior Tory figures of that period. A good and brave man.

Peter Monro

superb piece, if only to remind one that such people actually existed.

Ferdinand Mount's memory of KJ is also endearing in a different way:

'his familiar routine of slapping his forehead or groaning with his head in his hands, the only man I have seen in real life adopt this posture of despair so common in novels.'

david welsh

A splendid piece as usual by Peter Oborne. His second rule of never bothering to pay attention to what a politician actually says is clearly wrong however. And this rule is, moreover, contradicted by what he himself goes on to say.
Having paid close attention to what certain politicians actually said, Mr Oborne then notes that they invariably go on to do the opposite. Hence the great importance of paying attention to what they had to say in the first place.

Kevyn Bodman

Blair's advice to Miiband shows the character of these men:
self-interested,self-serving, manipulative and duplicitous.

No advice about working hard in the interests of his constituents and his country?

ATFlynn

I believe there are now 464, or is that 646 elected MPs? Ray, Tom Burroughes,Peter Monro, david welsh and Kevyn Bodman, have said all that is necessary to illustrate the absolute failure of todays Politics. These first five comments, explain why it is very
unlikely that many people will even bother to cast a vote in any election this year or ever again.
Westminster is in the process of making a claim on the entire financial structure of the economy worldwide and is on the point of constructing a system of Taxation and Public Service funding, that will allow the working Taxpayer absolutely no free-board between existance and shipwreck. Unless of course, you obey the dictact of the Westminster government.
Welcome to the Political, bright new future. As directed by Westminster. All other Political lifestyles, proscribed.
Your only answer is to change the way you work and are paid. Then you can take complete control of Taxation and starve Westminster of all but the bare minimum of funding. It is your bloody money to start with. Why allow that rubbish to rob you of what is yours ?
Regards, ATFlynn,
"Norfolk's Mutineer"

JohnAnt

Peter, you meant to write 'when he was on the shadow front bench', not 'when he was on the front bench'.

David B

Oh, come on. Labour's 'ethical foreign policy' was jettisoned in order to support a conservative US President in the name of the Atlanticists' special relationship. It was the first casualty of the war on terror, not the cause of it.

Given that continental Europe's postwar economic settlement has continued evolving right up to the presnet day without any exciting paradigm shifts, and are arguably better positioned today than we are, it really calls into question whether Sir Keith Joseph's revolutionary new political economy was really the right thing to do.

As investors in the dot com boom learned to their cost, always beware of people promising "paradigm shifts".

Lloyd j

NuLabour sre charlatans - the snake-oil salesmen of modern British politics and Keith Joseph's qualities (whether he was right or wrong in framing a new political economy) only serve to highlight this. The plebs don't (and never will) care but is it any wonder that the rest of us are switching-off the political broadcasts in droves: who wants to be lied to?

Neil Craig

If that is Miliband smiling I'm not sure what he would be like if he was actually trying to look like a tailor's dummy.

Milton Friedman once wrote, not without admiration, of how the Anerican socialist Party had had almost all of its programme carried out over the years simply because they put policy ahead of personal power & the politicians of the main parties, having no such principles, had edged towards them over the decades.