Keith Joseph

Keith Joseph was born in London in 1918 into a Jewish family; his father founded the Bovis construction company and was Lord Mayor of London. He studied law at Magdalen College, Oxford, served as a captain in the Royal Artillery in Italy during the Second World War and became a fellow of All Souls. He entered Parliament for Leeds North East in a 1956 by-election. As Minister of Housing from 1962 he led a large council building programme, and from 1970 to 1974 he was Secretary of State for Social Services under Edward Heath. After the 1974 defeats he concluded that he had not really been a Conservative before, co-founded the Centre for Policy Studies and gave a series of speeches restating free-market economics. A controversial speech at Edgbaston in October 1974 ended his hopes of the leadership, and he backed Margaret Thatcher instead. He served as her Industry Secretary and then Education Secretary, left the cabinet in 1986 and became a life peer in 1987.

Supporters regard Joseph as the intellectual architect of Thatcherism, and Thatcher described his Stockton lecture as one of the very few speeches that changed a political generation's thinking. The Centre for Policy Studies holds an annual memorial lecture in his name. Critics remember the Edgbaston speech, in which he said that "our human stock is threatened" by births to poor mothers, as offensive, and he apologised for its wording. Others note that his record in office was more cautious than his rhetoric, and he himself rated his time as a minister a failure. Papers released in 2011 showed he had suggested a "managed rundown" of Merseyside after the 1981 riots.