Talk:Keith Joseph

Untitled
I think the "assesment" section of this page should be removed, not because I agree or disagree with the assesment as such, but simply ANY assesment is bound to be the authors opinion about a certain subject, and therefor by its very nature not a neutral point of view. Jcuk

In the second biography it says at one stage to the effect that "at this point his drinking was under control" (quoting from memory, so possibly not exact). Further details?

"Like many great political thinkers, Joseph was a failure in office."

Are there #any# political thinkers who were effective in office? (Was it Karl Marx or Lenin who said that the point of political philosophy is not to describe the situation but to change it?) - It was Marx. This was the last of his "Theses on Feuerbach." NRPanikker 13:44, 11 October 2006 (UTC)

Regarding description as right wing
This is a vague term in the extreme, the changes in the Conservative Party in the 1970's very much were formed by the growth of Neo-Liberalism which was as Mrs Thatcher put it a project to "Roll back the Frontiers of the State", it is not an NPOV nor indeed is Neo-Liberal considered a negative term, Keith Joseph was from the early 1970's on in the vanguard of Neo-Liberalism - deregulation, ending big government and minimising government involvement in the economy - these are all parts of Neo-Liberal theory. On social policy Neo-Liberals could vary a lot from being very libertarian to being very strongly socially conservative.

In fact the term right lumps him together with people who favoured extensive state involvement in the economy but who had a very strong emphasis on a more authoritarian social conservatism.


 * Our job is to produce an encyclopaedia which is useful to people. Any article on Keith Joseph which does not describe him as being on the political right is being extremely unuseful. The Conservative Party are on the right of British politics, and Keith Joseph was on the right of the Conservative Party - not the authoritarian right, but the economic right. Fys. &#147;Ta fys aym&#148;. 13:48, 11 October 2006 (UTC)
 * He didn't use the term himself and preferred more specific technical terminology when categorising people and ideas.--Lord of the Isles 19:04, 11 October 2006 (UTC)

Playground Slang
As "sir-keith" his name has an entry (based on its sound) in the Online Dictionary of Playground Slang, to be found at www.odps.org NRPanikker 00:13, 27 October 2006 (UTC)

Relations
I 'vaguely recall' reading that he was related to another MP - if so, which? Jackiespeel (talk) 16:14, 21 September 2009 (UTC)

Name
Is the spelling 'Sinjohn' really correct? It is my own middle name and as far as I'm aware is always spelt 'St. John' since the pronunciation 'sinjun' is merely a verbal smoothing of the sound.Erwfaethlon (talk) —Preceding undated comment added 23:06, 19 May 2010 (UTC).

Maybe the spelling was chosen to distance him from the Christian saint, since his family was Jewish? NRPanikker (talk) 02:23, 28 March 2021 (UTC)

Why is so much of this article unsourced?
I am referring in particular to the elements of the article which seem to contain a pro-Thatcherite slant (coupled with, as usual, a subcurrent of anti-Heath sentiment). Pro-Thatcher and anti-Heath seems, sadly, to be the norm with so many Wikipedia articles. Still, at least this one doesn't (yet) include a quote from the odious Enoch Powell. Multiculturalist (talk) 22:12, 15 November 2010 (UTC)
 * It's basically a Keith Joseph fan page. Right wing Tory wonks are very active on WP with varying degrees of discretion and subtlety. Every WP article about British Conservative politicians active in the 80s displays this bias and I can't see that much can be done about it given the determination of the editors involved. --Ef80 (talk) 14:57, 16 November 2011 (UTC)

Edgbaston 1974 speech
According to the article, the speech was supposed to have been written by Alfred Sherman. But at the end of the paragraph it is credited to Joseph's assistant, Jonathan Sumption. Both are sourced but it is not clear from these. As it stands, the article contains contradictory claims.

Who wrote it then? Plutonium27 (talk) 11:07, 19 November 2010 (UTC)
 * Joseph inserted the controversial phrase into the speech which was written by Sherman.--Britannicus (talk) 11:29, 21 November 2010 (UTC)


 * So does that mean Sumption's claim can be dismissed? Plutonium27 (talk) 05:11, 23 November 2010 (UTC)


 * I wouldn't call it "Sumption's claim" because he has been indirectly quoted by an unknown person, he hasn't gone on record to take responsibility for it. However Joseph's biographers say this: "Ironically, although Joseph's close allies have treated responsibility for the phrase as if they were playing pass-the-parcel with a hand grenade, it seems that this section was almost the only contribution which Joseph made to his own speech. In recent months Sherman had taken care to remove additions to the texts which he provided, but on this occasion Joseph was so attracted by a phrase that he re-inserted it. [Note: ...So anxious was Joseph that the responsibility should lie with the true culprit that as late as 1989 he personally telephoned to correct a Times diarist who had attributed the phrase to Sherman; see The Times, 10 February 1989; interview with Alfred Sherman.]"--Britannicus (talk) 19:28, 23 November 2010 (UTC)


 * Thanks for looking that up, Britannicus. Quite an long-running mess, ay? I expect the party was still reeling from the Rivers of Blood fallout. I wonder if Joseph's keenness to exonerate him was because of Sherman's closeness to his free-market protegee Thatcher and he didn't want to make her look bad like she enjoyed and employed the wisdom of someone who would consider this a reasonable proposition for a politician's speech. It occurred to me that presumably Joseph had read it through first and yet didn't see fit to put a line through it - but he now claims he wrote it? Wouldn't be the first time he took the fall for her, would it? BTW, Alfred Sherman page here looks like a fan has had at it. *sighs (have spent most of the night cleaning up this sort of thing and can't face another one...)
 * All the best Plutonium27 (talk) 05:38, 28 November 2010 (UTC)
 * Whether he did or did not, the reliable sources claim Joseph wrote that part of the speech.--Britannicus (talk) 12:27, 28 November 2010 (UTC)
 * In a podcast on the BBC with Nick Robinson, Lord Sumption claims that he had nothing to do with the speech and first learnt about it through reading the newspaper. On the matter of provenance, he simply says it was written by Sir Alfred Sherman. — Preceding unsigned comment added by H.E. Nightingale (talk • contribs) 17:43, 10 June 2020 (UTC)

Date of divorce
The date of his divorce from his first wife is quoted as 1985 in the text, but 1978 in the box. Which was it? Valetude (talk) 12:53, 14 March 2015 (UTC)


 * According to his entry in the ODNB, they separated in 1978 and divorced in 1985. Crisso (talk) 11:20, 21 July 2021 (UTC)

'Bananas'
A longish paragraph concerned the story of Sir Geoff Palmer, who claimed in a 2015 radio interview that in the 1960s Joseph had addressed a racist remark to him ("go back where you came from and grow bananas") during an interview at Nottingham University. This story has since been questioned (see Charles Moore, "Spectator's Notes", The Spectator, 11 September 2015), on the grounds that there is no reason to suppose that Joseph could have been involved in this incident and that Palmer may have confused Joseph with someone else. Moore points out that Joseph was profoundly anti-racist and had no connection either with agriculture or with Nottingham University as the anecdote suggests. As the story is suspect (and is in any case WP:UNDUE in context), I have removed it awaiting any independent confirmation of its accuracy.--Smerus (talk) 07:42, 10 September 2015 (UTC)

Assessment comment
Substituted at 21:03, 29 April 2016 (UTC)

Allegations
Allegations of paedophillia were made by a known liar and fantacist

https://amp.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/oct/15/trump-allegation-british-witness-anthony-gilberthorpe 2A02:C7F:6610:AA00:A97D:D664:49A8:4F9D (talk) 23:54, 1 December 2023 (UTC)