Why was Sir Keith Joseph MP called The Mad Monk?

Answer 1

Arguably, Keith Joseph did as much as any other single person around the world to reshape the debate about government and marketplace, to take a variety of ideas and bind them together into a powerful critique of the mixed economy and, in the course of things, help shape them into a political program. That agenda, in turn, was articulated and put into effect by his most important student, Margaret Thatcher. She made the ideas "happen." But it was Joseph who created the package over half a decade, in the second half of the 1970s, at a time when the premises of the mixed economy were hardly questioned and yet the system itself was running into such severe difficulties as to become dysfunctional. Just as the Attlee consensus of the 1940s had become the "text" for governments and politicians for more than three decades following, so what began around the seminar tables in research institutes in the 1970s and took shape in the Thatcher program of the 1980s would do much to set the global agenda for the 1990s. Keith Joseph's name is hardly as well known as Margaret Thatcher's. But she would give him full credit. "I could not have become leader of the opposition, or achieved what I did as prime minister, without Keith," she said. And, she would add, Joseph was "my closest political friend." Laterothers would call Joseph the "Mad Monk"; Joseph would describe himself not much differently -- as "a convenient madman." He talked about such things as enterprise, initiative, and the need for entrepreneurship. There was nothing wrong with starting a business, said Joseph; in fact, it was entrepreneurs who created the wealth for society. Joseph's words, were completely at odds with the dominant opinion of the day when he began to proclaim them.