Joe Chamberlain has been much in the news this month, following a speech by Mrs May in his former citadel, Birmingham—a speech which bore the imprint of her powerful chief of staff, Nick Timothy, author of a useful study of the great man published by the Conservative History Group, of which Alistair Lexden is Chairman.
In August Joe’s comeback will be marked by the BBC’s Sunday evening programme, ‘the Westminster Hour’, for which Alistair has this week done a short interview. In it he stressed that Chamberlain had a career of towering political significance over a period of nearly forty years (1868-1906), but, leaving few towering achievements on the national stage, he is not remembered as a great constructive statesman.
The key to understanding him lies in his sobriquet, Radical Joe. He took his fiery radicalism first to the Liberal Party where Gladstone, then its commanding leader, had no time for him. After 1886 they were bitter enemies. For the next twenty years he sought to plant his radicalism in the Conservative Party to which he became indispensable. Until 1900 the Conservative government of Lord Salisbury needed him and the MPs who supported him to ensure that its will prevailed comfortably in the Commons.
It was utterly inconceivable that Chamberlain could ever have become a Tory. From the monarchy downwards few institutions escaped the lash of his fierce tongue. He enjoyed quarrels and rarely sought to heal them. Every ally eyed him with suspicion and distrust.
The important constructive work that is associated with his name was done almost entirely at local level in his Birmingham fiefdom. By the age of forty he was both a multimillionaire (in today’s money) former screw manufacturer and the hero of his adopted city whose houses, streets and public services became the envy of urban Britain after his three-year term as Mayor in the 1870s.
“No greater municipal officer has ever adorned English local government”, wrote Winston Churchill in his brilliant essay on Chamberlain published in 1937 in his book, Great Contemporaries. Birmingham, Churchill continued, was “the stirrup by which he mounted the saddle” that enabled him to ride off into national politics in 1876 where he became “the man the masses knew” and “ made the weather”.
Radical Joe’s fertile mind was constantly dreaming up schemes of social reform to improve the health, housing, employment conditions and old ages of the working classes. From 1885 onwards every election was marked by a programme of his radical measures. It was all done on the back of an envelope. He had no secretariat to work out details and costings.
Gladstone spurned the proposals; private charity in his view should elevate the condition of the working classes. Lord Salisbury was much more responsive; he had to be in view of the parliamentary circumstances. Some significant social reforms were passed into law by the Tories in the 1880s and 1890s, notably free elementary education and compensation for injuries at work. In 1892 Chamberlain declared that “Lord Salisbury has done far more for the solid improvement of the masses of the population than any Government has done before in the present century”.
He had an obvious interest in talking up what was done and claiming credit for every measure; some, like free elementary education, owed little to him. Many working-class lives did not feel the benefits. Slums continued to abound. Much of the legislation gave power to local authorities without obliging them to exercise it. None of it mattered nearly as much as the really dramatic changes in health, housing and local government undertaken brilliantly by Joe’s younger son, Neville, in the inter-war period. It was only then that social reform rose high on the political agenda. In this area Joe’s chief importance lies in the fact that without him there would have been no Neville, the greatest social reformer in the history of the Conservative Party.
On what then did the alliance between Joe Chamberlain and the Tories really depend? There were two elements: Ireland and the Empire which were also the two dominant issues in British politics after 1886. He worked with the Tories above all to preserve Ireland’s place in the United Kingdom under the direct authority of the Westminster Parliament(though he was also attracted by the idea of moving towards a federal state). Together they destroyed Gladstone’s Home Rule scheme and did so under one common Unionist banner; the word Conservative largely disappeared from the political vocabulary. They had an alternative Unionist policy: elected local councils and investment to boost the Irish economy. For some years after 1895 it looked as if the formula would work. (How pleased he would have been with Mrs May’s reference outside No 10 to the “precious, precious” Union.)
On the Empire Chamberlain’s radicalism carried him further and faster than most Tories wanted to go. In 1903 he resigned as Colonial Secretary to launch the greatest imperialist crusade ever undertaken by a British politician. Through the introduction of a wall of import duties—which countries of the Empire would pay at a lower level to others—he proposed an economic framework that he hoped would be the forerunner of political unity. “I hope to lay firm and deep the foundations for that imperial union which fills my heart”, he said. For three years he campaigned tirelessly until a stroke put paid to his career. He left his divided Tory allies with the smallest number of Commons seats in their history. It would hard for them to look back happily on their years in alliance with dynamic Radical Joe, one of the most disruptive forces in the history of British politics.
Excerpts from Alistair Lexden’s interview will be included in the BBC’s ‘ Westminster Hour’ on Sunday August 28.