One name leapt off the text of Theresa May’s Birmingham speech, which began as the launch of her leadership campaign but morphed instantly into a programme for her government this week. It was that of Joseph Chamberlain, who was listed by the new Tory leader in her apostolic succession of great conservatives.
It became clear as May developed the themes of her new Conservatism, moreover, that Chamberlain senior wasn’t being praised just because she happened to be speaking in Birmingham — the city he made into a worldwide symbol of great municipal government. She intended to follow in the footsteps of ‘Radical Joe’. And that could take her along very different paths from those trodden by both David Cameron and Margaret Thatcher.
Chamberlain is little celebrated today. But he was the most brilliant, inventive, and unpredictable politician in late Victorian England, and his brilliance seems to be understood by May’s adviser Nick Timothy.
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