Books

Radical Joe

Joseph Chamberlain was a towering personality in an age of political giants. He began his public career in the post-Palmerstonian era and died when Lloyd George was two years from the premiership and Winstone Churchill was First Lord of the Admiralty.

Possessed by an enormous energy, Chamberlain made a profound mark on Victorian and Edwardian politics; his hard-hitting, demagogic style aroused either adulation or hatred, never indifference. Judd is at pains to point out that Chamberlain's career was beset with apparent contradictions: the wealthy industrialist who espoused extreme Radicalism; the luxury-loving Nonconformist who championed the downtrodden; the architect of organised Liberalism who left Gladstone and split the Liberal Party in 1886; the scornful critic of privilege and the peerage who became a vital vote-winner for Lord Salisbury and the Tories; a creator of Unionism who helped to send the Unionist party to the electoral holocaust of 1906; the alleged Republican who became the greatest Imperialist of his time.

In this scholarly and stimulating biography, Judd draws upon an enormous fund of private documents, many of them from the Chamberlain family papers, to set 'Radical Joe's' career in its proper perspective. the colourful threads of Chamberlain's life are rearranged into an explicit pattern, throwing into clearer light some the great issues of his time: electoral and social reform, Irish home Rule, the Boer War, tariff reform. the private man also emerges from this important study; three times married, the forbidding father of a future Foreign Secretary (Austen) and a future Prime Minister (Neville); as dominant in his domestic life as in his public activities, yet at times haunted by depression and uncertainty.

Accused of every form dishonourable conduct, from corruption to conspiring at the ruin of his best friend Dilke in the divorce courts, chamberlain never ceased to propose futuristic solutions to Britain's ailments, amany of which - Irish troubles, economic depression, urban poverty, international uncertainty - are still evident today.

Reviews

"The best short study of Chamberlain that has so far appeared."
- Asa Briggs, The Guardian

"An excellent book, readable, clear, cool, scholarly, realistic and based on careful documentary research ... Denis Judd's first class biography reveals as much of the truth as we are ever likely to get."
- Robert Blake, The Sunday Times

"Denis Judd writes easily and with humour, presenting Chamberlain through he eyes of both his critics and admirers. No significant aspect of Chamberlain's work or personality is omitted."
- Julian Amery, the Sunday Telegraph

"An admirable biography, wise accurate and penetrating…excellent on Chamberlain’s personality."
- A. J. P. Taylor, The Observer