Letters to the Editor
Research Department
From Sir Keith Joseph, MP Sir: Politicians need thick skins, and more often than not permit press comments to pass in silence: Otherwise we might rarely ever lay down our pens. But there are limits and implications. I could expect some quarters to react angrily to my reference to socialist slumdom, but why this should lead to epithets like "crass," "infelicitous" and "indiscreet" from The Spectator, and why they should regard it as "ill considered" to tell the resident correspondent in London of an American newspaper what he reads and hears me saying in articles, speeches and Conservative Party press releases week in and week out surely makes one wonder what is biting them.
If your writer, who will not even sign his name, considers it immoderate to speak of socialist slumdom — the declining vitality, the squalor and the lack of self-renewing capacity that socialist policies have brought upon us — then surely the onus of explanation lies on him.
But presumably your unsigned author has some ambitions to direct our Party's policy. Otherwise, why should he take it on himself to decree that the Centre for Policy Studies should be wound up and merged with the Conservative Research Department? My colleagues recognise that our Centre has quite a different function from the CRD: if they did not, I'm sure they would tell me to my face and not use an anonymous columnist as their mouthpiece.
Keith Joseph House of Commons, London SW1
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