"...Long's contentment at Home Office. Joynson-Hicks was thus in many ways frustrated that his coveted portfolio remained out of his hands and that the matters for which he had developed an interest and passion he now could not influence, but Long remained his most important patron and mentor, and having a ministerial file and sitting in Cabinet meetings was nonetheless a considerable promotion.
The Ministry of Health had been created for the first time under the Haldane government and thus was regarded as a new and curious appointment by most Nats, but Joynson-Hicks saw in it an opportunity for more, and it was even more so at Health than as Long's deputy at Home that he developed his reputation as a tireless worker and ferocious advocate for his tasks. Joynson-Hicks aggressively moved to expand treatment for communicable diseases such as tuberculosis and created the first ever registry of nurses in Britain, with a push towards more centralized and standardized regulation and education of the nursing profession being incomplete by the time the Cecil ministry left office in December 1917.
In his role as Minister of Health, Joynson-Hicks clashed often with many of the Hughligan figures of the Cabinet, first and foremost Cecil himself, who criticized his spending requests as impractical and unconservative, and his instincts as inappropriately statist. Indeed, Malcolm went so far as to quip that "Jixie is a Chamberlainite, simply lathered in reactionary paint." This elided Joynson-Hicks' familiar moralizing social conservatism that set him apart from many of his contemporaries (one of his proposals at Health was to make "immoral behaviour" by nurses a sackable offence") but also missed perhaps the underlying shift in National thinking. While the aristocrats around Cecil were no moderates, their conservatism was trapped by a certain 19th century stuffiness, having become the Gladstonians in economic thinking they had once hated. What Joynson-Hicks represented instead was a more nationalist approach, a continental brand of conservatism that promised the use of the state on behalf of God, King and Country and all that entailed rather than, as the Liberals would argue, the moral and social uplift of the masses according to modernist ideas.
It was for that reason that toiling in relative obscurity to the public at Health, Joynson-Hicks avoided the reputational damage that much of Cecil's generation of colleagues suffered in the economic and political debacles of that term, but also proved himself to a legion of young Nationals that he was one of the true talents in the party as an administrator and governor, a figure who could reasonably use the tools of state before him to enact policy rather than simply opine on matters of the ruling class. He was, in that sense, the hingepoint of when what had once been the Conservative Party became a middle class party, and High Toryism was beginning to be replaced by something new..."
- Jix
