Simon Kuper writes this 2022 book:
* Britain does have world-class scientists, engineers and quants, but they are stuck in the engine room while the rhetoricians drive the train. Modern Oxford has specialised in producing the politicians and civil servants who administrate the British state, the lawyers and accountants who service the economy, and the pundits who narrate the show. These people (and I’m one of them) typically dropped science and maths at school aged sixteen, and acquired only a smattering of economics. In parliament in 2016, MP s who had studied politics at university outnumbered those who had studied engineering nearly sevenfold.
Numbers have historically been a challenge for Britain’s Britain’s ruling class. Douglas-Home as prime minister admitted to using matchsticks to work out the consequences of the Budget. 11 Later British leaders struggled to judge scientific advice on nuclear energy, climate change and Covid-19. In 2010, George Osborne became chancellor with no formal post-school education in economics or business beyond whatever he had picked up in his Oxford history degree. By the late 2010s, Oxford’s most oversubscribed undergraduate degree was economics and management, 12 but during Osborne’s student days it didn’t yet exist.
Oxford’s dominant technocratic degree at the time was PPE: philosophy, politics, economics. Any three-year undergraduate degree is only going to skate the surface, but that was triply true of PPE, which spread the student’s time across three subjects (although most people dropped one after the first year). A PPEist of my day told me, ‘I went on to work in the Treasury but could never use the economics part of my degree as it wasn’t good enough.’
Since the referendum of 2016, it has become commonplace to associate Brexit with PPE. Ivan Rogers, for instance, a grammar-school boy who read history at Oxford, and the UK’s permanent representative to the EU until he resigned in 2017, discerned in Brexit ‘a very British establishment sort of revolution. No plan and little planning, oodles of PPE tutorial level plausible bullshit, supreme self confidence that we understand others’ real interests better than they do …’ But this is a misdiagnosis. In fact, in the 2016 referendum, 95 per cent of MPs who had studied PPE voted Remain. 13 They included Cameron, Jeremy Hunt, Philip Hammond, William Hague, Matt Hancock, Liz Truss, Rory Stewart, Sam Gyimah, Damian Hinds, Nick Boles, the Milibands, Ed Balls, Yvette Cooper and Peter Mandelson. Most of these people were modernisers at heart, who had presumably chosen the degree in search of the cutting-edge knowledge needed to run a serious country. Among the rare PPEists to back Leave were Rishi Sunak, and, more consequentially, Rupert Murdoch, who in 1950s Oxford had been business manager of Cherwell . (Murdoch had also stood for secretary of the Labour Club, 14 but was disbarred from holding office after an investigation into electoral malpractice conducted by the young Gerald Kaufman.) 15
By contrast, all the leading Oxford Tory Brexiteers studied backward-looking subjects: classics for Johnson, history for Rees-Mogg and Hannan, and ancient and modern history for Cummings. Gove’s degree was English, which mostly meant the canon.
The most Brexity degree among MPs in 2016 was classics: six of the eight classicists in the Commons voted Leave. 16 Classics was a particularly public-school course, because so few state schools offered Latin and Greek. Rachel Johnson, who read classics at Oxford one year below her brother Boris, recites a few lines of Latin, then reflects: ‘All these things we had to learn by rote, so they stuck in the head, and you got into Oxford.’ 17 By the time their brother Leo arrived, there were three Johnson siblings reading classics at Oxford simultaneously. Their brother Jo arrived in 1991 but did history.
* in 1981, two years before Boris Johnson started his degree, Oxford admitted three-quarters of pupils who applied to study classics. 18 Yet perversely, classics carried outsized prestige. Such was the status of Latin that it had been part of the admissions requirement for Oxford and Cambridge until 1960. 19 Francis Crick, who could never be bothered to learn the language, failed his entry exams for both universities. He went to University College London instead, 20 before codiscovering the structure of DNA.
In the gentlemanly Oxbridge tradition, the less useful your degree, the more chic it was. As the poet Louis Mac-Neice noted,
Not everyone here having had
The privilege of learning a language
That is incontrovertibly dead. 21
Precisely because Latin and Greek were taught chiefly at public schools, both languages became ruling-class markers – as Johnson knows when he recites from the Iliad in public. (While mayor of London, he enlisted his former Oxford tutor Jasper Griffin to provide classical passages for his speeches.) 22 Rees-Mogg later said he regretted not having studied classics at university: ‘All the really clever people do that.’ 23
‘The classics fulfilled the same sociological function in Victorian England as calligraphy in ancient China – a device to regulate and limit entry into a governing elite’, explained the historian Colin Shrosbree.
* The dominant personality in the history faculty in 1980s Oxford was Norman Stone. His reputation as an unabashed groper 28 didn’t stop him being appointed to the university university chair in 1985. Stone was a fantastically entertaining lecturer: at 9 a.m., gripping his lectern in both hands to stop himself falling over from drink, he could ad lib about European history in a Glaswegian accent, without notes, non-stop for an hour.
* he exercised a fatal attraction for historically minded young Tories. Dominic Cummings reportedly approached him after a lecture to complain that his own tutor was always telling him to ignore the role of individual decision-makers like Hitler. Stone agreed that this was insane, and said, ‘Boy, I’ll teach you myself,’ which he did. The two men developed a mutual fascination.
Another of Stone’s protégés, Hannan, would write of his memorial service in 2019:
“I was able to take my place in St Martin-in-the-Fields among hundreds of (for want of a better shorthand) conservative intellectuals. There were dozens of Tory peers and MPs, scores of distinguished writers and academics and a good number of those anti-communist Mittel-European thinkers who, in many ways, made up Norman’s hinterland. Arriving just in time from the European Parliament, I found myself between Peter Lilley and Alan Sked, the LSE historian who founded the Anti-Federalist League in 1991, changing its name to UKIP in 1993. Dominic Cummings ambled in a little late wearing what looked like a black gilet for the occasion. Michael Gove and Andrew Roberts were among those who gave readings. You get the picture: here was the tribe massing to mourn one of its own.”
* Perhaps no other country has as happy a relationship with its own history. And the self-appointed guardian of this relationship is the Conservative Party. The Tory public schoolboys grew up as ancestor-worshippers, and understandably so: for anyone able to gloss over the brutality of Empire, the achievements of their tiny caste were breathtaking. Between about 1860 and 1960, British men who had attended either independent schools or Oxbridge or both had invented, ruled and written much of the modern world. They had governed a quarter of the planet, and overseen victory in two world wars. They created Alice in Wonderland, Peter Pan, Sherlock Holmes, Winnie-the-Pooh, Bertie Wooster, James Bond, The Jungle Book and Nineteen Eighty-Four. They had spilt the atom and discovered evolution, television, penicillin and the structure of DNA. They helped invent the computer and the nuclear bomb. 37 They gave the world Keynesianism and most modern sports. Recall Boris Johnson’s camp British-exceptionalist speech as mayor of London at the end of the Beijing Olympics:
“Virtually every single one of our international sports were either invented or codified by the British, and I say this respectfully to our Chinese hosts who have excelled so magnificently at ping pong. Ping pong was invented on the dining tables of England in the nineteenth century and it was called wiff waff. There I think you have the essential difference between us and the rest of world. Other nations, the French, looked at a dining table and saw an opportunity to have dinner. We looked at a dining table and saw an opportunity to play wiff waff.”
* I once found myself up a mountain in the Alps writing about a group of British toffs who went skiing every winter in 1920s outfits. As I scribbled in my notebook, a female toff peered over my shoulder and drawled, ‘Oh, are you writing shorthand? My great-great-grandfather invented shorthand.’ ‘What was your great-great-grandfather called?’ I asked. ‘Pitman,’ she said. I was writing Pitman shorthand.
After all that, if you were born into the ruling caste in the 1960s or 1970s, modernity could only feel like decline. Your fathers and grandfathers had run the world, and here you were, growing up in a struggling mid-sized outpost of the European Economic Community. The UK’s tame, vegetarian, low-stakes, Brussels-based, post-imperial incarnation had nothing more glorious to offer than the Falklands War.
* When I asked Dan Hannan why so many of today’s politicians were at Oxford, he replied, ‘It’s been true forever, right? … I guess people who were very interested in politics were more likely to apply to Oxford, because they think there’s more going on there.’ By contrast, the Cambridge Union has never produced a British prime minister. An attendee at one of its recent reunions reports ‘a room full of failed ambition and putting a hearty face on’.
* Politicos at Oxford formed a tight-knit little universe. In 1976, Theresa Brasier and her future husband Philip May, both of them Union ‘hacks’, were introduced at a disco of the Oxford University Conservative Association (OUCA) by another Union president, Benazir Bhutto, then already preparing to be prime minister of Pakistan.
* The future Australian prime minister Malcolm Turnbull met both his future counterparts Brasier and Bhutto at the Union, the first time in 1977 when he came to town as a visiting debater, and ended up giving Bhutto a lift back to London. ‘I have to say I’ve never known anyone drape themselves across the back seat of a Mini Minor as elegantly as she did.’
A year later Turnbull returned to Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. [Michael] Crick found him ‘the most dynamic person I ever met at Oxford, or since really’.
What was Turnbull’s impression of Oxford? “It was the first place that anyone asked me essentially, ‘What does your father do?’ People actually were hung up on how they spoke, their social background, where they went to school and so forth.”
* Like his role model Churchill, Boris Johnson spent years mastering the ancient craft of public speaking. 2 Eton had offered unmatched opportunities to practise. Johnson ran the school’s Debating Society, and by the time he left was so well-versed in traditional speech-making that he could perform it as parody.
* Johnson learned at school to defeat opponents whose arguments were better simply by ignoring their arguments. He discovered how to win elections and debates not by boring the audience with detail, but with carefully timed jokes, calculated lowerings of voice, and ad hominem jibes.
* Ignorant and suspicious of philosophy, Oxford politicos instinctively mock the funny-sounding new-fangled utopian ideologies that have sometimes ensnared French or German elites. Marxism, with its strangled terminology, never stood a chance in Britain. Oxford in particular was too ironic for radicalism. Kingsley Amis, one of the few post-war undergraduates to join the university’s branch of the Communist Party, explained later: ‘At least … it involved girls, not very nice looking ones, though.’ 30 The British emphasis on witty, deflating rhetoric was itself a bulwark against dangerous ideas. George Steiner, the continental intellectual-turned-Cambridge don, diagnosed:
“If the Lord God came to England and started expounding his beliefs, you know what they’d say? They’d say, ‘Oh, come off it!’ Yes, this land is blessed with a powerful mediocrity of mind. It has saved you from communism and it has saved you from fascism. In the end you don’t care enough about ideas to suffer their consequences.”
* I’d had a wonderful time at Oxford, but I left feeling both psychologically and intellectually unprepared for adulthood. I was painfully aware that I had been undereducated. In the Netherlands, where I had grown up, pupils sitting the final high-school exams aged eighteen did seven or eight subjects. In Britain, I’d sat four A-levels, meaning that my knowledge of all other academic fields was adolescent at best. As Rosa Ehrenreich notes: ‘Oxford produces scientists who haven’t read a work of literature since they were fifteen, language students who know nothing of history, law students who know nothing of politics.’ 2
The classic British three-year undergraduate degree is one of the shortest in the western world as it is, but my time at Oxford had amounted to just seventy-two term-time weeks, or a bit under a year and a half of actual work, when I wasn’t drinking with other wasters in the college bar.
* I went to Harvard to study economics, politics and Russian for a year, and ended up delving into mysteries I had never previously contemplated, such as how exchange rates worked.
The combined workload for the various classes at Harvard was much bigger than at Oxford – total reading assignments alone routinely exceeded 1,000 pages a week…
* Other British scholars returned home from Harvard with the latest in centre-left policy thinking, which they helped deliver to a grateful Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, then busy remaking the Labour Party. Several New Labour ideas – such as the New Deal for the long-term unemployed, or Sure Start, the programme for toddlers – had American intellectual origins.
The Oxford Tories didn’t bother with graduate school. As per public-school tradition, they seemed to feel that Oxford had completed their formal education.
* Malcolm Turnbull remarks: ‘Apart from city-states, I can’t think of another country which is so dominated by its capital as the UK is. Its institutions are national.’
* When I asked [Daniel] Hannan why a group of people who could have chosen any career flocked to Grub Street, he replied: ‘I’d always wanted to write columns. At the time that I applied for the Telegraph, I just thought that was what I was going to do for the rest of my life.’ Rachel Johnson, who started her career at the Financial Times, observes that becoming a journalist, especially a columnist, allowed ‘a kind of projection of personality that going into a merchant bank or a management consultancy didn’t offer. It was the beginning of the cult of personality and of the development of your individual brand.’
* The Oxford Tories belonged in journalism. Opinion-writing was exactly what their education had prepared them for. The right-wing Spectator magazine became their London clubhouse. The American journalist Anne Applebaum, who worked for the Spectator from 1992 to 1996, recalled: ‘The tone of every conversation, every editorial meeting, was arch, every professional conversation amusing; there was no moment when the joke ended or the irony ceased.’ 2 In 1999, Johnson became editor of the magazine.
By this time, he had transferred his Oxford Union persona to the TV screen, starring in the show Have I Got News For You . His style turned out to work on a national stage. Ian Buruma writes,
“Johnson deliberately exaggerated the upper-class mannerisms he acquired at Eton and Oxford: the stammering drawl, the self-deprecating jocularity that can only come from a deep reservoir of assumed superiority, the cultivated amateurishness, the Latin quotations, the carefully studied slovenly dress … Johnson realised that playing down his upper-class education would only make him look shifty, and so he played it up.”
* Life was good at the Spectator . And yet Johnson was preparing the leap into the senior branch of the rhetorical sector: parliament. As he explained, ‘They don’t put up statues to journalists.’
* Cameron hadn’t simply been thrust by his fellow MPs on a grumpy public. Rather, he emerged from Eton and Oxford branded – in his own mind and those of his voters – as a ‘leader’. A profile in the FT called him ‘a man whose most visceral political belief is that he is the best person to run the country’. 16
Eton and Oxford were electoral assets to Cameron more than they were weaknesses. Rachel Johnson says, ‘You just looked at him and thought, “That is a prime minister”. He inhabited the role so easily.’ Much of the public certainly liked that. It’s noticeable that the only three postwar British prime ministers without an elite educational institution to their name – Callaghan, Major and Gordon Brown – didn’t exude ease in office.
* Club members have traditionally been discouraged from holding strong fixed beliefs. The basic ideology has always been: trust in the system. After all, the system is run by chaps like them, who were at college a couple of minutes’ walk from each other. Unlike countries with multiple power centres like the US or Germany or Italy, the UK has a single ruling class.
‘You get a homogeneity in your elite that you don’t get in larger nations,’ remarks Malcolm Turnbull. He adds that even Australia, with a population less than 40 per cent the size of Britain’s, is ‘a much more diverse country in terms of people’s perspectives and attitudes and where they’d been educated, where they went to school, where they grew up.’
Because Britain has no recent traumas of revolution, civil war or collaboration, establishment members traditionally treat each other as good chaps even when they disagree on matters of life and death. In Anthony Powell’s twelve-volume novel sequence A Dance to the Music of Time , there’s a dinner party that takes place just after Chamberlain’s return from Munich. Powell, an Eton-and-Oxford man who knew half the establishment, describes two Conservative MPs on opposite sides of the appeasement debate behaving towards each other with impeccable politeness. They ‘had evidently no wish for argument’, writes Powell. 3 That’s the British establishment. Even the rupture of Munich soon healed, as did the rupture of Thatcherism once New Labour accepted her legacy of privatisation, lower taxes and higher inequality.
By the Cameron years, Britain was once again run by a group of politicians, civil servants, business people and financiers who agreed on most things. The right and left wings of the establishment got along fine. This was not America.
* The ruling caste could accommodate almost anybody. Even ‘God Save the Queen’ by the Sex Pistols, the ultimate anti-establishment song, was played at the Olympic opening ceremony in 2012, the happiest moment of Cameron’s tenure.
* In the Britain of Blair and Cameron, almost all establishment members shared the same set of facts and, to a large degree, even opinions, which they absorbed every morning from Radio Four’s Today programme. Almost all had come to accept Britain’s place inside the EU but outside its main projects: the euro, Schengen and ever-closer political union. Almost all agreed that social inequality and climate change were big problems, and also agreed not to do anything much about them.
* Brexit has been billed as an anti-elitist revolt. More precisely, it was an anti-elitist revolt led by an elite: a coup by one set of Oxford public schoolboys against other, backed by an Australian Oxford public schoolboy media magnate masquerading as an anti-elitist. Indeed, many voters were willing to entrust Vote Leave with the national future precisely because it was led by an elite.
* Johnson’s high verbal intelligence had absolved him from ever developing his analytical intelligence. Concentrated thought could always be sidestepped with a joke. He and his fellow Brexiteers were so poorly briefed that in December 2017 they accepted the principle of Brussels’ ‘backstop’ plan to keep the Irish land border open, before spending much of the next few years fighting their own decision. The Brexiteers failed to debate Brussels into submission, because the EU’s negotiators were lawyers who followed rules. Cummings said later that when Johnson struck the Withdrawal Agreement with the EU in 2019, ‘he never had a scoobydoo what the deal he signed meant’. 5 It scarcely mattered anyway: in the Oxford tradition, witty and brilliant speeches trumped reality.
* His caste instinctively scorned constraints. Had he still been a Telegraph columnist, he would surely have been warning the prime minister against imprisoning the nation over a flu. In his absence, that role was taken by other 1980s Oxford Tory journalists such as Toby Young, Julia Hartley-Brewer and James Delingpole. Their lack of scientific training did not impact their intellectual confidence. ‘When we have herd immunity Boris will face a reckoning on this pointless and damaging lockdown,’ was the headline on Young’s Telegraph column in July 2020. 9 Six months later, after well over 100,000 deaths, Young’s Lockdown Sceptics website still had a section headed ‘Where’s the pandemic?’, which said that ‘cases are just positive tests’. 10
Young, Hartley-Brewer and Delingpole had inherited the role that Hannan, Gove and Johnson himself played over Brexit: a vanguard of skilled wordsmiths can equip the Torysphere with an entertaining and persuasive story, wrapped in Oxford-tutorial level plausibility, larded with quips and choice statistics and appeals to ancient English traditions of liberty, Burke and all that. Boring experts might dissect the message with unmemorable phrases, but they didn’t get much of a hearing in the Torysphere. The ‘sceptics’ as much as the scientists were a voice in Johnson’s ear.
* [Covid] was the British state’s fourth major policy blunder in less than twenty years, after the Iraq war, the financial crisis and Brexit. Like the previous disasters, and like Johnson’s premiership itself, it had its roots partly in the privileging of rhetoric over facts or expertise.
In 2002/3, it had been Tony Blair’s articulacy that sold the Iraq war in Britain. When he hinted that Saddam Hussein’s imaginary ‘weapons of mass destruction’ could hit the UK, 19 the ruling class mostly believed him. Educated Americans would often praise Blair for arguing the case more eloquently than President Bush could. Yes: Blair spoke well. That was what he did. Where there were gaps in his knowledge, he talked around them.
* Malcolm Turnbull, surveying Britain in late 2020 from the safety of Australia, remarked: ‘The handling of Covid in the UK, I guess, is an example of not handling administration competently or effectively. The once-over lightly, debating chamber style – well, you can skate along for quite a long time, but then you end up with very serious consequences.’
* Most tutors today don’t tolerate articulate bluffers. There is even some soul-searching over Oxford’s role in shaping the Brexiteers. Louise Richardson, the university’s vice-chancellor, has said that she was ‘embarrassed to confess we educated’ Michael Gove. 6
Final exams have been reformed to favour scholars over ‘natural essayists’, a history tutor told me. Partly driven by the gender gap in results – confident men being rewarded for bold counterintuitive arguments made in a hurry – the format of three essays in a three-hour exam, with multiple such tests in a week or so at the end of the third year, is in decline. Now the history degree gives more weight to a compulsory 12,000-word thesis, a ‘Special Subject Extended Essay’, and a take-home paper at the end of the second year in which students have a week to write three essays.
Covid-19 prompted another reform: after exams were scrapped, history students had to submit revised, improved and footnoted versions of their three best term-time essays. In the 1980s, footnotes on undergraduate essays were almost unheard of.
