Given Oxford’s well-known reputation as the nursery for Britain’s political elite, it’s no surprise to find two governmental grandees currently battling it out to become the university’s next chancellor. Frankly, though, with due respect to their accomplishments in public office, Peter Mandelson and William Hague probably wouldn’t even make it into the Premier League of Oxford’s political alumni as things stand. Being a former Labour Business Secretary or an erstwhile Leader of the Opposition is all very impressive, but there’s an awful lot of retired top dogs above them in the pecking order.
All this Oxford-educated political ball-fumbling must eventually be bad for the brand
The extraordinary fact is, 14 of the last 19 prime ministers have graduated from Oxford. With one exception (Gordon Brown, University of Edinburgh), every prime minister since Stanley Baldwin left office in 1937 who attended university has been Oxford-educated, including (as a graduate student) the latest incumbent, Keir Starmer. This means, of course, that there has been no Cambridge prime minister for the greater part of a century – and only one non-Oxbridge graduate in all of that time. (Four incumbents – Winston Churchill, James Callaghan, Neville Chamberlain and John Major – didn’t attend university at all.)
It’s quite a grip, then, that Oxford has on the keys to No. 10. I asked my researchers at the Sutton Trust, where until very recently I was executive chair, to crunch some numbers. And what they came back with was astonishing. I can share the findings here exclusively with The Spectator.
Assuming, reasonably enough, that Oxford and Cambridge produce similarly talented graduates, the chance of Oxford winning the prime ministerial Boat Race 14-0 is vanishingly unlikely. Indeed, you would expect a sequence like that to occur once every 530,000 years. So, whatever else the numbers are telling us, this domination isn’t down to chance.
Moreover, Oxford’s supremacy over Cambridge (and everywhere else) isn’t confined to the top table. It extends deep down into the government. In the current Houses of Parliament, 83 MPs attended Oxford compared to 48 who attended Cambridge – almost twice as many. Within the cabinet, the proportion of Oxford graduates tends to be much higher still. The only cabinet in recent history with a higher Cambridge quotient was the short-lived one picked by (Oxford graduate) Liz Truss. Enough said, perhaps.
So what is Oxford’s political dominion down to? How can one academic institution so completely come to dominate the political landscape, eclipsing even its closely paired rival? Is it simply that Oxford is more political than Cambridge? It does, after all, host its famous Philosophy, Politics and Economics course (PPE), long held (though with little obvious justification in recent years) as the gold-standard qualification of the capable politician. Or is that dominion largely self-perpetuating – a question of Oxford’s reputation for political product preceding it, year after year?
However we explain it, it stands to reason that a healthily diverse country would surely be best run by a healthily diverse political establishment. Yet the next best-represented higher educational establishment in the Commons presently is the London School of Economics (19 MPs), followed by Manchester University (17). Comparatively among our governors, Oxbridge exerts an almighty stranglehold – with Oxford very much in control of the thumbs.
On the question of reputation, though, if I were either Mandelson or Hague, would I really want this trend to continue under my chancellorship? The poor ratings of the last several Oxfordian residents of No. 10, and the early struggles of the latest through the door, must surely one day begin to be reflected in the ratings of the university itself. Or to put it another way, all this Oxford-educated political ball-fumbling must eventually be bad for the brand. There might even be a sigh of relief to find that neither Robert Jenrick or Kemi Badenoch are alums…
Maybe it would be better for the university, and for the country all round, if Oxford gently dialled down on the PPE-waving and went looking for a few more Nobel-winning scientists instead like Cambridge does. Those don’t tend to let the old place down.
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