Oxford, said Matthew Arnold, was “the home of lost causes and forsaken beliefs”. Now Cambridge is giving it a run for its money.
Oxford’s chancellor election last year was widely billed as a two-horse race between the elder statesmen Lords Mandelson and Hague; the latter in the end won handily. They both had their hang-ups and lost causes too, of course, but they were also men who matter.
Fortunately for Gina Miller it is customary for Cambridge chancellors to be lacking in political acumen
Does Gina Miller – who in her latest attention-seeking stunt wants to be the next chancellor of Cambridge University – matter? She did once.
“I was the most hated woman in Britain”, Miller said in 2018; but things move swiftly, and the passions which attended the great Brexit debates of the late 2010s have largely faded away. Those passions, of course, brought Miller admirers, as well as haters. She must hope that the admirers outnumber the haters among Cambridge graduates.
Miller, in case you need reminding, became a household name because she successfully challenged the government twice: first in 2017, when Theresa May planned to invoke Article 50 without parliamentary approval, and second in 2019, when Boris Johnson and Dominic Cummings plotted to run down the clock on the Brexit negotiations by advising the Queen to prorogue parliament.
“Miller I” and “Miller II” were thorns in Tory sides, and secured a place in constitutional law textbooks for years to come. In both cases, Miller could, however tenuously, claim a moral high-ground. The rallying-cry for Brexit had supposedly always had something to do with “parliamentary sovereignty” – and there she stood, defending that sovereignty from an enemy far older than “Brussels”, the crown prerogative. But she rather gave the game away over her opposition to Brexit. She might have won both cases at the Supreme Court, but in the end Brexit “got done” anyway – and Miller, it appears, has been unsure what to do with herself ever since.
Some time between Millers I and II, she published a memoir, ghostwritten by Elizabeth Day, entitled Rise: Life Lessons in Speaking Out, Standing Tall, and Leading the Way.
“A heroine for our times”, enthused the Labour peer Helena Kennedy on the front-cover; “unapologetic and impatient to make a difference”, gushed Afua Hirsch.
Around the same time, rumours began to swirl that she had ambitions to lead the Liberal Democrats (Sir Vince Cable, you will recall, was getting on a bit). At their 2018 conference, she was eager to emphasise that “I am not addressing you as a leader in waiting”; so it was that Jo Swinson took charge instead.
Miller had no political talent to speak of, and her litigious touch was fading too. In an article for the Sunday Times, Rod Liddle referred to Miller, alongside Polly Toynbee, Swinson, and “various pompous Scottish remoaner lawyers”, as “monkeys”. Miller claimed to the Independent Press Standards Organisation that this was a “pejorative reference to her race”; her complaint was not upheld.
In an interview in January 2020 – appearing in the same issue of the Guardian as an article bearing the ominous title “First death from China mystery illness outbreak” – we find Miller casting about for a new purpose in post-Brexit Britain. Perhaps she would redirect her political momentum towards a codified constitution, or electoral reform; or she would go back to her “True and Fair Campaign” for transparency in the City? She split the difference.
In 2022, the “True and Fair Party” was born. Almost nobody showed up to its launch. Miller stood as her party’s candidate in Epsom and Ewell in last year’s election. She came sixth out of seven candidates, winning just 1.5 per cent of the vote, and losing her deposit: nationally, the True and Fair Party got fewer votes than the “Lincolnshire Independents”, the “Swale Independents”, the “Hampshire Independents”, and the “Communist Party of Great Britain”.
Fortunately for Miller it is customary for Cambridge chancellors to be lacking in political acumen. Chancellor George Villiers, the 1st Duke of Buckingham, came to a sticky end; the 3rd Duke of Grafton got to enjoy Cambridge as something of a sinecure following a failed stint in Downing Street. Chancellor Arthur Balfour is today so unloved at his alma mater that his portrait at Trinity College could be slashed by a Palestine activist, seemingly without any of the authorities batting an eyelid. Meanwhile, the current chancellor, Lord Sainsbury of Turville, spaffed £8 million on the Liberal Democrats in 2019, at a cost of over £700,000 per seat won. He has already made Cambridge a comfortable home for the lost causes and forsaken beliefs of the late 2010s.
If Miller’s political outlook is stuck in the era of Brexit high drama, her campaign to become chancellor is thick with the language of what came after, of 2020. “Representation matters”, she told Cambridge’s student newspaper Varsity, before advertising her “lifelong work promoting diversity, equity, fairness and justice” (“equity”, incidentally, is a creeping Americanism; the “E” in Britain’s “EDI”, at Cambridge as elsewhere, stands for “equality”).
She makes great hay, too, out of the fact that she would be the first female chancellor in Cambridge’s eight-hundred-year-long history. Similar appeals fell flat in Oxford’s recent election, which after much frivolity and fanfare returned a stale, pale, and male Tory peer.
Mohamed El-Erian, the president of Cambridge’s Queens’ College, threatens to keep the glass ceiling intact; he enjoys the support of Queens’ alumni Stephen Fry and Emily Maitlis, and cross-party backing from Andrew Mitchell and Gordon Brown. El-Erian also seems to grasp what the job is actually about: fundraising. Also in the running are Lord Browne, the former CEO of BP, whose bid rubs against the green sensibilities of the student body; and one Professor Wyn Evans, of Cambridge’s Institute of Astronomy, who has launched a policy-heavy campaign focused on workplace bullying and harassment.
A bigger threat to Miller looms on the horizon. Simon, Lord McDonald, the master of Christ’s College, is the man who did what Miller would have loved to do but never could; he brought about the downfall of Boris Johnson. And McDonald, though not condescending to stand himself, has thrown his weight behind his favoured candidate, Sandi Toksvig. Toksvig stood for the Oxford chancellorship over twenty years ago, and was eliminated in the first round of voting; she has had to settle for paltry Portsmouth in the meantime.
Toksvig has Miller’s progressive bona fides in spades. Like Miller, she felt nothing but disdain towards “a sexist Boris Johnson Brexit”. Like Miller, she once had a failed political party; the Women’s Equality Party even managed to wangle a couple of council seats, before cannibalising itself over “trans”. Not only would Toksvig be the first woman chancellor of Cambridge; she would also be the first lesbian. And Toksvig has one big advantage that Miller lacks, and which will doubtless endear herself to the narrow electorate, who already like her for QI and Bake Off: she actually went to Cambridge.
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