The idea that those who can should pay for their university education has taken more than a quarter of a century to become full government policy. Even now, in the week in which Lord Browne reports, people hate it. It is the first issue that I can remember where I came up against the ability of the well-off to defend themselves. In 1984, Sir Keith Joseph, then Secretary of State for Education, sprang the idea that parental contributions to their children’s university fees should increase, with the better-off paying more than the poorer. I was in my first few months of editing The Spectator, and the paper argued that this was a reasonable idea which should lead, in time, to universities being more independent of government. Auberon Waugh, then our weekly columnist, thought differently. ‘Perhaps I should declare an interest,’ he wrote. ‘Next year, Sir Keith’s reforms will cost me £4,000. This will make me conspicuously worse off than I was under socialism. It is no good pretending that it is the principle of the thing which interests me. It is the direct assault on my personal comforts, what the lower classes have been trained to call their living standards: it is nothing less than the spectre of wine in boxes which makes me bay for the blood of this class traitor.’ Waugh allowed that Sir Keith might be motivated by ‘a simple and honourable hatred of students and youngsters generally’, but that ‘his joke has misfired’: ‘Its effects do not fall on these loathsome students and youngsters, but on their honourable, decent, hard-working parents.’ Tory backbenchers took the same view, if not in the same words, and Sir Keith backed down.
Disagreeing with his editor, Bron Waugh said: ‘Charles Moore wrote…about “the anger of Mr Waugh’s class”…The truth is that he has rather longer to wait.’
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