OXFORD, England — Whoever is elected the next leader of the British Conservative Party and prime minister, two things are all but certain: First, their chief duty will be to address the country’s crippling Brexit crisis, and second, they will have been educated at Oxford University.
The three leaders in the first ballot of voting by Conservative Members of Parliament — Boris Johnson, 54, Jeremy Hunt, 52, and Michael Gove, 51 — were contemporaries at the university in the mid-1980s. Another fellow student at the time was David Cameron, Theresa May’s predecessor.
In all, 7 of the 10 who qualified for the first round of balloting attended Oxford University.
They will follow May, Cameron, Tony Blair, and Margaret Thatcher as Oxonian premiers. In all, 27 British prime ministers have been educated at Oxford. The runner-up, Cambridge, can manage only 14.
Ed Miliband, 49, Labour Party leader before Jeremy Corbyn, was at Oxford, along with his elder brother David, 53, a contemporary of Johnson, Hunt, and Gove.
Johnson, who was at Balliol College, was president of the Oxford Union debating society in 1986, and Gove, from the less fashionable Lady Margaret Hall, followed in his footsteps in 1988. Hunt, the son of Adm. Sir Nicholas Hunt, who was at Magdalen College, was much lower-key.
Danny Dorling, professor of geography at Oxford University, said this year’s race might represent a high-water mark for its stranglehold on No. 10, reflecting the particular circumstances of the Conservative Party 30 years ago.
“The reason why we are unlikely to see this again is that Oxford in the 1980s and 1990s contained an unusual concentration of teenage undergraduate men who thought that Mrs. Thatcher was special,” he said. “Today, there is no evidence of such a similar concentration emerging again. The ‘young Conservatives’ of the 1980s and 1990s are a thing of the past.”
British voters have been reminded of this period with excerpts from a new biography of Gove.
It recounts a story published in Cherwell, the university newspaper, under the headline “Union hacks in five-in-a-bed romp shocker.” It tells how in 1988, a young Gove ended up spending the night with two male and two female friends from the Oxford Union debating club. Gove explained it away by saying he was seeking comfort after being attacked.
The exploits capture a time when young men educated at some of the country’s most expensive schools arrived to plot their way to the top among the university’s narrow streets and high-walled, medieval colleges.
Johnson was famously a member of the Bullingdon Club, an elite all-male dining set who became known for their raucous behavior and reputation for vandalizing restaurants.
“It is extraordinary that in 2019 such a small, exclusive bunch of white men is going to give us our next prime minister,” said an Oxford graduate of the 1990s. “It’s like we are going backwards.”
An Oxford graduate of the 1980s who knew Johnson, Gove, and the Miliband brothers said: “Even at the time, it was clear Boris was born to rule. He was a slimmer and better groomed version of today, dating Allegra Mostyn-Owen, whom he later married, who had been on the cover of Vogue.”
“The first time I met David Miliband, I was told, ‘This is David Miliband, he’s going to be a Labour MP.’ Gove would speak at the Union wearing black tie and a kilt. This was the era of Brideshead Revisited, when Oxford had a sense of retro cool,” the person said.
Oxford, like Cambridge, attracts the most able students and offers small tutorial groups where young men and women must discuss and defend their ideas under intense scrutiny.
But analysts point to two major factors to explain the Oxford’s particular pre-eminence among prime ministers: its Politics, Philosophy, and Economics degree (earned by Hunt, for example) and the Oxford Union debating society.
The video for prospective P.P.E. students makes no secret of its connections with power. It opens with a loving shot of the famous black door to No. 10 Downing St.
“Former students have often gone on to work for the government, in the Treasury, working on various aspects of economic policy, in central banks, in financial services industry,” says one tutor.
But it is spending time amid the cut and thrust of the world-renowned union that is most often the feature of future and wannabe prime ministers.
Johnson was president of the union in 1986, followed a few months later by Gove. Benazir Bhutto, the future prime minister of Pakistan, held the post in the 1970s.
Lord Heseltine, who joined the union on his first day at Oxford in 1951 as part of his long-planned but ultimately unsuccessful campaign to become prime minister, said it was a crucial opportunity to meet politicians and forge networks.
“There are hugely impressive opportunities for undergraduates to meet people at the top of their tree, and that includes household names in the world of politics,” he told the BBC.
And Oxford runs more than just Britain. Details published last month by the Foreign Office reveal that 11 world leaders attended the university, including Imran Khan, prime minister of Pakistan, Viktor Orbán, who spent three months studying political science at Pembroke College before returning to Hungary at the start of the Velvet Revolution, and Aung San Suu Kyi of Burma, who studied P.P.E. at St. Hugh’s College from 1964 to 1967.
