The United Kingdom has had 15 prime ministers since the end of World War II. Three (Winston Churchill, James Callaghan, and John Major) did not go to college. One (Gordon Brown) studied history at Edinburgh University. The other 11 all went to Oxford.
This extraordinary monopoly sets Britain apart from the rest of the Anglosphere and, indeed, from most of the developed world. You meet a lot of Americans in senior positions who have been educated at places you have never heard of. A dozen U.S. schools can legitimately claim to be at the top of the tree. But in Britain, two universities have a cachet that the others lack — one of those two (Cambridge) doesn’t do politics, at least not in the way that its rival does.
But what if Oxford teaches the wrong things? What if the tutorial system, a unique institution that gives every undergraduate at least an hour a week one-on-one with a brilliant professor, elevates style over substance, encouraging students to make clever, polished, counterintuitive arguments rather than properly mastering their subjects?
If so, the impact on how we are governed must be vast, for as Simon Kuper, a Financial Times journalist (and Oxford graduate) points out, “it’s possible to tell the story of British politics in the last twenty-five years almost without reference to any other university.”
Kuper has written a book whose argument is contained in its title: Chums: How a Tiny Caste of Oxford Tories Took Over the UK. I play a part in his thesis, which goes roughly like this: In the late 1980s, a certain kind of privately educated young man flourished at Oxford because it rewarded the attributes he already had, above all confidence and rhetorical ability. Boris Johnson is Kuper’s main focus, but he devotes space to other senior Conservatives, including Michael Gove, the driving force behind much of the government’s policy, and Jacob Rees-Mogg, the gloriously traditional figure who, even as an undergraduate, was never seen except in a double-breasted suit. These men wanted a cause. They were, Kuper argues, haunted by the sense that Britain’s best days had passed, and they wished they had been old enough to have been tested in a war or some other mighty event.
Then, along came Daniel Hannan (that would be yours truly), the ur-Euroskeptic. He argued for what we now call Brexit decades before anyone else. Hannan, argues Kuper, gave these men, by now rising Conservative politicians, the great cause they had yearned for because they didn’t want Brussels muscling in on what they saw as their birthright: the ruling of Britain. Twenty-five years later, the U.K. duly voted to leave the European Union. But because Oxford was really only good at turning out plausible practitioners of sophistry, they had no idea what to do with their victory.
There are, as the author frankly concedes, several holes in this narrative. For one thing, the main characters were not contemporaries. For another, the majority of Oxford graduates of our generation voted to stay in the EU. (One of my constituents brilliantly characterized that campaign as “the working classes against the smirking classes.”)
The Remain campaign was led by David Cameron, another late-1980s Oxford man. And the mistakes that followed the vote in 2016 were almost all the responsibility of yet another pro-EU Oxford student of that era, Theresa May, Cameron’s surprise successor. It was, above all, her loss of a parliamentary majority in 2017 that destroyed Britain’s negotiating position because it brought in a majority of members of Parliament who made clear that they would not leave except on terms that Brussels liked.
Yet I keep coming back to Kuper’s central idea — namely that Oxford takes clever young people and teaches them to be superficial. I think there is something in this. Then again, is the ability to master a brief quickly — to get a rough sense of what is going on, to delegate — such a disadvantage in politics? Would we necessarily be better off if our leaders were, say, engineers?
Britain, after all, has not done so badly since 1945. We have remained a functioning democracy in which personal freedoms are respected. We have not lost any wars. Our standard of living has risen steadily. Many people from other countries want to live here — the line to get in is a lot longer than the line to get out.
In any event, I suspect the era of Oxbridge dominance is coming to an end. One of the oddities we have imported from the United States is a tendency toward quota filling rather than merit in college admissions. In consequence, those British kids who are lucky enough to be both rich and clever are decamping en masse to Ivy League campuses. That is where tomorrow’s oligarchy is forming.
