The Oxford manner: why does our oldest university dominate the premiership?
Since the Second World War, 13 of 17 prime ministers have been educated at Oxford; how do we explain that and what have been the effects?
There has been a great deal of comment this week, with the appointment of Rishi Sunak as prime minister and first lord of the Treasury, on the domination of Oxbridge—Oxford especially—over leading British politicians. The statistics are indeed remarkable: of the 17 prime ministers who have held office since the Second World War, 13 of them have been Oxford men and women. (The others are accounted for by Sandhurst, Edinburgh and no tertiary education in two cases.) No Cambridge graduate has led the government since Stanley Baldwin (1923-24, 1924-29, 1935-57).
This is striking. While non-Oxbridge graduates have filled cabinet positions more and more, the premiership has been dominated by Oxonians. In one sense, this should be heartening, as Oxford is currently rated the best university in the world; at the same time, England’s oldest university takes only 26,000 students each year, from all over the world, while the annual enrolment in the UK is around 425,000. There is clearly a bias towards the academic elite in those who rise to the very top of British politics.
Myriad reasons can be cited for this predominance. Oxford certainly represents a self-selecting group of well educated and high-performing students, but it can also be argued that Oxford draws disproportionately from fee-paying schools and both favours and develops those with some of the essential characteristics of political success, such as self-confidence and experience of public speaking. The Oxford Union, the debating society which was founded in 1823, helps ambitious students hone their skills of argumentation and critical thinking as well as winning style and manner.
Some have suggested that Oxford is a breeding ground for a particular sort of success, based on quick wit and an ability to cram facts into the brain for a short time. Boris Johnson was perhaps the epitome of this habit, the perfect “essay crisis” prime minister; he has formidable recall but relies too much on his native intelligence and fluency, making his approach superficial and showy. When he was an Eton schoolboy, Johnson took the part of Richard II in Shakespeare’s eponymous play. It is a very substantial role, requiring the performer to memorise 758 lines and to be on stage for most of the two-and-a-half hours of the play’s running time. But Johnson was unwilling to make the effort to learn his part, instead placing scraps of paper around the stage from which he could read his lines. The rest he improvised, smoothing his performance was making jokes.
Johnson’s lack of application did not go down well. While his father, Stanley, thought his son’s performance was “a hoot”, the other pupils involved in the production were angry and disappointed, while the headmaster, Eric Anderson (who had taught the current King at Gordonstoun and Tony Blair at Fettes), was enraged. The incident was said to be a major factor in Johnson’s failure to become School Captain at Eton in his final year.
This is representative of what people now regard as the “Oxford approach”. It is a long way from Oscar Wilde’s definition of the “Oxford manner”, though not unrelated to it; Wilde told his young lover, Lord Alfred Douglas, that he minded not at all that he had not finished his degree after his time at Magdalen College, Oxford, or that he had not read this or that book. What Wilde did mind was that Bosie had not acquired the “Oxford manner”, which he defined as “the ability to play gracefully with ideas”. While Wilde was not thinking as explicitly of the laziness and superficiality that Johnson would display, he nevertheless placed a premium on style and the outward show of erudition. The lineage which joins the Oxford manner and the essay crisis approach is obvious.
It is also true to say that modern politics does not provide an obvious platform for “playing gracefully with ideas”. Speeches to party conferences are now offerings of memorable sound bites and brief summations of approach, while debate in the House of Commons equally rewards quick thinking, mischievousness and the curation of the catchy phrase. Rarely now would we expect to see a prime minister give a dense, textured policy speech to a think tank or public audience, and the short attention span of the electorate for what politicians say make this a fruitless exercise. It is frustrating that we do not have leaders who can discuss philosophy and ideology in depth, or indeed an opportunity for them to do so, but, to use the persistent phrase popularised by (I think) Nick Clegg, we are where we are.
Not all of the Oxford prime ministers since 1945 have been brilliant minds. Anthony Eden took a first-class degree in Oriental Languages (in his case, Persian and Arabic) at Christ Church, but this was a subject which required feats of memory and role learning. Although Eden was a knowledgeable collector and connoisseur of art, he never demonstrated any inclination towards big ideas or the high ground of ideological debate. Equally, Margaret Thatcher studied chemistry, which developed her forensic and analytical faculties but left no room for theorising. In the same category we might put Theresa May, who read geography at St Hugh’s.
Clement Attlee, the secular saint of the traditional Labour Party, read history, and was diligent and clever, but, again, conducted his studies in a rather quotidian and workmanlike way. One tutor wrote that he was a “level-headed, industrious, dependable man with no brilliance of style”.
Some premiers, however, were much more the type which Wilde had in mind. Harold Macmillan was a bright, sensitive young man when he went up to Oxford in 1912. He had missed considerable chunks of his schooling at Eton due to ill health, but won an exhibition to Balliol College, that giant of Victorian intellectualism. He threw himself into Oxford life, academically and socially, but at the end of his second year the First World War broke out and he volunteered for the Army, joining the King’s Royal Rifle Corps before transferring to the Grenadier Guards after a few months.
Macmillan had an eventful war. He was wounded three times, mentioned in despatches, and spent the last two years of the conflict in hospital. When he left the Army, he decided not to return to Oxford to complete his studies. In later years, he would tell people jokingly that he had been “sent down by the Kaiser”. Nevertheless, he retained a hard-wired intellectualism, and after his first election to Parliament in 1924 displayed a passionate interest in ideas, becoming for a while a radical centrist, sometimes sailing closer to the Labour Party than the ideology of his own Conservatives.
As prime minister between 1957 and 1963, he was a leader with a grand vision of the world. It was a pivotal time for the UK. He assumed office after Eden resigned in the wake of the Suez crisis, and in foreign policy terms the country was adrift and unsure of its global role. It was in this period that the former US secretary of state, Dean Acheson, remarked acidly that Britain had “lost an empire and not yet found a role”, adding that the country was “about played out”. These criticisms stung, not just because they came from an old ally, but because they had a degree of truth. Decolonisation was well underway, a process Macmillan would accelerate, and the UK remained ambivalent towards growing measures of European unity, the Treaty of Rome having established the European Economic Community a few months after Macmillan became prime minister.
This drift was acutely felt by Macmillan. He was sure that Britain’s role as a colonial power was in its death throes, and, addressing the South African Parliament in 1960, he made his famous “Winds of Change” speech, in which he emphasised that Britain would not oppose or seek to delay the independence of any of its colonies. The same year, he decided that the UK should seek to join the EEC, though this policy would be controversial and fizzled out when President de Gaulle vetoed the application in 1963. But throughout his premiership, Macmillan was thinking in great sweeps, from Britain’s international role to the development of the economy and the maintenance of prosperity.
Harold Wilson, who carried the Labour Party to a narrow victory in the general election of 1964, was a different type of intellectual. After winning a first in PPE at Jesus College, Oxford, he became one of the youngest dons of the century, lecturing in economic history at New College and becoming a research fellow at University College. His degree papers had been exceptional, with alphas on every paper, and his memory and reasoning skills were outstanding. But Roy Jenkins, who served in his cabinets before becoming his biographer, noted “he lacked originality. What he was superb at was the quick assimilation of knowledge, combined with an ability to keep it ordered in his mind and to present it lucidly in a form welcome to his examiners.”
Wilson was clever, perhaps the cleverest prime minister of the post-War age. He, like Macmillan, had a vision, of modernising Britain after 13 years of Conservative government and kick-starting her industry through technology. At the 1963 Labour Party conference, he gave a memorable address which became known as the “White heat of technology” speech, though he did not quite use that phrase. But it summed up his radical and technocratic approach to creating a “new Britain”, shaking off the finals dust of the immediate post-War years and transforming the economy.
Although Wilson presided over the Swinging Sixties and a widespread liberalisation of social mores and the legislation supporting them, in many aspects he was a spectator. His vision, while it caught the imagination—think, for example, of the Mini Cooper, the high-tech but eventually abandoned TSR-2 strike aircraft, or the Post Office Tower in Fitzrovia, opened by postmaster-general Anthony Wedgwood Benn and legendary holiday camp pioneer Billy Butlin—was never more than a series of high-profile stunts. Wilson was unlucky, failing to heal the running sore of Rhodesia’s unilateral declaration of independence in 1965 and forced to devalue the pound in 1967. Moreover he was an inveterate political intriguer, seeing threats in every corner, and wasted much time and energy managing the personalities of his government.
Our recent prime ministers have been a mixed bag. Tony Blair had never been academic: he had taken a second-class degree in jurisprudence from St John’s before going on to be a mediocre barrister, essentially treading water until he was elected to Parliament, which came in 1983. He was, perhaps, not even an ideas man but had a superlative sense of “feeling”, understanding instinctively that the British public wanted something new from a Labour Party battered by years in opposition to Margaret Thatcher. He grasped that people wanted better public services but also wanted to be able to make their own success, and looked askance at the apparent disdain of socialism for individual prosperity. Aided by Peter Mandelson, the real father of New Labour and one of the century’s most gifted political operators, he took the party to its landslide victory in 1997 and kept it in power, almost destroying the exhausted Conservative Party in the process.
Blair’s partner, rival and eventual successor, Gordon Brown, was almost the polar opposite. An intense high achiever, he had been hothoused through school and the University of Edinburgh, graduating with a first in history before beginning research on a thesis entitled The Labour Party and Political Change in Scotland 1918–1929 (it was inimitably Brown). Brown remains the only prime minister to hold a doctoral degree, and was fiercely intelligent and driven. He felt the deep roots of the Labour movement, in a way Blair neither could nor would, and wrote a biography of the Independent Labour Party legend Jimmy Maxton. Brown spent 10 years as chancellor under Blair, growing ever more impatient to succeed him in the top job, but when he eventually reached 10 Downing Street, he seemed oddly lost for direction.
Brown was the absolute fulfilment of Tacitus’s judgement on Galba: omnium consensu capax imperii nisi imperasset. When he finally became prime minister, although he began with high-sounding words about “meeting the concerns and aspirations of our whole country” and his declaration that “I am convinced that their is no weakness in Britain today that cannot be overcome by the strengths of the British people”, his initial policy decision seemed muted. He rescinded the authority which Blair’s political advisers had enjoyed to issue instructions to civil servants, and announced a wide-ranging programme of constitutional reform, a sure sign of a political geek who does not grasp the broader picture.
The administration would be overshadowed by the financial crisis which began to unfurl in 2007 with the emergency at Northern Rock. It became a worldwide phenomenon, and Brown was well placed to take a lead in addressing the problems, given his huge experience at the Treasury and his immense grasp of detail. The history books will judge him kindly for his fire-fighting, but an impressive defence will never outshine a buccaneering attack, and his premiership will forever be regarded as the fag-end of New Labour, sinking to a narrow defeat in 2010 and Brown’s resignation as leader.
David Cameron, who succeeded Brown in 2010 after agreeing a coalition deal with the Liberal Democrats, was, in some ways, the Macmillan of his age. He was discreetly upper-class, his father a stockbroker and his mother descended from minor but ancient aristocracy, and he had sailed through Eton before going up to Brasenose College, Oxford, to read PPE. His tutor, Vernon Bogdanor, rated him as “one of the ablest” students he had taught, and, as in every facet of his life so far, Cameron seemed to cruise to success. He graduated with a first in 1988 and then joined the Conservative Research Department.
In manner and thought Cameron was intensely laid back. He would have been deemed too lucky in life, perhaps, had it not been for the birth in 2002 of his son Ivan, who suffered from severe disabilities. Caring for the young boy, who died in 2009, marked Cameron and gave him a personal insight into the value of the NHS. But his course to the top was unruffled: elected MP for Witney in 2001, he snatched the Conservative leadership from favourite David Davis in 2005, and scrambled his way into Downing Street in 2010. He was 43.
If Cameron had a vision, it was a comfortably diffuse one. He had spoken since his election as leader of “compassionate Conservatism”, and he performed wonders in detoxifying his party’s brand, still tainted after so long in opposition. He encouraged the electorate not merely to trust the Conservatives again, but to see them as caring and socially aware, not the hard-nosed number-crunchers of Thatcherite caricature. Even though he and his chancellor, George Osborne, had to introduce stiff cuts in public expenditure after 2010, Cameron always seemed equal to the challenge, operating well within his intellectual limits and managing to maintain a healthy degree of separation between his political and family lives. He slept well and processed paperwork quickly, and enjoyed the easy, effortless charm of the well-schooled aristocrat. The description of Macmillan which Lord Hailsham had coined in 1958, “unflappable”, seemed to apply equally to Cameron.
His premiership will forever be marked by the decision to call a referendum on Britain’s membership of the EU, and failing to win the campaign for the Remain side. He did not expect to lose, but took defeat with grace and equanimity. Did he have the Oxford manner? Certainly he was the most charming premier apart from Blair, and he demonstrated an agreeable ability to laugh at himself and to see himself as others saw him, to paraphrase Burns. There was, however, a lurking suspicion that he was too detached, too calm, not bringing his intellectual A game to every problem. But his geniality made him a masterful manager of the coalition government, which ran to its full five-year term.
The new prime minister is another PPE graduate (Lincoln College, Oxford). He is young and personable, like Blair and Cameron had been. But he is much less well-known than his predecessors, his political fame resting principally on his two years as an open-handed chancellor during the Covid-19 pandemic. He is the wealthiest prime minister on record, partly due to his wife’s inheritance from her billionaire father, and the first to come from the hedge fund sector.
Sunak is assumed to be clever. A first-class degree and substantial success in finance suggest that to be true. But he is also—and this has not been much remarked upon—the first prime minister to hold an MBA, in his case from Stanford University in California, where he was a Fulbright scholar. MBAs are still potent currency in the commercial sector, though their reputation depends heavily on the university which awards them. Stanford is regularly assessed as the best programme in the world, and it should not be dismissed as a small detail of Sunak’s CV, especially as his political experience is modest.
How might we expect Sunak to apply the lessons he learned in California? A strong grasp of economics and finance is a given, and he should have a solid basis in accounting, investment finance and corporate finance. These skills, however, will have played more to his previous post as chancellor of the exchequer. Now that he is prime minister, he will have to look to some of the other areas which MBAs cover, such as organisational design, management science and project management, as well as risk management and strategy. MBAs are designed for the elite of corporate leadership, and in some institutions are virtually a sine qua non of promotion to senior management. Whether George W. Bush’s MBA, from the prestigious Harvard Business School, assisted his presidency is open to question.
Political observers have a right to expect high standards of Rishi Sunak. He is the first prime minister not to have served in the military who has really had any kind of formal training in leadership, let alone systems and organisations. Politics is, of course, not like business, but his qualification ought to make Sunak less prone to administrative errors and misjudgements. He should be able to create and lead a strong team within Downing Street itself, something Boris Johnson was never able to do.
The critical chief of staff role, which has evolved since it was created for Jonathan Powell in 1997 and is now a lynchpin of a successful operational centre, is likely to go to Liam Booth-Smith, a long-term acolyte of Sunak’s who ran the joint Number 10 and Number 11 economic unit. He is bright and experienced, and even Dominic Cummings rates his abilities. Another senior position, perhaps head of the policy unit, will go to Eleanor Shawcross-Wolfson, a Treasury aide who was George Osborne’s deputy chief of staff.
Sunak’s Oxford manner is secondary at the moment. The vision thing will need to come, and he must create a picture of the Britain he aspires to before the general election, but for the next weeks and months he must simply get a grip on Whitehall. Johnson’s indolence prevented him from doing this and Truss was simply not in post long enough.
It will be interesting to see how this new style of leadership works. Sunak may be a standard-issue Oxford PPE graduate, but his advanced degree in management and experience of California should give him an unprecedented skill set. Perhaps we will begin to see some notion of desirable qualifications for the premiership begin to emerge, some codification of the areas of responsibility which need to be tackled. It all seems a far cry from Macmillan’s love of Jane Austen and his prelapsarian Oxford, the last summer of the Edwardian age.