Oxford’s PPE elite versus Andy Burnham

Is the reign of Oxford PPE graduates over political parties, Whitehall, Westminster think tanks and the posh media coming to an end? Politics, philosophy and economics as taught at Oxford have dominated British public life for at least two generations.

But the new Prime Minister, Chancellor of the Exchequer, Defence and Northern Ireland Secretaries all went to Cambridge.

While ten of our post-war prime ministers were Oxford  graduates, Andy Burnham is the first Cambridge man since Baldwin to be PM. However, he has done no special favours to fellow Cambridge graduates in his appointments. Rachel Blake, the excellent MP for the Cities of London and Westminster, has been removed as Economic Secretary at the Treasury— a post to which she was appointed just two months ago. She not only went to Corpus Christi, Cambridge, but is a Mancunian too.

More importantly, Andy Burnham is the first PM to have read English at university. As President of France (1981-95), François Mitterrand always told his ministers to read a few pages of a great French novel before going to sleep. A good novel teaches you more about politics than all the red boxes in the world.

Churchill was a duffer at school and barely survived the not very challenging academic exams at Sandhurst. But as a subaltern patrolling the frontiers of British imperialism in India, Afghanistan, and South Africa he got his mother to send out a crate of books every month to immerse himself in English literature. He learnt huge numbers of poems by heart.

In many ways a study of and real understanding of the nation through its writings – histories, novels, poems – is a much better preparation for national political leadership than the PPE course at Oxford, now widely imitated elsewhere.

Nicknamed “Modern Greats” (“Greats” being Oxford’s name for classical literature and philosophy), with one of its early students being Harold Wilson, PPE was always a vanity project. Oxford dons pretended that you could teach philosophy and economics – each normally 3/4 year courses in other world-class universities — as well as politics (really a branch of history), in just three years.

Despite the new light blue boss, Oxford graduates need not worry. Ten of Burnham’s cabinet ministers went to Oxford, five to non-Oxbridge universities outside of London, and just one to the LSE — though none to UCL (University College London) which used to be a training school for Labour politicians. Two went to Edinburgh, one is a Stanford MBA, and the Chief Whip was brought up in Paris.

Burnham speaks working Spanish and his wife Frankie, his Cambridge University sweetheart, has fluent French as well as her Dutch mother-tongue. The young Burnham couple would have spent time with parents-in-law in the Netherlands and the new PM has always given the impression he is relaxed about Britain being a European nation — in contrast to the monolingual political and media class of the Brexit era.

But Labour is no longer a party of workers. Angela Rayner, who went out to work as a teenager and never took a degree, is the only member of the cabinet whom John Prescott, James Callaghan, Aneurin Bevan or Ernest Bevin would recognise as coming from the working class Labour Party of the last century.

There are no great orators in the new Labour lineup. The new ministers speak routine English on TV and radio, with no memorable metaphors or words that stick in the mind. Most still speak PPE. In contrast to Starmer, who spoke lawyer, Burnham himself speaks human.

Far better for young people who aim to go into politics to do as our new Prime Minister did. Like him, you should immerse yourself in the words, metaphors, tales, hopes and failures as well as achievements and poetry of the nation you may lead one day.

Denis MacShane read history at Oxford and was Minister of Europe under Blair. He wrote the first English biography of Francois Mitterrand in 1982.

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