WHY IS Oxford always top in politics? The figures are remarkable. Since 1945 there have been ten Prime Ministers, of whom seven were educated at Oxford. Oxford Prime Ministers have held office for 46 of the past 60 years. The three non-Oxford Prime Ministers of the period were Churchill, Callaghan and Major, of whom only Churchill was a great figure.
Margaret Thatcher is unquestionably the most radical and effective Prime Minister on the Conservatives side, and Attlee on the Labour side. Both were strongly influenced by their exposure to the culture of Oxford, as is shown in their memoirs. Oxford graduates were largely responsible for the revolution which converted the Labour Party from being a socialist trade union party into a middle-class social democratic party, the most important political development of the past 30 years.
This revolution in the nature of the Labour Party was foreshadowed in 1973 by Dick Taverne’s victory as a Democratic Labour candidate in the Lincoln by-election. He had caused the by-election by resigning his seat, and now sits as a Liberal Democrat in the House of Lords. He was educated at Oxford.
So were Roy Jenkins, Shirley Williams and Bill Rogers, three of the “gang of four” who set up the Social Democratic Party in 1981. Only David Owen went to Cambridge. Tony Blair, who finally converted the Labour Party to social democracy, also went to Oxford, and is in some ways characteristic of the postwar Oxford culture.
Indeed, the dominance of Oxford has been even more striking in the Labour Party than in the Conservative. Since the war Labour has won nine out of 17 general elections. All nine victories were won by Oxford men; in fact, Labour has never won an overall majority except under Oxford leadership. That is a surprising record for what was founded by the trade unions as the working-class party. Despite the historic Oxford loyalties of Gladstone and Asquith, the Liberal Democrats are perhaps the least Oxford of the three parties. Yet they were strongly influenced, both by their own Oxford Liberal leaders, Jo Grimond and Jeremy Thorpe, and by the Oxford leadership of the SDP, with which the Liberals eventually merged. Thorpe more or less invented the populist Liberalism which has gradually built up the number of Lib Dem seats. Roy Jenkins, who became Chancellor of Oxford University, founded and defined Liberal Democracy as a modern force.
This exceptional cultural dominance cannot be explained away. Cambridge has produced many leading politicians, particularly on the Conservative side, including that seminal figure, Rab Butler. Michael Howard himself is a Cambridge man. Yet there has been no Cambridge Prime Minister since Stanley Baldwin nearly 70 years ago.
The leading Oxford politicians have often been able to dominate both sides of the big arguments, as well as both the major parties. In the Bevanite split, Hugh Gaitskell defeated Aneurin Bevan, but Harold Wilson was Bevan’s chief supporter. In the Militant split of the early 1980s, Denis Healey fought Tony Benn for the soul of the Labour Party. Except for Bevan, all the main protagonists came from Oxford. On the issue of Europe, Roy Jenkins was Labour’s chief pro-European advocate and Ted Heath, as the Conservative Prime Minister, was the man who took Britain into Europe. Other Oxford figures, Tony Benn for Labour and Margaret Thatcher among Conservatives, led the Eurosceptic reaction.
I went up to Oxford in 1946, when many of the core political figures of the postwar epoch, including Margaret Thatcher, were students. Schoolboys such as myself, who had not yet done their National Service, mixed with decorated majors who had fought on the beaches of Normandy. We all belonged to a middle generation, younger than Gaitskell’s, older than Blair’s.
Last Thursday I spent a very pleasant evening with the Oxford University History Society discussing the impact of my Oxford contemporaries on British politics. Most of those present were either graduates or second-year students; the third year were revising for their final exams. The quality of the students seemed to me to be excellent, as, I hope, visitors would have found among the history students who were my contemporaries.
I was pleasantly surprised by the strength of the Oxford continuity. When as a student I was involved in entertaining older guests of Oxford societies — such as Leo Amery, Winston Churchill’s friend — we were interested in the experiences of a generation born in the 1870s, but expected them to welcome some scholarly questioning. That atmosphere has not changed. Indeed, I found the atmosphere of the Oxford of 2005 more familiar than I had the Oxford of the late 1960s, when the undergraduate generation was in revolt.
If the history society is anything to go by, Oxford is producing another generation trained to ask the serious questions. “Rigour” was the word I picked up as the undergraduate expression of praise for the Oxford teaching they admired most. Our discussion generated one central question: why had my Oxford generation become so focused on politics, taken the political life so seriously and given it so much time and energy? Why did Margaret Thatcher and Tony Benn choose to devote their lives to politics? Would the undergraduates of 2005 want to do the same? Would they respond in the same way, if they faced the same challenges, which had included the war and the aftermath of the Depression?
They thought not. I thought they would. I liked the seriousness of their approach, of their scholarly concern for reaching historic truth. I also liked their open recognition that they are privileged to be taught by what one of them called: “The best history faculty in the best university in the world.” No lack of respect there. Oxford beats Cambridge at politics, as it clearly does, because Oxford is primarily a school of humanities and Cambridge of natural sciences. Politics, like the study of history, is more of an art than a science.
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