How to teach contemporary history in a coronavirus crisis

All universities have struggled during coronavirus to give students the education they have the right to expect, and there have been many heroic examples of good practice, but I believe my colleagues at King’s College London have done a particularly fine job. Before the November lockdown, Jon Davis, director of the Strand Group at King’s, ran hybrid classes, with some of the students attending in person, in a socially distanced hall, and the rest joining online. 

“We decided that our offering really was one where it would be better in person,” said Davis, “because of the very special guests that have always been important to our approach.” Since then, the courses have had to go online only, and when the new term starts on 15 January, that will continue, including for the “Blair Years” class that I co-teach with Davis and Michelle Clement. But we hope to move back to mixed teaching, online and in-person, as soon as possible. 

The result is that, even during this crisis, Davis and his colleagues have continued to build a remarkable centre of excellence in the teaching of contemporary history. It started with the Blair Years course on New Labour in government, but has expanded to include a postgraduate module on prime ministers and cabinet, run in conjunction with 10 Downing Street; a similar module for undergraduates; a class taught by Jack Brown on the history of London’s government including directly elected mayors since 2000; and a course on British economic history since the war, run in conjunction with the Treasury. 

This last class posed a particular logistical challenge last term. It is a popular course, with 70 students signed up – which may be some kind of record for a postgraduate module – including 21 serving Treasury officials who joined as part of their annual training. So Ed Balls, the former shadow chancellor and a visiting professor at King’s who has just been promoted to an actual professor, joined Davis on stage in the main auditorium in Bush House, wearing a visor. 

The auditorium usually seats 400, but distancing rules reduce capacity by nine tenths, so 39 people were allowed in the hall. Davis was also joined on stage by Clare Lombardelli, the senior Treasury civil servant who is currently the government’s chief economic adviser as well as being a visiting professor. Nick Macpherson, another of our visiting professors and a former Treasury permanent secretary who co-teaches the course, took part via the giant screen. Of the class of 70, 20 had opted to be online only, so half of the 50 who wanted to be in the classroom were allowed in on alternate weeks. 

It is a wonderful course. It was oversubscribed: potential students among Treasury civil servants were asked to submit a one-line “business case” for why they should do it. This year, though, the cap on their numbers has been lifted. I attended the last class of last year, at which Sajid Javid, the former chancellor, was the special guest. By then, it had had to go online only – in the Microsoft Teams format with which most of us are now wearily familiar – and yet the quality of the class shone through. Javid was a surprisingly tough teacher, for the young civil servants in the class especially: he recounted two occasions on which he had felt the advice he received from his officials was wrong, and on which he had had to insist on a different policy – on the government issuing sharia-compliant bonds; and on freezing the assets of the political wing of Hezbollah. Two fascinating case studies in the relationship between the “permanent” civil service and the “temporary” politicians. 

I think the No 10 and Treasury classes are the best of their kind in the country. The students love them. James Dinsdale, a Treasury official on the economic history course, told me: “I have thoroughly enjoyed the class. I think the main reason why the course is so good is the opportunity to hear first-hand from the people who shaped the events you are studying. Theory has its place in the classroom to help one recognise patterns in history, and in the world around you; but hearing what people did and what motivated their actions gives you a very direct perspective on what actually happened in situations.” 

The teachers and special guests love teaching the classes too. Ed Balls, who now holds a professorial chair at King’s, has been taking student tutorials and marking essays alongside Davis. (The best student essays from the economic history class are put on the Treasury intranet.) “I really enjoy the engagement with the students,” Balls told me. “The model of contemporary history is very smart. It’s not like 19th-century history, where all the books have been done and the papers have come out. You’re still working out, as the sources come out and the people come along to the class to debate it, how much did it really matter and how does it affect what’s happening now. 

“In every class you feel we are discovering something we haven’t worked out before.” 

Balls’s transformation from a pugnacious and partisan politician into an enthusiastic and jocular academic is not as unexpected as his turn on Strictly Come Dancing, but it is nevertheless dramatic. He brings energy and a sense of intellectual mischief to everything. In the Javid class, for instance, he tried to tempt the former chancellor into discussing his resignation by asking him what he thought of the idea that the “creative tension” between Tony Blair and Gordon Brown was good for their government. (Javid stuck to the line that his relationship with Boris Johnson “was very good and remains very good”.) 

Balls said: “Jon and his team have done a brilliant job of persuading King’s to keep the class going in person as much as possible. And the special guests like it too, because it is not an aggressive cross-examination; it is intellectually rigorous without being like a select committee, or a political debate.” 

The quality of the special guests is one of the greatest attractions of Strand Group courses for students. Blair himself answered questions at a Blair Years class last year, and Peter Mandelson will be taking part this year. As well as former prime ministers and cabinet ministers (another former prime minister is booked for this term), the classes offer a high level of engagement with people who are still in positions of power. Sadiq Khan, the mayor, took part by video in the London class before Christmas, and Simon Case, the new cabinet secretary, is expected to take part in the No 10 class this year. 

Another strong feature of the Strand Group’s teaching is running case studies in crisis management. Some of these have been delivered as one-off classes in No 10 and the Treasury for the civil servants there; others have been part of courses delivered at King’s or in cyberspace. They have looked at episodes such as Britain’s application to the International Monetary Fund for a bailout in 1976 and our ejection from the European exchange rate mechanism in 1992. 

Balls said that what matters about these exercises “is often not the specific lessons of what happened in the past, but understanding how frictions occur”. One of the themes to which he returns is that “when the consensus tells you that something is a good idea, that should ring alarm bells”. He said: “When the permanent secretary says that the CBI and the TUC agree on something – that is when you should be worried.” (In which case, should we be worried about the furlough scheme?) 

He gave other examples of when history tells us to ring an alarm bell: “When an overambitious adviser is destabilising the relationship between the prime minister and the chancellor. Or when people think they can treat messaging as an add-on – for example allowing the Bank of England to think that if they don’t put out press releases no one will notice what they are doing. And you learn how disastrous ‘when the time is right’ is as a phrase.” 

That was the phrase that trapped Margaret Thatcher into joining the European exchange rate mechanism, because inside her government and outside it, the question then became one of timetable rather than principle. Balls said he and Brown learned from that mistake, hence their “five tests” for adopting the euro: that was “us taking control, to avoid the accelerating inevitability – that’s the sort of thing you want them to learn”. 

Dinsdale, the Treasury student, said: “The primary thing I have learned is that context is not everything; individuals in history have agency and choices, their choices matter, and different choices could have produced very different outcomes.” 

I expect Balls would be pleased with that: in many ways he was the intellectual powerhouse behind the economic policy of the New Labour government, from independence for the Bank of England to keeping Britain out of the eurozone. 

One of the most important things about the course is that it provides the Treasury with an institutional memory. Lombardelli, the government’s chief economic adviser, said: “That so many colleagues have either been on the course or attended an event in recent years means that we are seeing a real transformation in the way we develop policy. It used to be quite a niche thing to ask, ‘What does history tell us about this issue?’ – now it is increasingly a bigger part of the way we go about our practice.” 

After decades of cost-cutting and accelerating staff turnover, most government departments have lost libraries, archives and long-serving officials who remember what happened the last time there was a crisis like the current one. Having provided a contracted-out institutional memory for No 10, the Treasury and the London mayoralty, Davis and his team at King’s have ambitious plans to do the same for other departments, starting with the cabinet office and the ministry of defence. 

It is an academic model that is thriving, even during the coronavirus crisis. Ed Balls seems filled with a sense of mission at King’s: “Throughout lockdown I did six hours of 20-minute slots with the students where they can talk about their lives, their careers, their projects – that is by far the most satisfying part of it. 

“You learn as an MP that if you do things regularly like talking to year 12s in a school, for an individual year 12 – or in this case for an individual 25-year-old civil servant – that 15 minutes in your day might be what sparks something in them, something that could affect the next 25 years of their life; they might remember it far more than you ever will. That gives you a sense of responsibility, because you don’t want to say the wrong thing, and you don’t know which are the moments that are going to make a difference. But for some of those individuals something will be said by one of us that will change their lives.”