What is it about studying at Oxford and rising to the top of politics?

Here’s a nice pub quiz question for you. What comes next in the following sequence: Brasenose; St Hugh’s; Balliol…? The answer is of course Merton. The next prime minister was always going to be from an Oxford college. Either Merton (Liz Truss) or Lincoln (Rishi Sunak), following on from David Cameron, Theresa May and Boris Johnson.

It seems that it doesn’t matter who you vote for, “Oxford” is always in charge, and, seemingly as often as not, the graduates of its School of Philosophy, Politics and Economics who populate the worlds of politics and the media. It’s true that Theresa May was unusual in studying geography, and Johnson was more old-fashioned in studying classics at Oxford, but they were surrounded by the PPEists, not least Sunak and Truss. They’re everywhere.

You may have noticed how Nick Robinson, (PPE, University College) was so disappointed that Truss (PPE, Merton) cancelled her interview with him. Or how enthusiastic former Tory leader William Hague (PPE, Magdalen) was about his successor as MP for Richmond in Yorkshire, Sunak (PPE, Lincoln). When Truss faces her first prime minister’s questions she might be welcomed by the Lib Dem leader, Ed Davey, who did PPE at Jesus College.

You can maybe also understand why many people think the Westminster “bubble” is so incestuous, and why naturally chippy, self-styled outsiders such as Nigel Farage believe in some vast “Establishment” conspiracy – nonsense though it is. They are a pretty mixed bag, the PPEists.

Still, just taking the premiers, it is remarkable how strong a grip Oxford University has on Number 10. Since Robert Walpole took office as the first recognisable prime minister in 1721, some 29 of the 55 have attended Oxford. Every British prime minister in the past half-century either went to Oxford or didn’t go to university at all, with the single exception of Gordon Brown, and four did PPE. Taking those who’ve held the highest elected office in the land since 1900, we find that 14 out of 25 were products of Oxford, but only three from Cambridge (and nothing since 1937), one each from Edinburgh and Birmingham (Brown and Chamberlain respectively) and four who didn’t go to university (Bonar Law, Winston Churchill, James Callaghan and John Major). A plurality, of three, did the same course at the same Oxford College, being Classics at Balliol – HH Asquith, Harold Macmillan and Johnson.

For much of the 1960s and 1970s the British political scene was dominated by two middle-class ex-grammar school Oxford PPE graduates, contemporaries who despised one another – Harold Wilson (Jesus and University College) and Edward Heath (Balliol). Two former PPE students at Corpus Christi slugged it out for the Labour leadership in 2010 – David Miliband vs Ed Miliband.

open image in gallery

Mind you, if Labour does get in at the next election we’ll have our first Leeds graduate as First Lord of the Treasury, but – spoiler alert – Keir Starmer did round off his legal education at St Edmund Hall, Oxford. Around his cabinet table he will be surrounded by no less than five products of the Oxford PPE school – Anneliese Dodds (St Hilda’s), Rachel Reeves (New College), Yvette Cooper (Balliol), Nick Thomas-Symonds (St Edmund Hall), and Ed Miliband (Corpus Christi). About a quarter of the cabinet, then, recalling Labour cabinets of the 1960s and 1970s studded with a similar profile – Wilson himself plus Tony Benn (New College), Denis Healey (Balliol), Roy Jenkins (Balliol), Barbara Castle (St Hugh’s), Shirley Williams (Somerville) and Michael Foot (Wadham).

I could go on, but it might depress you. It’s probably worth reminding ourselves, therefore, that PPE, or anything else, at Oxford is no necessary guarantee either of towering intellectual stature or political success. Our most academically distinguished leader since the war was Wilson, who won prizes, and achieved the best PPE first in his year with alpha grades in all his papers; but historians tend not to give him top marks for his achievements as prime minister.

The formal attractions of a degree in PPE are well described in this sample passage from the Jesus College website:

“PPE is an unusual course, and the three subjects – Philosophy, Politics and Economics – offer highly-contrasting intellectual styles and challenges.

“There is great variety and scope for specialization within the course, and you should have little difficulty in selecting papers that meet your intellectual needs and interests. At one extreme you can keep all three subjects going for the full three years and by the end of this particular programme you will have a clear grasp of the major institutions, thinkers and ideas that have shaped modern society. At the other extreme you can concentrate primarily on one subject, dropping another altogether after the first year, and doing only a few papers in the third. You could thus, for example, ‘major’ in economics treating politics or philosophy as a subsidiary. In this way you could reach a high standard in economics, but backed up by the intellectual variety of papers in another, contrasting discipline.”

Although some of the rules have changed over the years, the aims and structure of the course have been the case since the first undergraduates embarked on it in 1921. Absurdly, before that time it was impossible to study economics at Oxford while Cambridge had a well-established world-leading school, with Alfred Marshall and John Maynard Keynes the pioneers of modern micro- and macro-economics respectively. “Politics” is taught in a highly historical and institutional fashion, with some concessions to “theory” but there is no “political science”. You need Cambridge or the LSE for that.

open image in gallery

The PPE course was designed to be a counterpart to the study of Classics, as a method of understanding the basis of modern civilisations in the way that “literae humaniores” or “Greats” would introduce you to Ancient Rome and Greece. Hence, PPE was known, and occasionally still is, as “Modern Greats”.

For its time it was something of a revolution, or at least a revelation. One of its earliest students was Barbara Castle, later a Labour Party legend and – before Mrs Thatcher made it – widely tipped to be Britain’s first female prime minister: as one of a tiny minority of females at the university she was a double pioneer. Flame-haired and passionate, Castle (nee Betts), was born in 1910 and went up to St Hugh’s in October 1929. In her memoir, Fighting All The Way, she sets down why she went for PPE. Bemoaning the widespread snobbery and misogyny, and Oxford’s failure to keep abreast with the outside world, she says, presciently:

“On arriving at St Hugh’s I had decided to switch from French to Philosophy, Politics and Economics (PPE) as more appropriate for the sort of life I planned for myself. I had been quite clear for some time that the only vocations I was interested in were politics and journalism…Unfortunately when I arrived the new school was only five years old, and was suffering from growing pains. Its introduction had been Oxford’s stab at modernising itself, and frankly the university was not equipped for it. The only house tutor St Hugh’s could find me was a medieval historian, a plump, amiable little body who clearly had not a clue about the economic and political problems of the modern world.”

For all the genuine and unique challenges of the course – the economics tends to demand a mathematical frame of mind not always found in the politically driven – the course seemingly is favoured by some wannabe politicians because it can afford more time for “hacking” at the Oxford Union, the various political societies and associations and the student newspapers.

open image in gallery

The insanely ambitious Micheal Heseltine (Pembroke) and the chillaxing David Cameron (Brasenose) the exemplars. Cameron was described by his politics tutor, Vernon Bogdanor, as “one of the nicest and ablest students I ever taught… But I’m not responsible for his views.” Cameron got a first, but there’s no record of him burning the midnight oil. On the other hand, his later decision to hold an In/Out referendum on the EU did give the constitutional scholar Bogdanor (or “Bogs” as he was known around Oxford) plenty of books to welter about the political mess his former student left behind. (Naturally, Bogdanor himself studied PPE, at The Queen’s College).

Heseltine was even less of a conscientious student than Cameron, and spent his time at Oxford trying to dominate the Oxford Union debating society, the Oxford University Conservative Association (OUCA), socialising and making money on the side. His biographer, Micheal Crick (PPE, New College), describes his academic record as follows:

“At that time, people studying PPE sat preliminary exams – “prelims” – at the end of their second term, but it took Heseltine another twelve months to jump this hurdle. First time round, he failed all three papers he chose - constitutional history, economics and French. This was an especially poor result considering he had already studied two of the subjects at school. He passed the retakes in history and economics that summer, but, despite his French ancestry he couldn’t pass the language paper until his third go, in March 1953. Today Oxford Colleges are much stricter, and usually send students down [ie kick them out] for failing prelims more than once”.

The ultimate PPE layabout you might say, but he still got to be deputy prime minister. Heseltine also has the more dubious distinction of toppling Margaret Thatcher (Somerville College) from power. The Tory leadership crisis of 1990 was a wretched, bitter affair, with reverberations lasting well into the 2000s; it must have been like an OUCA election in the old days, but more civilised.

But PPE for the politically motivated is hardly compulsory. Margaret Roberts (later Thatcher) and Theresa Brasier (later May) studied chemistry and geography respectively, applied themselves to their studies with characteristic seriousness and made it to the top without ever being negligent or naughty. May’s biographer notes that her choice of degree, “was rather less showy than the PPE many aspiring politicians studied, but her interest in optics was as keen as ever”.

open image in gallery

Thatcher, the non-PPEist, spends a generous amount of time in her memoirs talking about how much fun she had studying chemistry and the inspirational tutors she had at Somerville. She also details, at considerable length, her political activities, focused on OUCA and the unfortunately abbreviated FUCUA (Federation of University Conservative and Unionists Associations) – but not a single word on whether she’d ever considered PPE. Interesting.

Indeed, it goes both ways. Strikingly, the only three people to win a majority for Labour weren’t that bothered about a career in politics. Clement Attlee (University College, albeit too early for the PPE option), Harold Wilson (Jesus) and Tony Blair (St John’s) went up to Oxford and took history, PPE and law respectively, but with no great interest in Labour politics at all. Attlee was a conservative imperialist, Wilson a half-hearted Liberal, and Blair, God help him, wanted to be a rock star.

Given Thatcher’s and May’s lack of interest in it, and that the Labour Party has tended to do best out of PPE, it might be thought to be a leftist sort of discipline, or at least one that doesn’t boast many alumni to the right of Edward Heath, Nigel Lawson and Oliver Letwin, to name drop a few. Yet you might be surprised to learn that Rupert Murdoch spent three years at Worcester College learning all about modern civilisation.

open image in gallery

Apparently, he kept a bust of Lenin in his room and was known as Red Rupert at the time. Other counterexamples would be Mark Littlewood (Balliol), head of the Institute for Economic Affairs, and Mark Reckless (Christ Church) the former Ukip MP. Bill Clinton, Benazir Bhutto, Aung San Suu Kyi, and the Australian prime ministers Malcolm Fraser and Bob Hawke are PPEists who don’t fit so easily into a British frame of reference.

The PPE curriculum does tend to reflect the world it lives in. Though you have some freedom to roam, your international comparative studies of political systems will tend to be the UK, France, Germany, and the US, for example. The option to study the economics of communist countries has long since gone, but you could and can gorge yourself on the ideas of Milton Friedman for the paper once simply entitled “Money”.

Labour economics waned with the decline in the power of the unions. Moving with the times, PPEists can nowadays also study “Game Theory”, “Politics In China”, and “the Sociology of Post-Industrial Societies”. Dons tend to be civilised people, on the whole, and universities tend to be tolerant and politely curious places – but they are also prone to be contrarian and challenging to their students.

Thus far, not that much is known about Truss’s time at Oxford, except that she was a dedicated Liberal Democrat of a radical stripe, and, according to her, “on a journey” towards the right. We don’t know, for what it’s worth, what her tutors made of her, and how much or how little economics she absorbed. Since 1970, it’s been possible for the students to drop one of P, P or E after the first year, and so arrange the optional papers in such a way as to minimise, say, the more heavily mathematical papers or avoid the most abstruse philosophical stuff, such as the mysterious world of advanced “formal logic” (which is even less fun than it sounds). Thus we can’t be quite sure how well her time studying PPE prepared Ms Truss for her new job. As well as her own talents, it surely helped propel her onto the Tory candidate A-list, after which she swiftly became the youngest female cabinet minister ever, and now a young prime minister, a couple of years short of her 50th birthday.

In PPE terms, if you like, Truss’s personal political philosophy now seems settled if unoriginal, her political instincts are certainly well-honed and predictably populist, but her economics seem to be maybe a little less well-grounded, bordering on confused. Overall, then, not yet alpha grade.