Categories
politicalbetting.com » Blog Archive » 65 years of Tory Prime Ministers – their educational backgroun
politicalbetting.com » Blog Archive » 65 years of Tory Prime Ministers – their educational backgrounds
One of my little obsessions over the years has been the very narrow base from which political leaders come from in the UK. The table above shows the educational backgrounds of every Tory PM since Churchill stood aside in 1955 and as can be seen all but one of them went to Oxford – the exception being John Major who did not go to university.
0
This discussion has been closed.
Comments
And if Oxford beats Cambridge to a vaccine, we won't even need the Light Blues for their sciencey stuff any more...
And the only PMs to be educated to degree level who didn’t go to one or the other are Gordon Brown (Edinburgh) Churchill (Sandhurst) and Neville Chamberlain (Mason College)?
If so, then the whole problem is the narrowness of all political leaders’ experience.
Am I right in thinking that the state comprehensive system (widely in place since about 1967) has yet to produce a PM?
Theresa May’s school became a comp while she was there. However, she was probably still in a de facto legacy grammar school.
Totally useless factoid of today - my grandfather was at Adams Grammar on a scholarship, and my father was briefly at Reigate. So I have familial education links with the current and previous Labour leaders.
So that would be BOTH then over the past 65 years!
Outside lessons, on the other hand...
On why, does Oxford take good students and form them in some way so that some of them become particularly ambitious for, and suited to, a political career? Or are intelligent 18-year-olds who want a political career most likely to choose Oxford? Or does having "Oxford" on your CV give you a particular advantage in UK politics?
My instinct, and I have some relevant experience, is that if Oxford does form students in this way, it does so unconsciously. I would guess that the second explanation is more important. It's probably not a total explanation, though, and there may be elements of the third.
As to whether it matters or not, as ever in social sciences, we can't tell defintively, as we don't have a control experiment - we don't know how the UK would have faired under different leadership. There may be some advantage to having a political class whose members have a similar background and common assumptions, and many of whom know each other. But it can be incestuous and lead to groupthink.
It can also breed feelings of exclusion in everybody else. The people most likely to have problems with magic circles are those who are not in them. Once they are, their feelings about them usually change - especially if they are ambitious politicians.
There is no evidence, despite decades of hypocritical propaganda from the Labour Party, that the electorate as a whole gives a damn where its politicians went to school and university. They are, sensibly, much more concerned about how well they think they will govern. At any rate, it is noticeable that the only one of those leaders to have led the Conserative Party to complete electoral disaster was the big exception in the table above.
(And by 2024 that question can be sixty years.)
In reality, I suspect May and Starmer received pretty much the education of the grammar that they entered.
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2020/jul/30/cummings-saga-damaged-uk-unity-covid-19-study-suggests
I would have guessed they used the Manchester Grammar model - payment according to means. So Starmer’s parents probably paid fees, but not full fees.
But that’s a guess.
WHick is of course an oxymoron.
Well, if you're not TSE, you'll do 'til TSE gets here.....
There's at least one case, in Southend, where the parent of such a student is taking legal advice. Although of course, she hasn't had the final assessment yet.
But hey why bother doing research when you can add an insult into the equation.
The elephant in the room.
Although I was advised against Leeds in my subject. However the advisor, who was in a very senior position in the profession I wished to enter, was spectacularly wrong in his forecasts of the overall educational direction of the profession.
Although one would miss the regular opportunity of seeing a decent cricket team in action.
But it doesn't really matter. It's unsurprising that Oxbridge dominate the top jobs in politics etc. But that's not to say that there aren't very capable people at other universities. And actually there are plenty of very capable people who don't bother with university at all.
If you look back through the membership records of Oxford colleges, the only time since 1800 or even earlier when the Clarendon Seven didn't supply a large chunk of the undergraduate population was a relatively brief period in the middle of the last century. Then exotic names such as West Bromwich GS, Maghull GS, and Goole GS became common in the rolls, whilst those of Winchester and Rugby and even Eton waned...
That must have been just a coincidence though.
Feels like grim news on the plague this morning. Ten days isolation, warnings that in two weeks we could have another surge etc etc.
:-(
However I blossomed by the 3rd or 4th year. When taking the exams to decide whether you took O levels, CSEs or nothing I came top in the school in all subjects except English (in which I did OK).
I went on to the local grammar school where I was fast tracked taking A levels early and went on to Manchester to do a degree in Mathematics.
So what is the problem you may ask. Well because of the split at 11 I had no opportunity to do languages, English Literature, Music, etc, however I did useless stuff for me namely metalwork, woodwork, etc (I am useless at practical stuff). Equally when I went to the Grammar school there were boys there who had no option to do the practical stuff, but could study Russian, German, etc.
Why oh why split at 11. Stream as you go along.
https://www.tes.com/news/ofqual-unhelpful-say-where-grades-most-optimistic
The real story of course is that OFQUAL are as much use as Dominic Cummings’ conscience. They don’t know what they’re doing and have been flailing and messing up for years.
Another point - the similar educational background at the top of the greasy pole is not really mirrored further down. Conservative MPs are from a more diverse educational background than PMs. And I would guess that Cabinet Minsters are somewhere between the two. If I'm right, that means that the advantages of Eton and Oxford become more pronounced the further up you climb. Is that because the public like their Tories to be from Eton and Oxford, given that media exposure increases as you climb? Or is it because that background helps with self-confidence, networking, backstabbing and all the other relevant skills to a political career? I don't know.
A few years ago, I was interviewing three candidates for a teaching post. I reported back to the director with a candid assessment of each candidate’s strengths and weaknesses.
One of them was at Oxford. I put him bottom of the three because he was a nice guy and obviously very bright but also muddled, inefficient and had no administrative experience.
He got the job, and the director admitted it was because this candidate was at Oxford. He wanted the prestige of that degree as part of what he was offering.
And until I left the following year, all his colleagues (and later his manager) commented ‘lovely guy. But...’ before detailing some cockup he had made through his lack of sense.
So it does make a huge difference to future career prospects. Not necessarily because the graduates of Oxford are better, although I have no doubt many of them are but because they are guaranteed a hearing and people tend to see what they expect, not what is there.
https://twitter.com/VanityFair/status/1288573329696317444
A new report looking at the opportunities for the Lib Dems has just been published by the UK in a Changing World think tank https://ukandeu.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/Lib-Dems-report-1.pdf.
It shows, comparing the results in 2010 and 2019, that there are a number of consitutencies where the Lib Dems have improved and have better chances of winning the seat.
And despite the general destruction they kept inviting you back!
Edit - among the careers departments at schools, Cambridge is regarded as better academically but Oxford is better socially. I think that may well be why there is a difference in the number of politicians. Politicians have to be able to get on with people. Policy wonks are the ones who sat in libraries.
https://www.statnews.com/2020/07/27/covid19-concerns-about-lasting-heart-damage/
Two new studies from Germany paint a sobering picture of the toll that Covid-19 takes on the heart, raising the specter of long-term damage after people recover, even if their illness was not severe enough to require hospitalization.
One study examined the cardiac MRIs of 100 people who had recovered from Covid-19 and compared them to heart images from 100 people who were similar but not infected with the virus. Their average age was 49 and two-thirds of the patients had recovered at home. More than two months later, infected patients were more likely to have troubling cardiac signs than people in the control group: 78 patients showed structural changes to their hearts, 76 had evidence of a biomarker signaling cardiac injury typically found after a heart attack, and 60 had signs of inflammation.
These were relatively young, healthy patients who fell ill in the spring, Valentina Puntmann, who led the MRI study, pointed out in an interview. Many of them had just returned from ski vacations. None of them thought they had anything wrong with their hearts...