From Chums (Simon Kuper, 2022) pp38-41
Britain does have world-class scientists, engineers and quants, but they are stuck in the engine room while the rhetoricians drive the train. Modern Oxford has specialised in producing the politicians and civil servants who administrate the British state, the lawyers and accountants who service the economy, and the pundits who narrate the show. These people (and I’m one of them) typically dropped science and maths at school aged sixteen, and acquired only a smattering of economics. In parliament in 2016, MPs who had studied politics at university outnumbered those who had studied engineering nearly sevenfold.
Numbers have historically been a challenge for Britain’s ruling class. Douglas-Home as prime minister admitted to using matchsticks to work out the consequences of the Budget. Later British leaders struggled to judge scientific advice on nuclear energy, climate change and Covid-19. In 2010, George Osborne became chancellor with no formal post-school education in economics or business beyond whatever he had picked up in his Oxford history degree. By the late 20108, Oxford’s most oversubscribed undergraduate degree was economics and management,” but during Osborne’s student days it didn’t yet exist.
Oxford’s dominant technocratic degree at the time was PPE: philosophy, polincs, economics. Any three-year undergraduate degree is only going to skate the surface, but that was triply true of PPE, which spread the student’s time across three subjects (although most people dropped one after the first year). A PPEist of my day told me, “I went on to work in the Treasury but could never use the economics part of my degree as it wasn’t good enough.”
Since the referendum of 2016, it has become commonplace to associate Brexit with PPE. Ivan Rogers, for instance, a grammar-school boy who read history at Oxford, and the UK’s permanent representative to the EU until he resigned in 2017, discerned in Brexit ‘a very British establishment sort of revolution. No plan and little planning, oodles of PPE tutorial level plausible bullshit, supreme self confidence that we understand others’ real interests better than they do …’ But this is a misdiagnosis.
In fact, in the 2016 referendum, 95 per cent of MPs who had studied PPE voted Remain.” They included Cameron, Jeremy Hunt, Philip Hammond, William Hague, Mart Hancock, Liz Truss, Rory Stewart, Sam Gyimah, Damian Hinds, Nick Boles, the Milibands, Ed Balls, Yvette Cooper and Peter Mandelson. Most of these people were modernisers at heart, who had presumably chosen the degree in search of the cutting-edge knowledge needed to run “a serious country. Among the rare PPEists to back Leave were Rishi Sunak, and, more consequentially, Rupert Murdoch, who in 1950s Oxford had been business manager of Cherwell. (Murdoch had also stood for secretary of the Labour Club,” but was disbarred from holding office after an investigation into electoral malpractice conducted by the young Gerald Kaufman.)”
By contrast, all the leading Oxford Tory Brexiteers studied backward-looking subjects: classics for Johnson, history for Rees-Mogg and Hannan, and ancient and modern history for Cummings. Gove’s degree was English, which mostly meant the canon.
The most Brexity degree among MPs in 2016 was classics: six of the eight classicists in the Commons voted Leave.’* Classics was a particularly public-school course, because so few state schools offered Latin and Greek. Rachel Johnson, who read classics at Oxford one year below her brother Boris, recites a few lines of Latin, then reflects: ‘All these things we had to learn by rote, so they stuck in the head, and you got into Oxford.’” By the time their brother Leo arrived, there were three Johnson siblings reading classics at Oxford simultaneously. Their brother Jo arrived in 1991 but did history.
In those days, if you came from the right class, classics was the easiest mainstream degree to get in for: in 1981, two years before Boris Johnson started his degree, Oxford admitted three-quarters of pupils who applied to study classics. Yet perversely, classics carried outsized prestige. Such was the status of Latin that it had been part of the admissions requirement for Oxford and Cambridge until 1960. Francis Crick, who could never be bothered to learn the language, failed his entry exams for both universities. He went to University College London instead, before co-discovering the structure of DNA.
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