Last month, Andy Burnham promised us a government where “all parts of the party and the country – can see themselves reflected and represented in it” and this week a “new political model”. And yet, yesterday The iPaper revealed that 17 of the 28 members of his new Cabinet have undergraduate degrees from Oxford or Cambridge.
Extraordinarily, six ministers – Ed Miliband, Yvette Cooper, Angela Eagle, Kanishka Narayan, Emma Reynolds and Miatta Fahnbulleh – all studied the same degree at Oxford: Philosophy, Politics, and Economics (PPE).
We might dismiss this statistic if studying at Oxford guaranteed competence. But our country lurched from crisis to crisis under the Oxford graduates who ruled between 2010 and 2024, most of who studied PPE. We have David Cameron, Theresa May, Boris Johnson, Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak to thank for steering us into austerity, Brexit, Partygate, and the cost-of living crisis.
Eleven years ago, I graduated from Oxford with a degree in PPE. I didn’t study it with any aspiration of entering public life, but I’ve often been treated differently because of it – across jobs in marketing, consulting and journalism. When I’m asked where I studied and tell people, I often find their manner brightens a little and they ask me a few more questions. When this has happened in job interviews it has felt like I have been seen as a more secure pair of hands because of my degree – and of course, most prospective employers would have seen it on my CV. It makes me wonder about the advantages I’ve been given because of where I went to university.
It’s this sort of preferential treatment that means people like me are overrepresented in many of the top professions. I very much doubt that Burnham examined prospective Cabinet appointees’ degree certificates before appointing them, but earlier on in their careers, they probably were chosen as parliamentary researchers and ministerial aides partly because of their degrees, which helped them on their journey to today’s Cabinet.
Burnham’s Cabinet merely reflects that Oxford grads have always done disproportionately well in public life. 14 of the last 18 prime ministers were educated at Oxford, while Oxbridge grads make up 75 per cent of senior judges and 40 per cent of newspaper columnists and political commentators. A decade ago, The Guardian published a long read entitled “PPE: the Oxford degree that runs Britain”.
And yet, there’s no reason why my degree should equip anyone to rule Britain. It’s not as though my course mates and I learned three times as much as others because it was a triple-honours degree – we just became masters of none. The politics and economics parts were overwhelmingly theoretical, with scant reference to current affairs or the problems facing the country. And as for the philosophy part – I can’t imagine that questions like “do I really exist?” are too useful for a newly appointed Cabinet minister with a bulging in-tray.
It’s true you need considerable intelligence to study PPE (it has a 12.8 per cent acceptance rate), and ambition, but you don’t need to be a genius. And the smartest people I know definitely didn’t study PPE or go to Oxford. The most gifted person I ever worked with, whose observations I catch myself repeating, didn’t revise for his GCSEs so stood no chance of going to Oxbridge. The wisest friend I have went to a polytechnic.
I’d also argue that whether you’re selected to study PPE at Oxford partly comes down to luck. The final hurdle of admissions is based around interviews, and I had just one interview lasting 45 minutes. How can you determine how clever someone is in that time? You could have been a bit foggy or nervous on the day of your interview. I had countless Oxford peers who were rejected by their first choice of college, only to go on and score higher than their classmates during finals.
So no, studying PPE at Oxford doesn’t make Burnham’s ministers clever enough to rule. It only proves that, aged 17, they were smart enough to impress a handful of university tutors. Governing a country requires far more than a degree can give you – it needs judgement and practical experience. It also demands humility, emotional intelligence and relatability – hardly the qualities people stereotype Oxford PPE grads for. How many more governments will we need to see flail, before we stop confusing one degree with competence?
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