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.
