Wanted: A PM who DID NOT go to Oxford
For a change let’s end the dark blue strangehold
With Johnson under police investigation we might be only days or possibly or just a few months away from a Tory leadership election and inevitably we are starting to see leadership speculation.
Currently, Chancellor Sunak is favourite with Foreign Secretary Truss second favourite and the loser to Johnson in 2019, Hunt third favourite. What the four have in common is that they are all alumni of the University of Oxford.
This is not surprising given how much Oxford grads have dominated British politics since 1945 as set out in the table above. This shows the alma mater of those who led their parties to general election victories, were graduates and in which case which University they attended.
Given that Oxford provides a very distinctive undergraduate experience would not it be great for once if the next PM, Johnson’s successor, had a different background?
This would include the fourth and fifth in the betting, Tom Tugendhat (Cambridge), Penny Mordaunt (Reading). Keir Starmer’s undergraduate experience was at Leeds but he went on to Oxford for postgraduate study.
A good betting market might be on the next CON leader not being an Oxford alum.
NOTE: From 1999 to 2005 I was Oxford’s Director of Development and I was working there when I founded PB in March 2004.