I am part of the “Oxbridge elite”, like Burnham’s cabinet. That doesn’t mean we’re smart enough to govern

Last month, Andy Burnham promised us a government in which “all parts of the party and the country – can see themselves reflected and represented” 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 could dismiss this statistic if studying at Oxford guaranteed competence. But our country lurched from crisis to crisis under the Oxford graduates who governed between 2010 and 2024, most of whom were studying PPE. We have David Cameron, Theresa May, Boris Johnson, Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak to thank for leading us into austerity, Brexit, Partygate and the cost of living crisis.

Eleven years ago I completed a degree in PPE at Oxford. I didn’t study this field with the ambition of entering public life, but I have often been treated differently because of it – in marketing, consulting and journalism jobs. When I’m asked where I studied and I tell people about it, I often find that their attitude brightens a little and they ask me a few more questions. When this happened in job interviews, I felt like I was seen as a more secure person because of my degree – and of course, most potential employers would have seen it on my CV. It makes me wonder about the advantages I received because of where I went to college.

It’s this kind of preferential treatment that means people like me are over-represented in many of the most prestigious professions. I very much doubt that Burnham looked at the qualifications of Cabinet nominees before appointing them, but earlier in their careers they were probably chosen as parliamentary researchers and ministerial assistants in part because of their qualifications, which helped them on their path to the current Cabinet.

Burnham’s Cabinet simply reflects the fact that Oxford graduates have always been disproportionately successful in public life. 14 of the last 18 prime ministers were educated at Oxford, while Oxbridge graduates make up 75 percent of senior judges and 40 percent of newspaper columnists and political commentators. Ten years ago, The Guardian has published a long read entitled ‘PPE: the Oxford degree that runs Britain’.

And yet there is no reason why my degree should enable anyone to rule Britain. It’s not like my course mates and I learned three times as much as everyone else because it was a triple honors degree – we just became masters of nothing. The political and economic sections were mostly theoretical, with little reference to current events or 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 minister with a bulging entry tray.

It’s true that it takes a lot of intelligence to study PPE (the acceptance rate is 12.8%) and ambition, but you don’t have to be a genius. And the smartest people I know certainly didn’t study PPE or go to Oxford. The most gifted person I’ve ever worked with, whose observations I find myself repeating, didn’t revise her GCSEs and therefore had no chance of going to Oxbridge. The wisest friend I knew went to a polytechnic.

I would also say that whether you are selected to study PPE at Oxford is partly down to luck. The final barrier to admission is interviews, and I only had one interview lasting 45 minutes. How can you tell how smart someone is in this day and age? You might have been a little confused or nervous on the day of your interview. I have had countless Oxford classmates who were rejected by their first choice of university, only to perform better than their classmates in finals.

So no, studying PPE at Oxford doesn’t make Burnham’s ministers smart enough to govern. This only proves that at 17, they were smart enough to impress a handful of college professors. Governing a country requires much more than what a degree can give you: it requires judgment and practical experience. It also requires humility, emotional intelligence and trustworthiness – qualities which are not the qualities that people stereotype Oxford PPE graduates for. How many more governments will we have to see before we stop confusing diplomas and skills?