Five out of the twenty-nine members of the new Cabinet were educated at Magdalen College, Oxford, with twenty of the group being made up of Oxford or Cambridge graduates. This number is up from eight out of twenty-five in the last cabinet.
The Magdalen graduates are William Hague, George Osborne, Chris Huhne, Jeremy Hunt and Dominic Grieve, who will serve as Attorney General, a part time member.
There are now as many Magdalen graduates as there are Lib Dems in the coalition Cabinet.
Archive material owned by Cherwell from the new Ministers’ time in Oxford shows some surprising changes and ironic similarities in the MPs’ approaches to politics.
As an undergraduate reading PPE at Magdalen and editor of The Isis magazine, Chris Huhne, now Minister for Energy and the Environment, slammed the suggestion of a Lab-Lib coalition slate for the National Union of Students delegation.
He criticised the Labour Club’s advances to Conservative and Liberal student politicians to bolster their slate, writing, “It is reassuring to know that prospective Labour party politicians are learning early, and don’t bother to wait until they reach Parliament before jettisoning their principles.”
“Was a broad left possible?” he asked in 1974.
In an editorial, Huhne, now a Minister in a coalition government, claimed that true politicians never compromise their principles.
“It is evident no politician will compromise…especially no student left-winger,” he wrote. “By the nature of a cause it has to be totally right: one side must be white and the other black.”
Apparently feelings towards Huhne were equally uncompromising. A gossip column named ‘Private Isis’ recorded that he was “notably reptilian” in his days as an undergraduate.
Chancellor George Osborne, who read Modern History at Magdalen and was also editor of The Isis in 1992, published a special edition printed partially on hemp paper, to indicate the importance that he attached to “green issues”.
In the accompanying editorial, Isis said that “green issues are not going to leave us. As time moves on, they will become more urgent and relevant.
To forestall change may not jeopardise our own lives or even those of our grandchildren, but it certainly ruins our hopes of living in a healthy world.”
The headline of a leader article in Osborne’s hemp edition read “How an Earth Did the Tories Get Back In?” and questioned how John Major had been returned to power in 1992.
The new Foreign Secretary, William Hague, another Magdalen-educated member of the front bench, was President of both the Union and OUCA during his time at the University.
An article dating from 1981 reported that he had been found “guilty of incompetence and irresponsibility” in his role as Returning Officer by an OUCA tribunal.
Michael Gove, the new Secretary for Education, attracted his fair share of controversy while President of the Union.
Most notable was his appearance in an Evelyn article, the gossip column, entitled, “Union hacks in five in a bed romp shocker”. The article claimed that the Minister was found in a bed with other Union members following a ball.
He was also labelled a “not so nice hack” in a similar article from 1986.
Andrew Smith, the Labour MP for Oxford East re-elected last week with an increased majority, was the subject of student media attention from his first Parliamentary campaign.
A political round-up in 1987, months before he entered Parliament for the first time, described him as “a man with the style worthy of the smoothest of gameshow hosts.”
The President of Magdalen Professor David Clary, spoke to Cherwell about the disproportionate number of alumni from his college now in the Cabinet.
“It has not escaped our notice that there are as many Magdalen members in the Cabinet as there are Lib Dems,” he said.
“Those Magdalen Tutorials in PPE or History must have made the difference,” he suggested.
As editor of the Isis, George Osborne also found time to express reservations about the power of the security services.
In an interview with an unnamed spook, he said, “new technology is allowing organisations like GCHQ and MI5 to literally ‘harvest’ communications from the airwaves, making it that much easier to monitor the affairs of British companies and British citizens whose interests they are supposed to be guarding.”
Mr Osborne’s anti-establishment views were also expressed in the another edition of the Isis.
In an article about gambling, he wrote that, “The gambler is implicitly giving the two fingers to the pillars of our bourgeois society – security and stability.”
He went on to write that gambling held an attraction for many because they felt “suffocated by the laws of what you should and shouldn’t do”, and commented that it was “no wonder that this fantasy world can be so much more alluring than the reality of nine to five jobs.”
However, his writing did also contain traces of the rhetoric now used by the Conservative Party.
In an Editorial from 1992, Isis pondered its own image, and concluded that “ISIS should draw upon the strength of its past to build a bridge to the future.”
The Ministers mentioned in the archive material were contacted for comment, but did not respond.
Mr Osborne’s office said that it was not “something George is going to be able to do at this time”.
