John Rentoul is one of the most experienced and astute political commentators of our age, currently occupying the role of The Independent on Sunday’s chief political commentator. Total Politics gave him what many would consider a backhanded compliment, saying “his column in The Independent on Sunday has become one of the last bastions of pure, unadulterated Blairism”, while at the same time ranking him as the 3rd most important political journalist in Britain. He is perhaps best known for his humorous series of ‘Questions to Which the Answer is No’, which is a collection of absurd and hyperbolic media headlines and includes gems such as “‘Is Spongebob Squarepants the new Che Guevara?” and “ ‘Is this proof the Virgin Queen was an imposter in drag’”. He has continued this as a campaign of sorts against sensationalism in journalism.

But he is most notable as a biographer and chronicler of Tony Blair’s administration. Rentoul professes that so much of his writing has been related to Blair that “when Tony Blair stood down, I thought I was going to be out of a job, because so much of my profession had been made on knowing more about Tony Blair than anyone else!”

We begin by discussing Blair’s early years, as well as how his political style changed while he was in office.

“He matured very fast, matured in opposition as well. Before he became leader he was very good, but he was very inexperienced, you had the sensation soon after he became leader that the wheels are going to fall off this train, he doesn’t have the experience. But he proved to have such a good natural political judgement. He never made the same mistake twice. He learnt and grew amazingly quickly. The Clause 4 debate was one thing where he thought, here’s a big risk we could pull off, and it was spectacularly successful. It was after this that we saw a politician grow to take up virtually all available space in British politics. We forget it now, but there was a period of several years where he was just so dominant.”

Considering the gulf between popular opinion of Tony Blair and Rentoul’s view, I wonder what the most common public misconceptions of the man and his administration are, both at the time and now. “There were so many who projected their personal progressive hopes and expectations onto Blair. Expectations were high and contradictory. Everyone thought they voted for him to do what they wanted. That clearly wasn’t possible. There were people who voted for him because they wanted him to be pro-European and to join the Euro, people who wanted Proportional Representation in voting, people who wanted a rapprochement with Liberals, and all those things were just not going to be realizable. One of the most remarkable things was that he was able to put off the day of reckoning where people were disappointed in him for such a long time.”
But did it come harder once it came? “Yes, because he was able to put off the contradictions for so long that it became quite so vicious.

“A lot of the ‘Blair Rage’ phenomenon that I bang on about was a result of this but”, he pauses; “obviously Iraq was also a very important issue that people felt strongly about.

“I’ve been waiting for Blair revisionism to kick in but he seems to be getting more and more unpopular since he’s left.”

“He behaves in such a way that let people think that he doesn’t particularly care what they think. He swans around the world giving consultancy to what we consider unpopular governments. Also giving vast amounts of money away to charity, and raising money for good cause’s .This is all very un-British and people find it abhorrent that he should have the temerity to do this. Rather he should live on the isles of Scilly and live in sackcloth’s and ashes and do penance for getting the Iraq War wrong
“I’m afraid Iraq has poisoned the well sufficiently that historians will have a hard time looking at his administration objectively.”

We move onto the topic of the most controversial aspect of the Blair years, concerning his interventionist foreign policy and the invasion of Iraq. I ask if early successes, such as in the former Yugoslavia, Sierra Leone or Afghanistan, contributed to a sense of overconfidence in Blair about how easy the invasion of Iraq would be.

“Yes, that is definitely true, Kosovo in particular. It was an extraordinary achievement; people forget how hard it was now to persuade an extremely reluctant POTUS and 18 members of NATO who had to vote with unanimity. You had to persuade Greece and Germany; Germany with its recent history of pacifism, Greece with its problems with Macedonia on the border. And yet Tony Blair managed to do all that, managed to rally the international community behind the idea of interventionism, and it worked so well that within a year Milosevic was deposed in Serbia, so that clearly gave him far too much confidence in his own judgement.

“He should possibly have paid more attention to the fact that people back home gave him no credit for it whatsoever, they were just not interested. People were not interested in their PM swanning around solving the world’s problems.”

After this, Tony Blair’s world view came under a profound shift with the terrorist attacks of September 11. “I don’t agree with Tony Blair regarding the importance of 9/11. I wrote an article for The Independent a week after it happened saying that despite being a great atrocity it didn’t matter very much, and we shouldn’t take Islamic terrorism particularly seriously, which is not Blair’s view.”

He continues, talking about the question of how Blair’s premiership affected Britain’s international standing “The legacy of Iraq certainly had a negative effect on Britain’s international standing, although I still think it was the right decision considering the information we had at the time.”
“As soon as Blair came along he was one of the key players on the international stage in a very short time. But then of course Iraq did quite quickly erode this.”

One major criticism of New Labour was that it was a capitulation to Thatcherism; Blair said that after the 1980s the “battleground of politics is now over efficacy, not ideology” and I put this quote to Rentoul. “That’s one of Tony Blair’s classic phrases where he dresses up something completely banal as some kind of profound insight. He does himself a disservice with this. The idea that Blairism is some kind of continuation of Thatcherism is completely wrong.

“She did do some necessary things in turning around the economy and curtailing the power of the trade unions, but at the cost of huge social divisions. I think New Labour helped to repair those divisions, and towards making Britain a more social democratic country. But she did say the country would be safe in Tony Blair’s hands. Admired him on both a personal and political level. She was very solid on Kosovo for instance, and saw Blair as a necessary reaction to the soft appeasement of the Major government.”

We end by talking about the changing future of media, and I ask him his opinion on those frequently predicting the doom of professional journalism. “Getting paid for journalism is not dying but it is certainly shrinking. The idea of going into journalism as a career where you have a steady job for decades, that’s not really around anymore. The basics haven’t changed. If you’re interested in how things work and communicating that to other people, there is still a job for you somewhere I think Twitter has really transformed journalism in the last 5 years.

“By mistake The Independent’s people put me on Twitter and they put the blog on Twitter and it sort of exploded from there. If you’re not on Twitter as a journalist you are invisible, you don’t make the connections you need to. When I worked for the New Statesman a few years ago, the editor took someone out for lunch and just said, ‘don’t’. But I think if you want it badly enough; you’ll probably succeed in some form. These days you have to be on Twitter, you have to write and blog for nothing. The great thing is how democratic it is. I’ve seen several young people get into mainstream journalism just through being picked up like that. Talent will always shine through, and the only difference is you can spot it so much more easily now.”

East-West relations are at their lowest ebb since the collapse of the USSR. Talking to the Oxford University International Relations Society, and then in an exclusive interview with Cherwell, Sir Roderic Lyne explained why. Lyne is the former British ambassador to Russia, having served during the period covering 9/11 and the Chechnyan war, and is currently Vice-Chairman of Chatham House, one of Britain’s most respected policy institutes. These positions have given him a unique insight the minds behind Russian high politics.

Russia, Lyne tells me, has an identity problem.

“Unlike the UK, which has been able to divest itself of empire over 30 years and come to accept its role as a middle power, for Russians, the collapse of the USSR came overnight. As such, despite having neither the economy nor military to justify it, they continue to perceive themselves as a truly global power and act accordingly.”

Russia thus considers former Soviet states as their “near abroad”, effectively part of the Russian motherland, and wishes to have a strong influence in these countries’ affairs. Such states have ongoing post-Cold War economic stability and national identity problems that Russia is able to exploit to enforce their subservience. As Lyne states, they were “simply not ready for independence”, and unresolved independence issues are a powerful tool in Putin’s arsenal.

Ukraine has been the latest example of this intervention. After the ex-Soviet republic slipped through Putin’s fingers with the forced departure of Victor Yanukovych, he exchanged carrots for sticks, invading Crimea and fostering ethnic conflict in Ukraine’s eastern regions to prevent Ukraine from maintaining autonomy.

Lyne discussed Putin’s approach to international affairs in depth. Putin, in Lyne’s view, is “an opportunist, not a strategist. Putin does not think like a chess player, several moves ahead, but as a Judoka. He pushes to sense where his opponent is weak and exploits every weakness he finds to score a victory.” Thus, on Ukraine, he sensed an opportunity, and acted.

Russia, however, is far from alone in bearing the blame for the current crisis. Lyne describes the decision to offer NATO membership action plans to Georgia and Ukraine as “simply mad”, and bound to threaten the Russians. Sadly, he says, in reference to former Soviet NATO members, “Given we did not have any good reason to say no, we couldn’t really justify saying no to their membership at the time.” While Russia could do little to prevent Poland or the Baltic states turning west, when Georgia and Ukraine threatened to do the same, Russia acted.

So what’s next for Ukraine? For Lyne, a Ukraine “linked with the West but not threatening to Moscow, and with real Russian influence in Kiev” seems the most likely and stable outcome. Ukrainian NATO or EU membership is certainly not likely.

And Russia? Russia itself is likely to suffer economically, despite the rather superficial nature of Western sanctions. “Russian solvency depends on a high oil price, due to an extremely undifferentiated economy,” Lyne explained. Thus capital flight, a collapse in the rouble, and a relegation of Russian debt to near junk status has hit the Russian economy badly. Russian foreign reserve holdings have “taken a battering”, pushing it into predicted recession this year. Many foreign firms now see Russia as just too risky for investment.

Thus, while it might seem that Putin is riding high on popularity from reasserting Russian dominance, in the longer term, this crisis could threaten his vertical of power. He cannot simply continue to pay off the public without the capital to do so. For example, he cannot continue to increase Russian pension payments: “Once they go up, they are impossible to bring down without creating massive unpopularity.”

Overall, Lyne argues “we are not in a new Cold War”, but that steps need to be taken to resolve the issues on Russia’s border “to which Rus- sia has genuine claims”. I asked him whether he felt the EU’s failure to co- ordinate effectively on the issue of Ukraine threatened its ability to provide a coherent foreign policy in future.

“Actually, the policy coordination within the EU over Ukraine has been better than I expect- ed, led by Germany, and I think it has been re- ally interesting that the Germans under Angela Merkel’s leadership have taken a pretty strong line on Ukraine,” Lyne mused. “I don’t think the EU has done badly within the limits of its ability, but it’s never developed the ability to act as a single actor in foreign policy.” I quizzed him
on whether Russia’s declining power explained its lash out in Crimea.

“Russia is a declining power,” Lyne stressed. “It is not rapidly declining, but it is on an incremental decline because its economy is going downhill. It is now, as Obama said the other day, effectively a regional power, not a global power. I think the driver of the Ukraine crisis was that not just Putin, but generally all policy makers, need more voters in Russia. They think of Ukraine as part of the Russian motherland and therefore as an area while they do not believe should join Western blocs. They effectively want Ukraine to be subservient. That is the driver of the crisis.”

Speaking about the extent of British power, Lyne admitted, “There’s not a huge amount we can do. If we wish to exert influence on the situation, we have to throw our efforts together with those of our European partners, the United States and indeed more widely in the United Nations. We have a global network, and we should use that network to make sure that Russia knows that around the world, no serious country is ever going to endorse its annexation of Crimea. The Russians actually care about how the world thinks of them; they want to be respected in the world, they want to be part of the international status quo, and they know they have breached international law, and that is something that we can have a role in influencing.”

Finally, Lyne is pessimistic about future crises.“I think there is a very high likelihood that we will see further instalments, as this wasn’t the first, we have seen it in Georgia, and we have seen it in Moldova. Questions will arise at some point in the future on the orientation of Belarus. Belarus is a country that was, perhaps, even closer to Russia in some ways than Ukraine. It has a much less strong sense of nationhood than Ukraine, it is a weaker country economically, it is not a country which the West has ever shown much interest. But when the current dictator of Belarus, Lukashenko, loses power through one means or another, Belarus will come into play. Whoever is in power in Moscow at this stage will definitely want Belarus not to float off in the direction of the European Union.”

Further conflict with Russia is a risk in the international system, not because of its military might or aggressive foreign policy, but because Russia has failed to reconstruct its perception of itself as a global power. Rather, that idea has been renewed by united Russian nationalism. The challenge, it seems, for British foreign policy is to accommodate this self-perception, allowing for meaningful engagement without giving in to Russia’s aims.

YES

Like a number of my contemporaries, I’m currently ill. Like a number of my contemporaries, I’m currently behind on work. Never mind, most students around the country would say, just take a few days off, get better and then catch up. Not so at Oxford.

The term begins in a whirl of extraordinary excitement, and for a few brief moments you’re too happy about being back in Oxford to worry about work. You think of all the things you are going to do this term. Then your deadlines hit you like a simile you’d be able to think of if you had any time left in the day. The next eight weeks consist of essay crisis after essay crisis, without even the promise of sleep as a respite since you have to head to Bridge once you’ve sent this off.

And sure, one might argue that after eight weeks of this madness, you’ll need a rest. But this kind of stop-start, all-go then all-stop is a disastrous one. It’s not how the world works outside Oxford, and it’s not a healthy way to conduct one’s life.

In a recent survey of students conducted by Times Higher Education, Oxford placed bottom for ‘fair workload’, a clear indicator that the students at this university are not happy with the structure of the term. The love for their subject which most Oxford students brought here is carefully and systematically eroded by a rigorous programme designed to turn a labour of love into an onerous chore. It is difficult to feel passionate about the poetry of Catullus when you’ve had to stay up all night throwing together an essay with the semblance of a structure and a vaguely coherent argument.

This brings me on nicely to my next point. Why, when most students at other universities have exams throughout their degrees, do we insist (for the most part) on having only two exam periods, and only one that counts towards our final qualification?

An argument often used is that having all your exams at the end of your final year means that you must have a comprehensive understanding by the time you leave. It is not possible for students to spend a term cramming one module, do the exam and then forget it all.

This would be OK, if our teaching was actually geared towards gaining a comprehensive understanding of the subject. However, moving so swiftly between topics (for example, a student might ‘do’ Keats in a week and then move on), it is impossible to obtain a deeper knowledge of said topic until the vacation, by which time the average student will have forgotten whatever she wrote in a caffeine-addled haze at 2am on Thursday of 5th week and, more importantly, will be too tired to do any work anyway.

For many students, the hasty revision period for prelims often consists of actually learning the damn stuff for the first time. We need more time and more teaching to understand what we are learning, and we need an exam timetable that actually relates to the way in which we study.

NO

Summer in Oxford has an unquestionably idyllic image – punting and Pimm’s, croquet and cricket, to May Day and May Balls, and walking home through cobbled streets in the early morning light in ball gowns and dinner jackets. Yet the phrase ‘Trinity Term’ doesn’t always invoke such Waugh-esque nostalgia. Unfortunately for most, it is also ‘exam term’, bringing endless revision in stuffy libraries as the sun shines outside.

This isn’t the only indication that Oxford’s academic calendar might not be the most beneficial to its students. Oxford and Cambridge follow their own traditional academic format with three terms comprising eight weeks each. This format is notable – many universities in the United States and Canada follow a semester-based calendar, with two academic sessions of around 15 weeks. Much of Europe also follows the semester system, as do several high-profile UK universities. Even amongst universities following the three term model, most institutions operate in terms of ten weeks or more.

But would Oxford be better off reorganising its academic year? I don’t think so. If the structure of three eight-week terms remained only for tradition, I would argue against its preservation. However, I genuinely believe that the format is the best for students here.

Yes, eight weeks is short and, combined with the added intensity of an Oxford degree, this makes our workload per week consistently higher than many other universities. Yes, the amount of work is stressful and, if you do any extracurricular activities at all, you are going to end up tired (at the end of last term I slept for 17 hours straight, which is a personal record). It is also the best preparation for working life, which is ruled by strict deadlines, fast turnover of projects and working hard five days a week, every horrible week, until you are a husk.

One essay every fortnight isn’t preparation for the daily grind, but desperately trying to make a deadline when you are still literally brined in gin from the night before just might be. If nothing else, the structure of our academic calendar makes it an exercise in getting shit done.

Fortunately, unlike in the real world, our workload also allows us impressively long holidays. I strongly believe that there is more work-life balance to be found in periods of truly hard work punctuated by significant periods in which to relax and pursue purely non academic pursuits than in the drudgery of a 15 week semester with a lighter workload.

This argument can also be extended into keeping exams in the summer term. All academic calendars are designed logically so that the longest recess falls over the summer months. Whilst some courses do have exams that fall in January or February, the movement of all yearly exams to this period would either require the movement of the academic year or an increase in the need to revise at least some course material over the summer months. Our current system is the one that allows the largest portion of summer to be enjoyed most fully, even if it requires some sacrifices in Trinity Term.