“I adore Clinton; you know, naughty but nice with a very sexy voice,” said Elizabeth Hurley in a recent interview with the Sunday Times Style magazine. “John Major was terribly dry and funny in the flesh too.”

Hurley has made a lot of mistakes in her life. She dated Hugh Grant, she starred in Bedazzled and she wore a dress held together by giant safety-pins. But her assessment of the former British Prime Minister, when I met him this Wednesday at the Union, was disconcertingly accurate.

It goes without saying that he’s not the most popular, the most memorable or the most sexy of British politicians – let alone former leaders. When you google his name, only the first few results actually link to John Major, Prime Minister from 1990 to 1997. From then on in he’s mixed up with John Major Jenkins, ‘ a leading independent researcher on ancient Mesoamerican cosmology’.

When I called round PPE-studying friends as part of my recon before his evening speech, the most certain thing they could tell me was, “He’s the one after Thatcher but before Blair.” For a generation whose political consciousness came into being one May morning in 1997 when it bounded down the stairs in New Labour-red pyjamas to ask, “Mummy, did Tony win?” (just me?) Major is a sort of political blind spot. Famously wet and wimpy – “What I don’t understand…is why such a complete wimp like me keeps winning everything” is one of his more famous quotes – it’s hard even to get through a youtube video of one of his speeches.

In person though, speaking to the crowd at the Union and one-on-one at drinks after, he is every bit as dry and funny as Liz Hurley would have us believe. And he’s not just out on the after-dinner speech circuit either. He’s campaigning for Cameron’s Tories, and angrier with Gordon Brown’s government that you would ever expect. Having famously promised that in fifty years time, Britain would still be “the country of long shadows on cricket grounds, warm beer, invincible green suburbs,” you would imagine John Major – Sir John as of 2005 – would be devoting his retirement to sipping said warm beer and bowling with an amateur team on said cricket grounds. Not a bit. Well, maybe a little; at least one cricketing story makes it in to his talk. But for the moment his mission is undeniably to turn the country blue again.

In the Q&A following his speech, one of the questions picks him up on his “theatrical” denunciation of the last eleven years of Labour government.
“Theatrical?” he says to me over a glass of wine later, “of course it was theatrical. My father was a trapeze artist”.

The speech begins on a light note, calling the G7 “one of the most useless meetings God ever devised”, before moving on to an anecdote about his argument with Mikhael Gorbachev over whose nation was the most patient. Things soon get more serious, though. “We’ll find out in nine days’ time how patient the British nation is,” he says, “Whether it’s had enough of a government who is prepared to comprehensively dismiss them, and elect in turn a government that can take decisions to put right what Labour put wrong”.

He talks about the state of the Treasury when he handed over to Blair’s government in 1997, and claims that it was in the best form any incoming government had found it since the First World War. “I have to tell you Gordon Brown wasn’t very impressed: ‘What do you want me to do?’, he said, ‘Send a letter of thanks?’ Well if he did it hasn’t arrived.” Beat. “I knew I should have privatised the post office”.

His voice is soft and easy to listen to, a bit like the narrator of Noggin the Nog, even when delivering the most damning of his verdicts on Labour’s years of rule. “It cannot surely be a coincidence that every single Labour government this country has ever been cursed with has left behind a wrecked economy and masses of debt. They come in when the coffers are full and they leave when the coffers are empty…New Labour was a fraud from the very start. The political equivalent of pyramid selling. And Gordon has just run off with our money.”

He paints such a grim picture of the country – the state of the economy, the erosion of civil liberties, the moral vacuum at the heart of New Labour – it’s almost enough to induce a ‘I’ve never voted Tory before, but…’ moment in even the most die hard Labour supporters.

But then, there are a couple of reminders of the less desirable side of his own party. When he lays into the hollowness of New Labour’s political slogans – “‘Whiter than white’, well, that didn’t stand the test of time. ‘Tough on Crime’…All of them with the backbone of a marshmallow” – it’s hard not to be reminded of his own ‘Back to Basics’ campaign which so spectacularly backfired on his own cabinet, the culmination of which was the revelation of his own affair with Edwina Currie (speaking later this term at the Oxford Union. Where else, indeed?).

He also attacks the media image of the Conservative party. It’s certainly true that the ‘Tory Toff’ image could not be further from his own story, which documents the rise from Brixton boy, “living in near slum poverty in the middle of a large inner city…in two rooms as a family of five” to leader of the country, and those of many others in his party. But the Oxford location of the speech provides an inconvenient reminder of Cameron’s Bullingdon days, and the differences between the party’s current and former leaders, not to mention the rest of the would-be Tory shadow cabinet.

As I find out after the speech, Major believes he was treated differently as Prime Minister because of his University of Life- rather than University of Oxford-education; never by the political classes, but rather by the media. “Oh, Oxford does make a difference, absolutely. It’s more about attitude than ability, about having the confidence to run the country. I was never treated differently by the party; sometimes by the media, having been to Westminster and Oxford themselves, who couldn’t understand why a boy who left school at fifteen is Prime Minister”.

John Major in the flesh is the sort of person you can imagine voting for. It shouldn’t be surprising, considering he spent seven years running the country, but somehow it is.

He says he knows his place though. When I ask how much input he has in the current Conservative campaign, he tells me he’s still in contact with David Cameron but rarely offers advice on election tactics. “I don’t offer advice unless anyone asks for it, though I give it if it’s needed,” he says. “It’s a different world now, anyway”.

For someone who studies and admires the ancient Greek and Roman philosophers, as I do, it is disquieting to reflect that these deeply humane ancestors of our own moral thinking were also unquestioning slave-owners. How should we react? Condemn them as wholeheartedly as we do those scientists and other intellectuals who threw in their lot with the Nazis? Or resort to relativism, and maintain that, given the moral code of the time, slave-owning was justified? Neither option is attractive. We must retain our right to condemn slavery wherever and whenever it has occurred, but at the same time recognize that we do not do so from a privileged moral vantage point of our own. History helps us to view ourselves as others will.

What, then, will our descendants justifiably blame us for, as we do the ancient slave-owners? Almost certainly top of their list will be the fact that we continued to trash the environment for them even when well aware of the irreversible consequences of our actions. And by ‘descendants’ I don’t mean some remote future civilization: I’m talking about your grandchildren. There is a near-consensus among climate-scientists that our present levels of greenhouse emissions threaten catastrophic damage, with the danger that large parts of Europe will become uninhabitable. Inevitably some people are self-deluding enough to disbelieve the science. But how about those, including university academics, who are aware of what we are doing, yet are as unwilling to contemplate giving up their comforts as the ancient slave-owners were theirs?

The most damaging thing you can do to the planet in a single legal act is get on a plane. In an international return flight the emission equivalents per passenger typically run into literally tonnes of carbon. And academics fly a lot. Do they have to? To an extent, yes. International conferences, guest lectures and research visits are the adrenaline of academic life. But can any academics truthfully say that they could not halve their flying if it mattered enough to them to do so, by taking the train more often, for example, and by asking themselves which journeys are actually necessary? Many conferences attract participants by their exotic locations as much as by their intellectual value. Almost anybody can find a way of flying less.

Back to the philosop­­hical slave-owners. We would have been unimpressed, no doubt, to learn that they had merely tried to cut down on their number of slaves. But with the harmful practices that pose such an acute threat to our environment the goal is not abolition, it is radical retrenchment. Who will set the needed example of restraint, if our intellectual leaders do not?

If the first rule of a political campaign is ‘never give a sucker an even break’, David Cameron has clearly failed to abide by it.

In agreeing to prime ministerial debates, Cameron gave Gordon Brown, once in a seemingly hopeless situation, the chance to revitalise his campaign. And, even if he has not made the most of it, the leader of the Liberal Democrats, Nick Clegg, has capitalised on an unprecedented opportunity for his party.By mere virtue of taking part in the debates, the Lib Dems were always going to be the winners. The chance to appear on equal footing with Labour and the Conservatives in election debates is one Paddy Ashdown or Charles Kennedy would have relished. Catapulted into the public eye like never before, the Lib Dems’ electoral aims have gone from clinging onto the 62 seats they won in 2005 to going on the offensive with theree even being talk of breaking the 100-seat barrier.

The similarities between Cameron and Tony Blair are oft remarked upon. Yet in one crucial way, Cameron failed to learn from Tony Blair. In 1997, when Blair looked as inevitable a Prime Minister as has ever existed, there was a great deal of pressure for prime ministerial debates, but Blair managed to avoid them. He simply had nothing to gain, being almost certain to win. Debates bring the candidates closer together: hence it has invariably been those trailing in the polls who have called for them.

Cameron may come to regret his performances in these debates, and, if he does not do so, see them as a key reason for his failure to win the general election. But if such a scenario manifests itself, he might reflect ruefully that, if his debating performances were less-than-perfect, the more fundamental error was his being in the debates at all.

Feminism. One word capable of eliciting shudders of revulsion from the least squeamish of women, and reducing grown men to tears. I can see you conjuring up images of hairy legs, burning bras and men-hating. Bear with me, I promise the editors will have removed as much self-righteousness as possible.

Feminism in Oxford is a disappointingly dispersed phenomenon. While dealing with one issue at a time is a very sensible route in terms of achieving concrete goals, these divisions are, I believe, part of the problem: we are failing to see the bigger picture. As with the feminist movement in general, we see activism here in a range of separate areas, boxed off and compartmentalised. There is something missing in this issue-by-issue treatment: I want a narrative, a causal route from this property of ‘femaleness’ to the disadvantages that come with being landed with it – what is it about being a woman that makes you disproportionately vulnerable to a range of specific pressures, problems and inequalities?

Crucially, we can’t get to this narrative while feminism is a niche market; we need to consider the experiences, expectations and pressures of gender stereotypes on everyone – men and women, feminist and non-feminist alike. I don’t think reclaiming the word ‘feminism’ is as important as getting people to think about the issues we are talking about – I agree with Louise Livesey, who is playing a key role in co-ordinating the Oxford Feminist Network, that it is ‘not what people call themselves, but what they do’. I would even add to this, that it is not only what people do that matters, but what they have to say. Feminists need to be vastly more inclusive: our duty is not only to raise awareness of where problems lie, but to connect these problems through paying attention to the views and opinions of those we feel instinctively inclined to disagree with.

The first step will be dropping the stereotypes we have imposed on ourselves since the battles of the 70s. In trying to avoid the difficult stereotypes of old, many Oxford women have fallen into new, and equally debilitating, moulds. We have ‘empowered’ women, who don’t need feminism – women can freely embrace their sex appeal now, we’re told. Lipstick and heels are all part of the sexual liberation. On the other side of the coin we keep feminists hidden away, and conveniently wheeled out to complain about particular issues. Even feminists are encouraged to play a particular role; we should be softly spoken and consensus-seeking, because women who forcefully argue about ‘women’s issues’ are labelled as aggressive or anti-men.

My problem is not, take note, with lipstick or quiet voices: I don’t think feminists have to look or behave in a particular way, and on a health and safety note I certainly wouldn’t advocate setting fire to your underwear. What I do take issue with is the quiet acceptance that these are the only roles women should publicly play: out of fear of being landed with the terrifying ‘angry feminist’ label, we seek protection behind more acceptable guises.

At the moment gender equality is a niche concern, and feminism is an amusing eccentricity. Until we return to the premise that scrutinising basic gender roles is the solution to combating various other social problems, we will fail to draw in the crowds, and until we embrace the idea that being passionate about addressing these concerns does not have to mean being tarred with the ‘angry feminist’ brush, we are going to fail to harness the argumentative power of the political men and women within our midst.

Let’s not be afraid of getting angry. Being an angry feminist does not mean you are aggressive or irrational, it means you are bothered by the way things are, and are not afraid to show it. What if we forgot for a few minutes that women are meant to be compromisers and men are inescapably more aggressive and let loose a good healthy argument? I think the results would be enlightening.