Which post-war Oxford-educated prime minister was the most effective public speaker?

Oxford University's near-monopoly of political leadership

10 of the 14 (71%) UK prime-ministers between 1945 and 2019 were educated at Oxford University. One, Gordon Brown was educated at university in Scotland. None went to Cambridge, Durham, Manchester, London or any other English university. 

Winston Churchill, James Callaghan and John Major became prime-minister without having had any formal higher education.

At the European Speechwriters Network conference in April, held at Queen's College, Oxford, I showed the following clip twice) before inviting the audience to rank the speakers according to which ones they thought the most effective.

It only went back as far as Harold Wilson - receiving an honorary degree at the then new university of Lancaster - in the 1970s. But the time available for my  presentation wouldn't have been long enough to include every Oxford-educated PM since Clement Attlee.

This is the short clip that I showed and you now have the chance to do what the original audience did and decide for yourselves which were the most most effective speakers:

The next question is to decide on how each of the above compared with all the others?

1. Clement Attlee (Labour), University College, modern history

                      2. Sir Anthony Eden (Conservative), Christchurch College, modern languages

3. Harold Macmillan, Balliol College, Latin, Greek and ancient history

3. Alec Douglas-Home, Christchurch College, modern history

5. Harold Wilson, Jesus College  (PPE*), then Fellow of University College

6. Edward Heath, Balliol College (PPE*) and organ scholarship, Keble College

7. Margaret Thatcher, Somerville College. chemistry

8. Tony Blair, St John's College, law

9. David Cameron, Brasenose College, PPE*

10. Theresa May, St Hugh's College, geography

(*PPE = politics, philosophy and economics)

Best Speaker?

After watching the first clip the audience at the European Speechwriters Conference (of about 100 from different countries in Europe) awarded the gold medal to Tony Blair, the silver medal to Margaret Thatcher and bronze to David Cameron. 

Had it not been for his widely publicised attempt to unite a divided Tory party by holding (and losing) the brexit referendum, he might have beaten Thatcher to the silver medal. It was, after all, a ten-minute unscripted speech at a Conservative party conference beauty parade that had won him the leadership in the first place.

Of the other Oxonian PMs, Attlee would surely get the wooden spoon as the least inspiring  public speaker, even though he presided over some of the most important post-war innovations like the foundation of the National Health Service. 

Macmillan continued to be a brilliant speaker until he was well into his 90's. Home was apparently more interested in playing cricket than reading history at Oxford and isn't  remembered for any famous speeches.

Wilson was arguably the first PM who understood how to make the most of television. Clip 5 shows his skill at dealing with hecklers. He was the first to call TV interviewers by their first names, thereby implying that they were good friends - and making it more difficult for them to ask hostile questions. Puffing his pipe, during interviews was a neat way to buy himself more time to work out an 'impressive' answer. And, unlike all the other Oxonians, he was the only one who managed to retain his Yorkshire accent during his years in Oxford. All of which enabled him to come across as 'a man of the people'.

Although from a similar middle-class background, Edward Heath lacked Wilson's ability to appeal to a mass audience and, though he'd negotiated the UK's successful entry into the European Common Market (later the European Union), he's remembered more for his public and continuing animosity towards his successor as Tory party leader (Margaret Thatcher) than for memorable quotations or speeches.

So we are left with Blair, Thatcher and Cameron as the most impressive recent Oxonian speakers.

Will yet another Oxford graduate take over from Theresa May?

Theresa May's most famous early speech was back in 2002, when, as Tory party chairman, she warned that many voters regarded the Conservatives as 'the nasty party'.

More recently she's been heard losing her voice during her leader's speech and at prime minister's question time in the House of Commons (see this blog, 13th March, 20019).

Yesterday the conspirators won and she announced that she would be quitting the party leadership in early June - so the party and the public would have to prepare itself for yet more internecine battles between ambitious Tories bidding for the top job.

The following are already being widely mentioned as candidates. Six of the nine are Oxford graduates, three went to 'provincial' universities (Exeter, Warwick and Reading) and therefore have little or no hope of winning.

Among the Oxonians, the dark horse is Matt Hancock (Secretary of State for Health and Social Care). Unlike, Messrs. Gove, Hunt, Johnson and Raab, he went to both Oxford (dark blue) and Cambridge (light blue).

• Michael Gove, Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford (English)
• Said Javid, University of Exeter (Economics and Politics)
• Jeremy Hunt, Magdalen College, Oxford (PPE)***
• Boris Johnson, Balliol College, Oxford (Latin, Greek and Ancient History)
• Matt Hancock, Exeter College, Oxford (PPE), Christ's College, Cambridge (Economics)
• Andrea Leadsom, University of Warwick, (Politics) 
• Penny Mordant, University of Reading (Philosophy)
• Dominic Raab, Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford (Law)
• Rory Stewart, Balliol College, Oxford (PPE)

Competition

A signed copy of my book Speechmaking and Presentation Made Easy will be awarded to the first person who accurately predicts the winner.

       Starting date:  Today
       Closing date:  The day before the winner is announced

May loses vote & voice - again

During the day, I spent more time than is good for anyone watching proceedings in the House of Commons and took to Twitter a few times to note that her voice was going, going...and at this rate might soon be gone.

By the time, hours later (above), she'd lost the vote, her voice sounded  very different to what it was like at the start of her opening speech and and Philip Hammond, sitting on her left, wasn't able to rescue her with cough sweets as he'd done at a party conference when the same thing had happened (to her voice).

Will she drink enough cocoa tonight to make it fit for yet another gruelling day tomorrow???

How many skiers after Paddy Ashdown resigned as leader?

Ski-holidays revisited

In an earlier post on 19th January), I wrote about the annual Ashdown-Atkinson ski-tours and the large number of LibDem activists - including M.P.s, peers, at least one knight and lots of ordinary members like me. Many, if not most us, came with our families which meant that there could be as many as 20-30 of us being led down the pistes by our intrepid party leader.

At one point during the 1999 trip, Paddy and I were alone on a 2-seat chair-lift together - one of the only places for a private chat on such expeditions. He told me that, as you couldn't put a cigarette-paper between his politics and Tony Blair's, he was planning to quit the party leadership later that year - "...to give a new leader at least two years to establish himself and become well-known to voters before the next general election."

Although I was surprised (and less than 100% convinced by his argument), I managed not to pass his news on to anyone else, even though it became quite difficult towards the end of the holiday, after the Ashdowns and some of the others had gone home. On skiing up to a group of senior LibDems, I was greeted by "We think it's essential that Paddy leads us through the next election; what do you think."

I can't remember exactly how I replied, but it was along the lines of: "I know what you mean but I suppose it's really a  matter for him and Jane to decide."

A few weeks later, on 20th January, he announced his intention to resign the leadership of the Liberal Democrats. By August, 1999, the party had elected Charles Kennedy as their new leader.

The  next ski-holiday  

The following winter fewer than usual came on our annual ski-holiday. The Ashdowns, Atkinsons and Kenny-Levicks were all there and had a very merry time. But, although I'd notified everyone of the dates and location, none of the other LibDems were able to make it...

Birthday of two independent men, Stanley Atkinson & Paddy Ashdown

Stanley Atkinson

Paddy Ashdown

On 27th February every year, I always think of two special men, my father and Paddy Ashdown who shared the same birthday.

Then on 24th June every year, I always think of two special women with the same birthday, my mother and Jane Ashdown.

For her, yesterday, on what should have been his 78th birthday, it must have been  especially difficult to spend the first 27th February for 50+ years without his being there.

PIG-FARMING 
Of the many things Paddy and I used to talk about, one that might surprise people was pig-farming.

When his father retired from the Indian army, he went back to Northern Ireland to run a pig-farm. My father was a mixed farmer who took special pride in his pigs which were called the Burbridge pedigree Wessex saddlebacks - one of which won the supreme championship at the Great Yorkshire Show.

Danish Landrace sow

The only trouble with breeding what are now called 'traditional breeds' like Wessex saddlebacks was that, as he used to say, "Housewives are demanding leaner and leaner bacon which means that sooner or later we're going to have to abandon the pure saddleback in favour of crossing them with large whites or, better still get hold of some Danish Landraces, the Dachshunds of the pig world."

The Danes were so aware of their good luck in having a monopoly of ultra-lean bacon pigs that they did all they could to prevent the export of live Landraces.

But I digress, my father's realisation that he was going to have to go in for mass pig-production led him to Northern Ireland, where there were some pioneering pig-farmers. We went on a ferry to Belfast,  where my mother had a friend whose husband was a marine engineer working at Harland and Wolf in Belfast building the aircraft carrier HMS Eagle.

So in 1950, while he was inspecting pig-farms in Northern Ireland, my mother, brother and I stayed in Belfast as tourists, which included visits to Stormont and the shipyards.

It would be nice to think that my father had met Paddy's father on his tour of pig-farms, but the dates mean that we must have been there there before the Ashdown family came home from India.

ENLIGHTENED FARMER
Stanley Atkinson went to the King's School in Pontefract and would have dearly loved to have been allowed to stay on there a bit beyond than the then official school-leaving age of 14. But Grandpa Atkinson had other ideas, namely to make his own oldest child work on the farm for £0.00 a week. So, for the 16 years until he was 30 (when he married my mother in 1941), he worked six days a week for his keep + no wages. If he needed to go into a local town to buy new clothes (or anything else), he had to ask my grandmother to give him some cash.

By the time he reached his twenties, his frustrated brain had led him to become actively involved in attending local WEA (Worker's Education Association) lectures and, by the time my older brother and I were born, he'd amassed large numbers of non-fiction paperbacks and biographies and was genuinely self-educated.

He was also keen that his own sons would have a better education than he'd had, that they could stay at school as long as they liked and, if they passed the right exams, could go on to a university to study whatever they wanted - which is exactly what my brother and I both did.

At a time when so few youngsters went to university, our good fortune as 'sons of the soil' was itself quite exceptional. Years later, after I'd become a professional sociologist, I did a survey (from memory) of the other 50 sons of farmers I'd known as a child. Apart from my brother and me, the number of others who went to a university was one - who (surprise, surprise) was a younger son, whose older brother left school at 16 to work on and eventually take over the family farm (which is exactly what the other 94% also did).

ENLIGHTENED LOCAL POLITICIAN
For much of my childhood, Cllr. Stanley Atkinson represented Burton Salmon on the long since defunct Osgoldcross Rural District Council, of which he eventually became Chairman. Underneath our farmland were seams from a local coal mine, four miles away was a new Ferrybridge power station with chimneys and cooling towers, there was as canal and a navigable waterway (the River Aire), railways, potteries, factories and chemical works. It was, in other words, a rural district council of an area that was both urban/industrial (represented mainly by Labour trades unionists) and rural/agricultural (represented mainly by farmers). 

Although he knew that most voters assumed that all farmers were Tories, he always insisted on standing for the council as an Independent. If you asked him why, his answer was that tribal party politics had little or no relevance for the burning local issues on which members of the council made decisions. "If a Tory member backs a new bus-shelter for his village, Labour members will oppose it. If a Labour member wants street-lighting in theirs, the Conservatives will oppose it. But what really matters is what the local constituents actually want."

He was took special pride in the fact that, while he was the village's representative, they not only got both street-lighting and a new bus shelter, but new council houses as well. Because he really was  Independent Labour and Conservative councillors repeatedly elected him as their chairman. But his only attempt to graduate to the County Council was thwarted by corrupt practices elsewhere in our area where an infamous local architect with offices in Pontefract lived, namely John Poulson.

When I went canvassing for my father - knocking on local doors beyond the village, distributing leaflets (for which, as an Independent, my father had paid for himself) - the standard reply to my offer to tell them more about what a brilliant job he'd done for the Osgold Cross Rural Distract council was along the lines of: "Don't bother, son - I don't want to hear about another Poulson crony like him and never vote Tory anyway!"

The only political connection he ever had with Poulson were in his official capacity as a member of the Osgoldcross Rural District Council which had to deal with a planning permission application from him to build an extremely expensive and ultra-modern house in Darrington which ORDC had granted it (*see below line for reminder about the Poulson Affair - with thanks to Professor Robert Williams, University of Durham https://www.robertwilliams.co.uk/images/PDF/poulsonaffair.pdf).

I realise now that I was still in my teens when I first saw that being an enlightened, rational and sensible politician is no guarantee of success.

NEW INDEPENDENTS, NEW PARTY, OR AMALGAMATION WITH THE LibDems?
At a time when some Labour and Tory M.P.s have left their parties to join a new independent group (see previous blogs), I found myself wondering on their birthday how Stanley Atkinson and Paddy Ashdown would have reacted to these defections.

I'm fairly certain my Stanley Atkinson, as a long-committed Independent would have thoroughly approved of recent events, whereas Paddy Ashdown would have rather they'd joined the LibDems.

My own view, for what it's worth, is that the new Independents and the LibDems should definitely get together about getting tgdghd, who are far from what they used to be during the Ashdown leadership. But it is still a fairly efficient party with a lot of members in every part of the UK willing and able to canvas for a party that isn't Labour or Conservative.

And, without a Poulson scandal lurking in the background, it's unlikely they'd get the kind of unhelpful response that greeted me on the doorsteps when canvassing for an excellent candidate in the early 1960s.

___________________________________________

*The Poulson affair revealed a web of corrupt transactions which took place in Britain in the 1960s and 1970s and embraced dozens of councillors in numerous local authorities across the country as well as several MPs. The ensuing scandal exposed aspects of the conduct of public life which shocked and surprised many British citizens. This conduct had largely escaped the attention of both the police and the mainstream media. The Poulson Affair, if it did nothing else, helped to make claims of British assertions of superiority regarding corruption seem rather hollow.

The main figures in this drama were John Poulson, an unqualified architect from Pontefract, Yorkshire, and a key associate of his, T. Dan Smith, the leader of Newcastle City Council , and although many others were involved, these two were the ones who attracted the most public and media notoriety. 

___________________________________________

What Anna Soubry said about Theresa May on Newsnight

I used to be a BBC TV Newsnightoholic, but hardly ever watch it these days - except when there's something interesting happening in the news - like the defection of some rather sensible MPs from both the Labour and Conservative parties.

One of three MPs to quit the Conservative Party says she's "really worried" the prime minister has a "problem with immigration".

Anna Soubry, who now sits with the Independent Group, told Newsnight's Kirsty Wark: "The only reason why she will not agree to [continued membership of] the single market is because of free movement of people."

Gang of 4 grows in in interesting way

7 becomes 11 - including 3 Tories

Overnight we heard that another Labour MP, Joan Ryan had had enough of Corbyn's leadership of  her party and his feeble response to anti-Semitism - and that she's has the group of 7 independents who quit the party on Monday.

Heidi Allen,  Sarah Wollaston,  Anna Soubry

As a side-show, we also had to watch Derek Hatton, former 'Militant' (i.e. Labour PartyTrotskyist infiltrator who was expelled from Kinnock's party 30 years ago) being welcomed back into today's new model Labour party.

Today's Tory Gang of Three

The decision of three extremely articulate and effective women MPs to leave the Conservative Party is rather more interesting than the departures from Labour - because the SDP gang of four's escape from the Labour Party's left-wing extremism was not accompanied by any Tory defections.

And though the gender balance of the new Independent grouping is looking quite impressive, viewed through the eyes of an OAP, it could do with someone closer to a certain age. So who better than Soubry's neighbouring Nottinghamshire MP, than the ultra pro-European Ken Clarke???

But I suppose the big question now is whether any of the younger anti-Corbyn MPs will risk their own chances of succeeding him by resigning from the party? Andy Burnham had presumably already given up on the Corbyn-McDonnell Labour party when he resigned as Shadow Home Secretary in 2016 with intent to go back home to the North as Mayor of Greater Manchester.

As I've said before, a leadership contest between David Lammy and Yvette Cooper could restore a confidence in an erstwhile credible party. Under the current regime, however, the chances of that ever happening are - er - NIL!!!

Gangs of 4 and 7: history repeating itself???

Gang of Four, 1981

Bill Rodgers, David Owen,
Roy Jenkins, Shirley Williams

The original 'gang of four', Jiang Qing, Zhang Chunqiao, Yao Kenyan and Wang Hongwenan were prominent in orchestrating Chairman Mao's cultural revolution, 1966-76. So when four leading figures in the Labour Party set up the SDP in 1981, it was hardly surprising that the media dubbed them the 'gang of four'.

The reason they did so was that the January 1981 Wembley conference had committed the Labour Party to unilateral nuclear disarmament and withdrawal from the European Economic Community.

They also believed that Labour had become too left-wing and had been infiltrated at constituency party level by Trotskyist factions whose views and behaviour they considered to be at odds with the Parliamentary Labour Party and Labour voters.

If Militant and the far left made Labour unelectable for 17 years, Momentum looks like doing much the same to today's Corbyn-McDonnell left-wing Labour Party.