( I have revived this blog, where I lasted posted 10 years' ago, so I could post this)
I arrived at Oxford University in 1985, a Dorothy having slain the Wicked Witch of bullying and sexual harassment by my history teacher and a group of boys at my very ordinary state grammar school. I had no lion, scarecrow or tin man to accompany me as I was the only one to come up to Oxford from my school that year, but I soon found fellow Dorothys in search of a home – a gothic punk from a comprehensive in Surrey whose parents worked in the Tesco’s factory there, and a shy North London Jewish girl whose terrifying mother had given her a frumpy name and a frumpy wardrobe.
I also met some tin men - heartless or pretending to be, with axes to grind. Many of these are now in positions of power or influence.
To get to Oxford University if you are a Dorothy or a Cowardly Lion, the curtain has to be twitched back a little, to reveal the reality and give you courage to apply. In my case the curtain was lifted by a trip to the college I ended up at, organised by the very same history teacher who had also insisted on kissing me and holding my hand. In my gothic punk friend’s case, she was encouraged by a French teacher, an Oxford graduate herself, who recognised her brilliance, and knew that Oxford academia would be rather thrilled by her ability to compare Jackie Collins to Baudelaire. My frumpy name friend turned out to be not so alone – there was a contingent of what became known as the North London Trendies whom she knew from school days, but they were all at much more fashionable colleges than our rugger bugger one.
In my search for a home, I found myself in the wobbly intersection of several Venn diagrams of Oxford tribes. The North London Trendies were mostly active in OUDS (the dramatic society) or journalism. We went to the OUDS cuppers, and watched Patrick Marber crush the hopes of freshers with blank faced comments such as “the thing about comedy is it should be funny”. We cried with laughter at Armando Ianucci in some dimly lit basement talking about rabbits.
My parents (both academics) had insisted on paying for me to become a member of the Oxford Union. I went to several debates in the first year, baffled by Boris Johnson’s habit of wearing odd socks, in love like most of the female members with the blond earnestness of Simon Stevens (now running the NHS). The miners’ strike had come to an end earlier that year and my miners’ support group badges went into a drawer somewhere, but we thrilled to Derek Hatton and Ken Livingstone’s passionate speeches and I tried to make an attack on the sneering radical Rightness of a history don, but ended up becoming too emotional to make sense. I realised then that I was not cut out for a political career, but continued to attend debates, until eventually I attended the dinners beforehand too, as a guest, since by the time of my third year, many of the people on the Oxford Union podium were actually my friends.
In the first year, the curtain was still firmly down. I simply felt lucky to be at Oxford, in such a friendly college, and to find that it was true, as my parents always promised me, that I would find like minded people and not feel such a freak any more.
The curtain was lifted in the second year, when I ended up living with the North London Trendies in Jericho and going out with a boy from Balliol. I wrote an article about the joys of shopping for dusters in Boswells, the local independent department store, and showed it to Nick Denton (who ended up founding Gawker). He was King of the North London Trendies, and as the editor of The Isis in the Michaelmas term, was temporarily bunked up at our house, raising advertising revenue. To my surprise he really liked the piece, published it and asked me to become news editor.
My fellow news editor was Emma Tucker (now deputy editor at the Times). She suggested, in the summer term of the second year, when we bumped into each other in the Co-op, that we should run for editorship for the Michaelmas term of my third year. It had never occurred to me that I would be eligible for one of the top Oxford student positions, besides which, the girly swot in me worried what impact it would have on my Finals. My economics tutor (a rare female in that subject) did indeed react by saying “that’s the end of any chance you have of getting a First”. I was edging towards becoming a scarecrow - in search of my brain, and following in my parents' footsteps on the road to academia.
Emma persuaded me to stand for election, pointing out that it wouldn’t take too much to prove more competent than some of the other people who had run for editorship – one team had promised to interview the very dead Stevie Smith, after all.
The day we were elected was a brilliant blinding summer’s day or at least so it still seems in my memory. The curtain had come up, and revealed that there really wasn’t much to be scared of behind it. I could call Oxford my home. I rushed back to my college and went up to a group of friends in the quad and told them. “What’s Isis?” said one. And then they all took me off to the Buttery to celebrate.
I suppose I should not have been surprised that they didn’t know or care about Isis. I was one of the very few people that intersected between the college social group and the North London Trendies. By then my North London Trendy house had become a bit of a slum and I often stayed over at my Balliol boyfriend’s at the weekend, which meant the joy of Balliol breakfasts, shared with a basking Boris, who had finally made it to President of the Union the previous term. He and my boyfriend (a very brainy scarecrow who later became a political journalist) would argue for hours whilst I hid behind the colour supplements.
Most of my social life was spent with my Balliol boyfriend and his Balliol gang, who had not known each other before college. They thought they were pretty diverse in terms of nationality and background, so were bemused to discover they had been labelled the jeunesse d’oree of Balliol. It was something to be careful about, as Olivia Channon had been found dead of a heroin overdose at in the rooms of Gottfried von Bismarck in Christ Church not long before and the shadow of Brideshead Revisited which had been on the TV when we were in our mid-teens still hung over us, sickly sweet.
They were heady times nonetheless, but Toby Young was always there to remind us how second rate we all really were. In my naivety, I had no idea who he was, and didn’t really understand what drove him to be so unpleasant and the self-appointed arbiter of excellence. I later discovered that his father Michael Young was practically considered a saint in North London liberal circles, having set up the Open University, and invented the term meritocracy – yet had also used his influence to get his son into Oxford, when he had flunked his O levels and his A levels. It was a hard act to define yourself against.
I thought we were a meritocracy, at least the people that I knew. One of the outer circle members of the Balliol gang, like me, not at Balliol and also, like me, in the year below, was Michael Gove, someone I still feel fond of and admire to this day, despite strong political differences. He too I would imagine had the same curtain thrown back, blinding light moment at Oxford that I had, but even more so, as the adopted son of an Aberdonian fishmonger, when he became Oxford Union President.
In retrospect, there were many tin men at Oxford, in search of a cause, never quite finding their hearts and armed with axes. Many, like Toby Young and Boris Johnson, didn't put their axe down after graduation. Slaughtering sacred cows of the liberal establishment was just too much fun. It seems as if Toby Young did find a heart, in educational reform, but rather too late to undo the damage.
Michael Gove had a go with his axe in the early days. At Oxford he delighted in winding people up with talk of his Filipino manservant in speeches to the Union or putting on a dog collar as a very convincing, kleptomaniac vicar. After Oxford he gave the axe another outing in the deliberately contrarian TV series A Stab in the Dark. But as fellow presenter Tracey McLeod describes, he was unfailingly polite even then, off the screen, which seems to be another characteristic of many of the tin men, with the exception of Toby Young.
I would classify Jeremy Hunt as another tin man, without the openly contrarian stance. It would seem from yesterday's reshuffle that Jeremy Hunt has found his cause, and I hope his heart, in reforming the NHS. He has displayed his ruthless determination in refusing to give up his job, and indeed adding social care to it. I bet he was again admirably polite in pursuit of this.
Despite - or maybe repelled by - his gentlemanliness, I thought I remembered edging away from Jacob Rees-Mogg, at the bar at the Oxford Union. But this cannot have been the case, as he started at Oxford in the year that I graduated. But it may be that I met him when I returned to Oxford on a visit. There were plenty of people like him though, delighting in the arcane side of the university and willing to use it as a weapon to get one over others. Many of the tin men learnt at Oxford that a stab in the back is more useful than an openly wielded axe.
So this then is the Oxford Myth, the phrase then used by Rachel Johnson (another contemporary and fellow Isis editor) as the title of her first book, to which Toby Young contributed. It is a myth and not a myth. British society (or at least politics and journalism) is run to a large extent by the tin men I knew then. Or maybe it isn’t really, and I didn’t really know them, but am now adding to the mythologizing. Many of them did not need to have the curtain drawn back to reveal that there is little to be scared of and life is for the taking. They had the privilege of a well-connected background, or they had a much bigger axe to grind than I and all the Dorothys, scarecrows and lions who have not gone on to run the nation. We Dorothys look down at our feet when we hear news of our more high profile contemporaries, worry again about the limitations of our talent and our ambitions, and realise our ruby slippers have faded away. But I hope we have all found a home, at least, and know where our heart is.
