Ministry of Defence | Defence News | MOD confirms loss of recruitment data

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Ian Batten wrote:

>... the typical Tory front-bencher 
> attended one of our better public schools, has a degree in PPE or 
> similar from the better colleges of our better Universities,
[...]
> The Labour Party, however, is full of people with non-degrees from 
> second-rate institutions 

FWIW a brief trawl through the ever-reliable Wikipedia leads me 
to believe that the current Labour front bench has at least 
seven degrees from Oxford, mostly PPE. "At least" because I got 
bored quite quickly so gave up about two thirds of the way 
through. And three each from Cambridge and LSE, and a couple 
from Edinburgh and other London colleges. As well as  Glasgow, 
Leeds, Sussex and Aberdeen. Also Harvard, U Michigan and U 
Pennsylvania in the USA.

You can accuse them of having too many PPEs, and too many 
lawyers, but not of having gone to "second rate" institutions. 
OK one of them went to Trent Poly, but that's about it for 
"second rate" institutions.

It might have been a good idea to have at least one with some 
background in science though..

 > I bring you Stephen Byers as a prime example,
 > but there are many others.

Stephen who? Remind me which high office Gordon Brown has 
appointed Stephen Byers to?

> Having to choose between clever people I 
> disagree with and less clever people I agree with is hard.  But when it 
> comes to running a regime, to basic managerialism, clever civil servants 
> will find it harder to pull the wool over the eyes of Michael Portillo 
> than they will over Stephen Byers.

As neither of them is a minister that is irrelevant.

Anyway, elected politicians are not meant to be managers, they 
are meant to be representatives.  They do too much managing as 
it is. That's what the civil servants are for. Amongst all those 
PPEs and lawyers there is one - just one - who worked as a 
postman when he left school. That makes this cabinet just a tiny 
bit more representative than some others.

And the cleverest and best-educated cabinet this country ever 
had was  probably Harold Wilson's first.  Did they do that much 
better?