Economics Tutors, Their Students and PPE's Influence in Post-War Britain
Twenty-eight British Prime Ministers have been Oxford graduates; three studied PPE: Harold Wilson, Edward Heath and David Cameron. In addition, economics tutors influenced a generation of Chancellors of the Exchequer and other senior British politicians from the 1930s onwards.
Those who received the PPE degree between 1923 and 1939 reads like a Who’s Who of modern British politicians, public servants and academics, along with prominent personalities of other nationalities (see Young and Lee 1993: 81-82). Moreover, in the post-war period, as many Rhodes Scholars opted for PPE (there were no Scholars appointed during 1940-1946), the result was an increasing number of leading US academics and others who were PPE-trained (see Schaeper and Schaeper 2010: chapter 9).Regarding PPE economics tutors, the pre-war group had a significant postwar impact as follows. Robbins tutored Evan Durbin and Hugh Gaitskell; Harrod tutored Nigel Lawson; Hall tutored Anthony Crosland; Fraser, Opie and Allen tutored Wilson and Heath; and Balogh tutored Roy Jenkins. However, there are some qualifications to this influence. For example, in his first term at Oxford, Gaitskell went to Robbins for tutoring in elementary economics. Although Robbins was a critic of Labour, he ‘enjoyed tutoring’ the future leader of the Party (Howson 2011: 128, 131).
Jenkins wrote in his autobiography that Balogh ‘was by far the best teacher I had’, even if Balogh was shocked by the First Class degree that Jenkins obtained (see Jenkins 1991: 42-43). Jenkins went on to recall that while he was recruited ‘as an economist’ after the war to work for the British Industrial and Commercial Financial Corporation, he was ‘a product of the Oxford PPE school with no...specialist training’ in economics (ibid.: 60). That Jenkins decided to pursue PPE is not surprising since, as his biographer noted, the degree had been the ‘course of choice for aspiring politicians’ as early as the 1930s (Campbell 2014: 25). Opie tutored both Wilson and Heath.
According to one Wilson biographer, Opie rated Wilson higher than Heath (see Ziegler 1993: 21), and indeed Wilson had a promising start to his career as an Oxford don. In the view of another of Wilson’s biographers, if he had not been seconded into war work, later deciding to go into politics rather than academia, he might well have had a distinguished, albeit unorthodox, academic career, along the lines of Kaldor or Balogh, who later advised him as Prime Minister (see Smith 1964: 72). On the other hand, some tutors had a direct influence on the formation of their student’s ideas. Reisman wrote in his study of Crosland, who was tutored by Hall: ‘It may have made a difference that Crosland was writing his Oxford essays on supply and demand for a Trinity tutor who, coincidentally, was himself a Labour Party man' at the time (Reisman 1997: 69). Crosland, in turn, tutored Anthony Wedgwood Benn in economics while at Oxford (see ibid.: 8).Perhaps the most outstanding evidence in support of the influence of PPE in post-war Britain and up to the present is to be found in the February 2017 Guardian listing of just some of those who have studied the degree. The list includes former UK Prime Ministers; Deputy Prime Ministers, Chancellors, Foreign, Education, Health, Justice, Energy, and Work and Pensions Secretaries; UK Party Leaders; four non-UK Prime Ministers (two Australian, one Pakistan, one Myanmar); one US President; numerous economics and political journalists, columnists, editors and a media mogul. Whether or not this is a measure of the success of PPE economics per se is a moot point. It is, however, an indication of the success of PPE as founded, that is, as a degree designed, in the early 1920s, for the future leaders of Britain and the world.