Non-lefties: The isolated minority in varsities

Afew columns ago, I told the mortifying story of how I totally died at the Oxford Union. Today I’m going to tell you how I managed to avoid the same fate on a more recent trip to the Cambridge Union, where I opposed the motion: “This house would open its doors to refugees.”

Partly, I was just better prepared. One of the benefits of a publicspeaking disaster is that it makes you particularly loath ever to repeat the horror. I can’t say I spent any longer on my speech. What I did do, though, was coordinate much more with the rest of my team (ex-MEP Godfrey Bloom, current MEP Roger Helmer, economist Alasdair Macleod) so that we knew what we were all going to say. This forced me to write my speech a week early.

Then there is the simple fact that Cambridge is a much better-mannered place than Oxford. It’s not that the undergraduates are any less left-wing. But Cantabrigians are more fastidious, austere and thoughtful than impetuous, thrusting, ostentatious Oxonians, and are consequently much less prone to shouting down their opponents.

But the main reason it went so much better is that I went in fully expecting to lose. (As indeed my team did lose, big time, by a margin of about 90 to 10.) There’s no stupid voice in your head going: “May be if I smile sweetly enough I can make them like me.” Instead you think: “Sod ’em!” You’re going to end up face-down in the dust, whatever you do, but at least you can take a few of the bastards with you.

I’m amazed that I was naive enough to expect otherwise at Oxford. But the thing people don’t realise about me is that in real life I’m a really, really nice, sweetnatured, person. So when I stood on the debating floor that time in Oxford and tried to put all my listeners at ease by opening with an ad-libbed quip about Aids, I genuinely thought in my deluded imagination: “Ha, I’m going to win over these kids with my engaging mix of charm and no-nonsense, tell-itlike-it-is right-wing politics, just you see…” This illusion lasted for all of the split-second it took before the boos and hisses began.

Has anyone ever attempted to quantify just how incorrigibly leftwards our great universities have drifted? In the bar afterwards I met five out of the total of 14 undergrads I calculated had voted for us. One — as a gesture of defiance — was dressed in cords, tweed jacket and Viyella shirt. Thirty years ago, people with their politics would have been, while not the majority, at least part of a sizeable minority. Today, they could scarcely have seemed more freakish and isolated if they’d turned up in doublet and hose. Like Catholics in Elizabethan England, they must congregate discreetly, only expressing their faith openly when they can be sure they are in likeminded company. The persecution isn’t always overt, at least not in Cambridge. But there’s little doubt that they’re the one group which doesn’t get the perk of special privileges for its minority status.

This stultifying conformity of political opinion in modern university culture really ought to worry anyone who cares about our country’s intellectual future. It’s not the doctrinaire left-wingery that’s the problem so much as its closedmindedness.

My side’s speeches weren’t at all bad; certainly a lot more eloquent, and accurate than the opposition’s. But I’ve no doubt that even had we combined the oratory of Churchill and the brilliance of Einstein, we would still have lost by about the same 90 to 10 ratio.

When I first experienced this at that Oxford debate, I thought it must be an aberration. As I sat listening to the speech given by Alan Rusbridger, I remember musing gleefully to myself: “We’ve won this one. No way are kids bright enough to have got into Oxford going to be swayed by this kind of turgid tripe. It’s an insult to their intelligence.”

What I now realise, having gone through the same process at Cambridge, is that, no, this is how it is. If you’re representing the liberalleft side on any given proposition, then frankly you could fart your way, through the telephone directory and still be greeted like Caesar dragging Vercingetorix through Rome in chains. If you’re on the “wrong” side of the argument then it’s morituri te salutant.

“Why do you do this?” asked a student journalist from the Tab. “Because even if I can make just one person change their mind it’s worth it.” And thanks to the rest of you, Cambridge undergrads, for at least not wearing your hatred quite so openly…