Does the PM’S geography degree explain everything?

Is the problem with Theresa May the fact she was a geographer? Prominent politicians are often judged against the subjects they studied during their university days. Boris Johnson still makes good use of classical references. David Cameron is arguably the archetypal PPE graduate. Perhaps it was reading history that gave Gordon Brown his gloomy sense of destiny.

But the study of geography – as read by our current Prime Minister – has few positive connotations. It tends to be routinely dismissed as “advanced colouring-in”, a subject so incidental it gets taught at school by PE teachers in their spare time. And this week, Dan Hicks, professor of Contemporary Archaeology at Oxford, asked on social media: “How much of this current mess comes from our current Prime Minister having been trained in old school quantitative geography?”

As a geography graduate myself, I have good reason to be unnerved by attacks on the PM’S degree, although I wouldn’t go quite as far as defending geography as an academic discipline (like her, I only achieved a “Desmond”, or 2:2). But it’s not a question to be dismissed out of hand, either. By the time I reached the geography department at Cambridge in the late Eighties, it was a bit of a fagend of a discipline. Its tastier bits had been consumed by natural sciences, leaving the remaining practitioners suffering from an identity crisis, pumping out sad papers with titles like “Whither geography?” and “What is geography?”. It would be unsurprising if graduates were afflicted by paralysing indecision.

Geography had also become a repository for Marxists. My degree certificate really ought to say “applied Marxism”, given that it involved reading impenetrable texts by then-fashionable Lefties like Manuel Castells and Claude Levi-strauss. As much as one could discern even a nugget of an idea from their writings, it was: global capitalism is impoverishing and disempowering the world’s poor – a position which has become everharder to sustain as global inequality has declined over the past three decades.

Does any of this affect Theresa May’s ability as Prime Minister? I doubt it. A student who absorbed large parts of my geography course would have ended up more like Venezuela worshipping Jeremy Corbyn than Theresa May. Then again, Mrs May’s experience at Oxford a decade earlier may have been a little lighter on Marxism. For one thing, her lecturer in political geography, John Patten, was to become a Cabinet minister in Mrs Thatcher’s government. One of the questions on her finals paper asked, intriguingly given the subsequent direction of the EU, “What are the geographical prerequisites for a successful federal structure?” Did the young Miss Brasier mention the backstop?

Prof Hicks wondered whether the fact that Mrs May would have been taught something called spatial analysis – where cities and countries were modelled as if they were molecules – led to her “parochial obsession with national borders”. Well, maybe. But I’d venture a more likely explanation. Perhaps, in fact, the problem was that Mrs May’s studies didn’t rub off on her much at all, and like me she spent too much of her time at university on other things – which would explain the 2:2. Her stubborness and lack of imagination in coming up with a Brexit strategy, meanwhile, can only be explained by character flaws, not her education.