Oxford in the 1980s was well-photographed, and as a consequence we have several contemporaneous images of a young William Hague. He went up to Magdalen College in 1979, to read (inevitably) Politics, Philosophy and Economics. Let it not be said he didn’t know how to have fun though: an image of him bopping in evening dress is now preserved forever. But the best is more sedate. Hague is at the Oxford Union, the university’s neo-gothic debating society, and looks it. Winged lapels; loose, thickly knotted bowtie; three shiny buttons on each flank of his tailcoat.
The two young men to either side of him look like standard Union apparatchiks, or “hacks” as they’re known. One, wide grin and swept hair; the other bespectacled, taking himself much too seriously to be taken seriously by anyone else. But Hague – resting his arms casually on a wooden chair, neatly framed by the arched window and bound Union records behind – is different. He has – what else can we call it? – the air of an arrogant young man with something to be arrogant about.
This was the peak of Hague’s university career: President of the Union, always a promising milestone on the way to a career in British politics. But it is also an image from the lost era of the Oxford of which Hague was part leader and author. This was the crucible for the generation of Conservative politicians visited on Britain in Hague’s wake: Cameron, Osborne, Boris. It was a place of wilful opulence and splashed cash, of the upper-class vandal and the Brideshead revival. And it is a very different Oxford to the one that Hague will now return to as its new chancellor, the place, he insists, which holds his “heart and soul”.
What happened to Oxford in the 1980s? The decades before had been a period of levelling, when grammar schoolboys jostled in its quads. William Waldegrave, a Conservative of an earlier and greater vintage, recently told me that he was barely aware of the Bullingdon Club when he was at the university in the late 1960s. But by the coming of Thatcher – with Jeremy Irons and Anthony Andrews pouting over each other’s incurable ennui on telly, and a resurgence of public-school boys in the student body – the university began to regentrify. It was the counter-reformation to the age of meritocracy. As Tina Brown put it at the time, speaking to the reporters dispatched to photograph people like Hague, it was “fashionable again to be rich and smart”.
The trend was hardly homogenous, but it was intense and class-bound. Toby Young, an undergraduate at the time, drew a distinction between the “stains” (aspirational middle-class arrivals) and the glamorous, monied “socialites”, who dominated the university’s social life and political institutions. State-educated William Hague came from a comparably humble background. But he’d already been heralded as the Tory Boy of his age when he addressed the Conservative Party Conference in 1977 aged just 16. When he packed his dinner jacket into his trunk two years later and made his way to Magdalen, he knew which set he’d be joining.
Much has and hasn’t changed about the British class system in the decades since. But flaunted poshness is most definitely out. As Aaron Reeves and Sam Friedman show in their excellent recent book, Born To Rule, the contemporary upper class takes great pains to be mousy and unassuming. The aristocratic ebullience, and wilful foppishness of Oxford in the 1980s now looks more like a last party than a social revival.
Within Oxford itself, in the 1990s and 2000s, university trends came and went, most of them apolitical, and not worth photographing. However, since the mid-2010s a real political subculture has taken root. It has possibly mirrored the changing composition of the university: in 2000 around half of the university’s intake came from state schools; now it’s more than two-thirds. But a generally progressive politics also became an ambient fashion, intensely hostile to any display of class arrogance. This smothered social divisions rather than solving them: one of the attractions of identity politics was that anyone could play, regardless of background. But its egalitarian spirit was undeniable, and the braying toffishness of the 1980s is dead now, the anxious wealthy doing their utmost to look like everyone else.
In 2017, just months before I went to university (not Oxford alas, but somewhere rather similar), a student dressed in white tie was filmed burning a £20 note in front a homeless man. The incident obviously became a campus and national scandal. But for years a very similar stunt – though costlier, involving a £50 note – was rumoured to be an entry-level initiation for the Bullingdon Club. The Bullingdon itself is now said to be effectively dormant, with the Oxford Conservatives banning its members from joining in 2018, severing a link personified by that 1980s generation.
In retrospect, Britain at large enjoyed something of its own posh revival in the last decade or so, with our Etonian prime ministers and Downton Abbey on ITV. When Hague enjoyed his successful political comeback in the 2010s, serving as foreign secretary in the Cameron government, he was working alongside other graduates from a few years below, including two other Union Presidents, Michael Gove and Boris Johnson. That now seems a long time ago – and the 1980s even longer. Lord Hague of Richmond, who now adds Oxford chancellor to his procession of titles, will find the university a very different place to the one he left.
[See also: Why is Elon Musk obsessed with British politics?]
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