Drop the dead donkey.....

Cameron is all gong and no dinner! Dave’s policies seem to be like Boris’s buses; there’ll be another one along in a minute. He seems eminently qualified to take the title role in ’Drop the Dead Donkey’.

Having returned in triumph from his brown-nosing expedition to Pakistan, he went straight in, boots and all, with another cracker, this time slagging-off Oxford University for not having enough Afro-Caribbeans amongst its intake. I fear that this chap is not the accomplished politician that we have been led to believe. He had clearly not thought out this latest asinine remark before he made it otherwise he should have realised that it would involve him in another senseless political furore. Secondly, he must have known that he would be torn to shreds by left and right. Thirdly, he didn’t check his facts.

First let me give my own take on this.

When I was working in Jamaica I asked my counterpart the lovely and elegant Mrs K why it was that in the Jamaican public service the top management seemed to have an extraordinarily high proportion of women. For example, 8 of the 10 Executive Agencies had female CEOs (and very good they were, too). The Secretary for Justice, whom I got to know well, was a very dynamic and somewhat intimidating lady. During my second stint the PM was a woman.

She told me that it was part of the Jamaican culture that boys tended to goof off school in their early teens for the pleasures of the beach, reggae, and Red Stripe. Meanwhile the girls beavered away at school, got good results, went on to University – often in the US- and started their careers while the boys were still into Bob Marley. By the time the boys had started to come to their senses, the girls were already well up the greasy pole.

Another aspect of Jamaican life is that there is a high proportion of single parents; fathers are somewhat deficient in the responsibility department. Sounds familiar.

On the assumption that these cultural characteristics are carried over to the British environment with the Caribbean diaspora the partial explanation is obvious. Perhaps a more important aspect is that a disproportionate number go to poor schools on sink estates. And on a slightly wider note there is no doubt in my mind or the minds of many others that the main reason why pupils from state schools are under-represented in Oxbridge is nothing to do with privilege. It is everything to do with the lousy educational standards in too many state schools. In former days, the grammar school was the route to Oxbridge for youngsters from ordinary backgrounds – Simon Heffer himself was a grammar school oik, as were Michael Howard, William Hague (who transferred to a comp) and many others who later found fame and fortune.

One interesting piece of information to come out of this furore is that Oxford has a very high proportion of what are euphemistically called ‘ethnic minorities’ i.e. persons of colour. It is no surprise that Chinese and Indians are strongly represented. Another titbit that I picked up is that in schools that have a high percentage of pupils of Chinese background the standards of the school overall are raised because the intelligence and industriousness of Chinese pupils has a salutary impact on the whole body.

The duty of the best universities is the pursuit of excellence not social engineering or some latter-day version of America’s disastrous affirmative action policies.

Dave redeemed himself up to a point with a speech on immigration that was about 20 years overdue. The topic has been taboo since the ‘rivers of blood’ speech that Enoch never made. But the fundamental problem in English politics is that Conservatives have nowhere to go. Dave and Millie are interchangeable – public school and Oxbridge boys from privileged backgrounds who know virtually nothing about real life. They are interchangeable, and many of Dave’s effusions could come from Millie without being able to tell the difference. Today’s choice is between a red lefty toff and a blue lefty toff.