Last month, Andy Burnham promised us a government where “all parts of the party and the country – can see themselves reflected and represented in it” and this week a “new political model”. And yet, yesterday The iPaper revealed that 17 of the 28 members of his new Cabinet have undergraduate degrees from Oxford or Cambridge.

Extraordinarily, six ministers – Ed Miliband, Yvette Cooper, Angela Eagle, Kanishka Narayan, Emma Reynolds and Miatta Fahnbulleh – all studied the same degree at Oxford: Philosophy, Politics, and Economics (PPE).

We might dismiss this statistic if studying at Oxford guaranteed competence. But our country lurched from crisis to crisis under the Oxford graduates who ruled between 2010 and 2024, most of who studied PPE. We have David Cameron, Theresa May, Boris Johnson, Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak to thank for steering us into austerity, Brexit, Partygate, and the cost-of living crisis.

Eleven years ago, I graduated from Oxford with a degree in PPE. I didn’t study it with any aspiration of entering public life, but I’ve often been treated differently because........

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