The college used the famed Sheldonian Theatre — Christopher Wren’s brilliant attempt to recreate a Roman theatre in the midst of Oxford — made especially enjoyable thanks to the recently renovated ceiling, which really is a marvel. The event was restricted to current Brasenose students and Fellows, so I thought it might be worth recording some of my impressions for people outside the college.

On the most general level, David Cameron is a very good speaker. He needs no notes or teleprompter; he speaks in complete sentences; he looks at people who have asked him questions; he persuades rather than harangues. He is more skilled but less soaring than Barack Obama, the former because he does not need notes, the latter because British politicians are only allowed to soar in wartime: think Winston Churchill. I do not normally pay this kind of attention to speechmaking skill, but I have seen too many debaters turn into miserable barristers because they harangue judges and juries to distraction. It is something that my pupilmaster insisted must be avoided at all costs: his favourite line was ‘one always catches more flies with honey than with vinegar’. It is a lesson Cameron has learnt well.

Of course, the danger with a very skilled speaker is that he can get away with saying very little of substance, or burying what he does say in gorgeously orotund Ciceronian diction. On the whole, Cameron did not do this, although there were a couple of spots where he strayed perilously close to saying nothing at all. He will have to be watched is probably the fairest assessment.

With respect to policy, the heart of his speech concerned his view that while many traditional left-leaning ideas were good (greater equality of opportunity, less child poverty, better quality education and health care more diffused through the general population), top-down attempts to achieve them had failed. In this he was on secure classical liberal ground, and he made his points about centralised target setting in the NHS, for example, movingly and with great skill. I was impressed with the way he tied targets that could be ‘gamed’ to the Staffordshire Hospital Disaster; it was a textbook example of the economist’s law of unintended consequences and the danger of attempting to plan without adequate knowledge (Hayek’s ‘problem of information asymmetry’) from some central office.

His view, then, is that private and localised solutions to large problems of inequality and injustice will work better than centralised solutions. He is clearly a fan of subsidiarity (probably Catholic social teaching’s greatest contribution to political theory). He also seems to be aware (albeit sometimes dimly) that there are large problems with the scale of Britain’s welfare state that take in not only obvious things like the size of the country’s benefits bill, but the amount of things the state has to pay for out of the Exchequer (the NHS, education and so on). He is also aware that doing something realistic about climate change will lead to a more unequal society: much of our current prosperity in economic terms is not about how much money we have, but how cheap so many things have become relative to the incomes that we all earn. He is bright enough to be aware of the tension and did not during the course of his speech pretend that all of these incommensurables could be resolved.

His responses to our questions were for the most part good, although that said he was not asked many very difficult questions (I asked him one; more of that later). He is a supporter of a Swedish-style system in education (vouchers) and is clearly rankled by the annual spectacle of British parents playing musical houses in order to get little Johnny and little Julie into the best local school, coupled with attempts to prosecute parents for lying about where they live when they have been beaten by the real-estate market. The simple solution is to let parents choose their schools, and to let bad schools close.

At one point he gave a spirited (and deeply Burkean conservative) response to a question favouring the introduction of proportional representation in the UK, pointing out that single member constituencies forced people like him to engage with their constituents and to retain knowledge of at least one chunk of the country. He tied this to first-past-the post, and the obvious response would have been to suggest Australia’s preferential voting system (called instant runoff vote over here), which both allows a protest vote and has the effect of preserving single-member constituencies. Ever since I began to travel, I have become more and more impressed with the way Australians elect their House of Representatives, and believe that other democracies would do well to copy it.

The two questions with which he struggled most concerned aspects of welfare policy. One student pointed out that he had pointed to clear situations where the state had obviously failed; how would he react if a private charity or NGO — given the same job to do — also failed to deliver. He faffed about for a bit but in the end came up with a version of an argument that I first heard from Richard Epstein: ’95% is good enough’. In other words, it is necessary to accept that large scale actions will sometimes fail, whether they be public or private. He thought private ones would fail less often (and the economics bears him out on that), but to pretend that they would never fail was delusional. For a brief moment, he reminded me of Peter Beattie, who was a study in getting electoral mileage out of admitting that his government had cocked up.

My question concerned welfare policy, and was inspired by a serious of long conversations with DEM, one of my co-bloggers, and ran as follows: ‘both Labour and Conservative have made a great deal of mileage out of demonizing benefit recipients as cheats and scroungers, despite the fact that it is becoming increasingly clear that the welfare state in its current form is unsustainable over time (mainly due to the demographic transition). Why not just be honest and admit that we can no longer afford such largesse and that it will simply have to be cut? Why is it necessary to create a hated out-group first?’ I particularly had in mind this risible exercise in demonizing, produced by the BBC, no less.

He was frank about the fact that politicians needed to be more careful with their language, and argued that Labour has been much worse (although, that said, Labour has had a long time in office to be worse) but ultimately fell back on research pointing out that the higher rates of benefit attract considerable fraud thanks to the inevitable moral hazard involved. My next question (had I been permitted one) would have been to point out the futility of getting disabled people into the workforce when (in the UK at least) they often cop effective marginal tax rates upwards of 200%.

There were other questions and issues, including one on Trident (Cameron wants to keep it, in part because he thinks it will help to underwrite an independent UK foreign policy) and several on education. There were none on Afghanistan or Iraq, which are squarely sheeted home to Labour in this country thanks to the party’s long period in office (since 1997).

All in all, an interesting event. I think David Cameron will be Prime Minister (so we will get a new portrait in Hall, natch), but I don’t know if he has what it takes to tackle the really difficult issues.

Comments from other Brasenostrils also in attendance welcome; this is very much a personal recollection.

University Challenge is, in fact, a celebration of sheer braininess. It pits two British Universities in teams of four against each other and asks them increasingly difficult (and more rapidly delivered) questions. Oxford and Cambridge — rather than entering corporately, as entire universities — enter only as Colleges (up to five each). People have complained about this, calling it unfair, but I have a strong feeling that the system dilutes Oxbridge sufficiently to allow other universities a chance at the win. Reduce Oxbridge to their corporate identities, and I have no doubt that four Rhodes Scholars would face off against four Gates Scholars almost every year, and be pretty much unstoppable. The greater British public would soon grow tired of their most venerable game show coming to resemble the Boat Race.

The power of a single (small) Oxford college is highlighted by this year’s winner, Corpus Christi, or more particularly, Corpus Christi’s gifted captain, Classics DPhil student Gail Trimble. Corpus Christi (student population 400) knocked off the University of Manchester (student population 40,000). The strangest part of the whole deal is that Trimble’s superb performance (she scored 2/3 of her team’s points throughout this year’s series) has uncorked a bottle of national soul-searching.

Dubbed ‘the Brainiest Person in Britain’ and suddenly exposed to a mass of media attention, she has been fiercely attacked and defended throughout the British press and across Britblogistan. She’s even been invited to do an arty photo shoot for a lads’ magazine (the answer was a polite and slightly arch ‘no’):

“Would you believe it, my brother received a Facebook message from Nuts yesterday morning saying ‘can we have your sister’s e-mail address, we want her to do a tasteful shoot’,” Miss Trimble told BBC Breakfast.

“So of course he sent them an answer saying, ‘seriously mate, would you give your sister’s contact details to Nuts?”‘

Thereafter, she was interviewed on half a dozen chat shows, profiled throughout the country’s still large and diverse print media and discussed in hushed tones around water coolers across the nation. Her name was increasingly twinned with that of Jade Goody, a reality telly star who seems to oscillate from adulation to revulsion. She’s loved at the moment, because she’s dying of cervical cancer, but she was once reviled for not knowing that East Anglia was part of Britain (she called it, somewhat pathetically, ‘East Angular’, and thought it a foreign country). Yet she made money, and became ‘famous for being famous’. Why do we love Jade Goody and vilify a University Challenge brainbox? ran one despairing headline.

Some of it is undoubtedly gender inflected, something Trimble has observed herself:

Some reaction has been less pleasant, with hostile comments posted on blogs early on in the series. She has been ridiculed on social networking sites for being too intellectual, and one newspaper this week asked: “Why do so many hate this girl simply for being clever?”

Miss Trimble – bespectacled, with long brown hair and a beaming, dimpled smile – said she had been taken aback by the hostility, after experiencing no such problems at school or university.

“Suddenly there’s this thing that involves being in the public eye, and I find all this reaction to me, and I’m sure this wouldn’t be the case if I wasn’t a woman.

“It is nice when people are saying nice things about my appearance, and not nasty things, but it’s sad that they feel it necessary to say things about my appearance at all.”

Some of it, however, is class inflected, the closest Britain comes to the culture wars. Buried in the angst is a dislike of snobbery and an argument over what constitutes ‘really useful knowledge’. Gail Trimble is privately educated, the daughter of two scientists and — crucially — unashamed of her cleverness, revealed attractively in this longer interview. In an attempt to bring her down, The Sun made a point of asking her five questions drawn from popular culture, none of which she knew. Infuriatingly for the denizens of the Sun (and to the even greater irritation of those who read The Sun), she did not seem to care. The idea that there may be hierarchies of knowledge is just a bit too freaky for some, and the venom of those casually dismissed (‘all the bits of Britain not for export’, says one Canadian friend over here) was on serious display:

“Not for some time have I been so angry at a complete stranger as I was with this Trimble character. Each answer was met with a smug grin or a cocky smirk. My normally placid girlfriend ended half-poetically seething: ‘Not a friend did she own at school’, before physically turning her back on the screen so she didn’t have to bear this odious little smug specimen.”

Speaking to the Observer yesterday, Trimble said: “I’ve been aware of the attention and the things that are being said. It makes me realise how people see you as a person and how you come across on TV, as opposed to how you have always imagined yourself to be in real life. I don’t know quite know how some people can get an impression of who you are having only been on a couple of half-hour TV programmes.

Intellect, gender and class conspired to combine into a toxic and hateful stew symbolic of these divided Isles, where — as one blogger observed — aspiration has been ditched in favour of spite:

This seems symbolic of the anti-aspirational attitudes found everywhere today. OK, Ms Trimble comes from a supportive middle class home and has had educational advantages. We should be saying, ’Let’s try to give more people those benefits’ but instead the attitude is, ‘Let’s bring her down!’ It’s a far cry from the Mechanics’ Institutes and Workers’ Educational Societies of old. Eheu!

That last sentence is particularly telling, and offers a hint that the politics of envy often associated with certain elements on the political left is, I think, relatively new. Ruskin College and places like it were built in order to give the disadvantaged the same things that Gail Trimble has enjoyed. Much of the early history of the Labour movement (in its broadest sense, and so taking in similar efforts in Australia) was about hope and progress, not a limiting insistence that all must have prizes or that all knowledge is equally valid.

There is another and darker message, too. Often in political philosophy — think, for example, of John Rawls in the development of his difference principle — intellectual brilliance is seen as a form of unearned merit, the consequence of lucky genetics (IQ is largely heritable) and a solid upbringing. The more I see of the treatment meted out to the very clever, however, the more I’m coming to doubt this. If intelligence is a form of unearned merit at birth, then it is rapidly earned as life progresses.

And Gail Trimble has paid her ‘merit tax’ in full this week.

[Two disclosures: I knew two of the Sun's posers (cinema buff, so sue me), and I've just been made captain of Brasenose's University Challenge team for the next season. Perhaps I can plead Australian ignorance ... because until this week, I had no idea what this show means to some people].

UPDATE: There’s an excellent and very thoughtful response to this post over at Fizzog’s blog. Highly recommended.

See, the new snow falls on top of the old snow, which means — right now — pretty much every surface has a layer of black ice, followed by a layer of white ice, with the latest snow on top. It’s too cold to melt properly, and Oxfordshire (like every other county) is rapidly running out of the salt grit used to keep roads navigable. It’s all rather hazardous, and people are starting to make rather unkind jokes at Al Gore’s expense (like the possibility that he’s visited Oxford in spirit, hence the weather).

The British experience of driving in heavy snow is negligible, to put it mildly. Cars have sashayed and fishtailed down the street. I’ve seen some really good near accidents, including a chap who seemed unable to get his vehicle out of reverse. He was a tradesman of some sort and somehow managed to reverse around the Radcliffe Camera in a big circle until he made an exit through the gate near Hertford.

People across the UK have skied to work (and of course, one has seen everything when one sees footage of a chap snowboarding down a perfectly powdered snow street in Brighton), and even Parliament Hill turned into an impromptu slope. Some members of the animal kingdom have also been getting a kick out of things, too (do follow that link, it’s very funny).

I’ve put together an Oxford album here (it’s on Facebook, but you don’t need to join to view it, Facebook being anathema for some).