N o .126
T he T rusty S ervant
The Winchester College Parliamentary Dinner
Charles Stewart- Smith (G, 74-79) reports:
The place of its genesis tells how long
ago it was. In the final stages of a dinner
following the annual awards ceremony
for the British Video Association, I was
seated next to John Whittingdale (A,
73-77). He had been a Furleyite while I
was a Philite, though we had not known
each other at school. We were talking of
Win Coll when John said to me, ‘Do you
know I’m the only Wykehamist in the
House of Commons?’
This rather took me aback. I had always
thought we had an honourable tradition
of parliamentarians. My own father was
an MP when I went to school, and I
can remember hearing of his defeat in
1974 on a clandestine radio in my dorm.
During the 1980s, Margaret Thatcher’s
cabinet was driven by a triumvirate of
OWs: Willie Whitelaw, Geoffrey Howe
and George Younger (with John as her
Political Secretary in the later years);
and, of course, there is a much-vaunted
tradition of Winchester equipping the
intellectual Left: Sir Stafford Cripps,
Hugh Gaitskell and Dick Crossman.
I agreed with John there and then that
I would organise and pay for an annual
dinner to encourage an interest in
politics for the boys at the college, and
so the Winchester College Parliamentary
Dinner was born, or rather, re-born,
as there had been one before in the
1980s heyday, but it had fallen into
abeyance. It had been quite a starchy
affair with formal speeches by the
Aulae Prae and Headmaster. John and I
wanted something more engaging, more
reflective of the knockabout debate
that is the joy of political discourse. We
wanted the boys to be the drivers of
discussion, not the victims of it.
There were usually seven or so boys from
school, an organising don and sometimes
the Headmaster – Tommy Cookson was
an early attendee. From our end, because
John was the only MP, we initially had
to be fairly generous in our qualification
for being a Win Coll-connected political
figure. Of course, the Lords gave us
rich pickings – not least Geoffrey Howe
who continued to show his immense
intellect and extraordinary memory for
detail, but also George Younger’s son,
James, and David Montgomery, telling
of what it was like to be at school during
World War II when your father was
the nation’s favourite military leader.
Also Nigel Lawson, whose son Tom was
Furley’s housemaster and for many years
the organising don. At one memorable
dinner, Geoffrey and Nigel locked horns
with Francis Maude, then a shadow
chancellor with a son at the school. The
local MP for Winchester often came,
with the current incumbent, Steve Brine,
being a particular stalwart.
We also stepped into the world of the
Civil Service and media. So Michael
Jay, former Permanent Secretary at the
Foreign Office, and a good smattering
of journalists: OWs such as Edward
Lucas, then of The Economist, and
James Forsyth, Political Editor of The
Spectator; or those who had had sons at
school, such as Peter Oborne or my old
colleague, ITN’s Alastair Stewart.
Over time the debate has evolved
noticeably. It started in the Blair years
and often in the early days caused the
older statesmen around the table to
reflect how much less combative politics
was compared to when they had entered
the House of Commons. Then there
were the big debates over the power of
unions, privatisation and the enormity of
the communist threat and the Cold War.
Now, they reflected, people tended to
disagree on little things.
And so we probably spent more time
talking about what a career in politics
13
might look like and whether it was
desirable. We were not trying to turn
them into politicians, but it would have
been a nice outcome if some had. On
the whole, the advice to the boys was
that it was a good way of providing
public service, that being a constituency
MP could be very satisfying, but the
common recommendation was to go
and do something else first to get a
taste of the real world before stepping
onto the political ladder. However, two
occupations were generally discouraged
as preparation for political life: being an
army officer, or an entrepreneur. Both
gave you far too much ability to get your
own way; politics is about nothing if not
constant compromise.
But the financial crisis of 2008, Brexit,
the rise of Corbyn and Trump have
inevitably spiced the debate up a bit. The
boys have generally been fairly free-
market Tories, almost entirely remainers
– but with, as one would hope, a few
individuals who have challenged that
consensus view. But all debate has been
entered into in a spirit expressed by one
Aulae Prae: ‘These issues are some of
the most complex in the world and we as
Wykehamists should relish the chance to
tackle such intellectual challenges.’
After about ten years, the Lords thought
they better catch up and instituted
their own biannual dinner – a bit
more like the more formal ones of
before. More speeches, and definitely
including the Headmaster. Ralph
Townsend delighted his audience
with the observation that evidence
of the need for more Wykehamical
thinking in politics could be found in
the Life and Death of Rochester Sneath
by Humphrey Berkeley. These were a
series of letters, written by the fictional
Rochester Sneath pretending to be the
Headmaster of Selhurst School, to the
great and the good asking for particular