Does Owen Jones’s Oxbridge theory actually apply to Jeremy Corbyn?

After Mr S’s colleague Harry Mount wrote in The Spectator that the Labour party has undergone ‘a brain transplant’ under Jeremy Corbyn with a purge of the Oxbridge set, Martin Amis went on to accuse the Labour leader of being undereducated. The best-selling novelist said that he suspected Corbyn — who achieved two Es at A-Level before enrolling at the North London Polytechnic to study trade union studies for a year — possessed ‘slow-minded rigidity’.

Now Corbyn’s cheerleader Owen Jones has waded into the debate. Writing for the Guardian, Jones comes to the Labour leader’s defence arguing that an Oxbridge degree isn’t everything. He says that opting to study at a red brick university over Oxford or Cambridge is not something that should be sneered at as Oxbridge is the place where the most privileged — rather than the most intelligent — go to study. He says that ‘if Oxbridge drew more students from non-selective comprehensives, the status quo would be less objectionable’:

‘Unless you are a social Darwinian who believes the richest are the brightest, in no sense can Oxbridge be described as an academic elite.