Let’s be elitist

If the Prime Minister really wants some of that ‘blue sky thinking’ of which he is so fond, and for which he bizarrely relies on the utterly discredited figure of John Birt, he would do well to take the ‘up train’ to Oxford and pop into the Warden’s lodgings at New College. From the Warden, Alan Ryan, he would be sure to hear plenty of candid words. Not comforting ones, necessarily; for Ryan, a leading theorist on politics and education and an authority on John Stuart Mill, is not known for mincing his words.

‘I by and large hold the view that all governments should be shouted at,’ he says, ‘on the grounds that power is extremely corrupting.’ During the Laura Spence affair he declared, ‘In my opinion Gordon Brown is a fibber and a hypocrite and a bully. He was talking out of his backside, and that’s a bad thing for a government minister to do.