The case for theft-tanks

The Conservative party leadership contest is a milestone for diversity and inclusion. This time, we get to choose between someone who studied philosophy, politics and economics at Lincoln College, Oxford and someone who studied philosophy, politics and economics at Merton College, Oxford. I can barely contain my excitement.

I find the very idea of an undergraduate degree in politics alarming. It is often seen in business that people who complete an MBA straight after university turn out to be spectacularly useless employees, and it’s possible that this unhappy pattern recurs in politics. The reason is simple: there is an order effect at work. It’s one thing to theorise on the basis of practice; quite another to practise on the basis of theory.

The hidden price we pay for demanding theoretical consistency in politics is the loss of those new or oblique ideas which often emerge from tacit learning, experimentation or accident. I used to wonder why political journalists did not make this point – until I discovered they had all read PPE at Oxford too.

There are thousands of changes we could enact to improve the quality of everyday life in Britain which are lost because they do not chime with some predefined ideology or economic theory. I was pleased to see a piece by Professor Paul Collier in The Spectator two weeks ago praising the 19th-century American economist Henry George. George, like Elinor Ostrom (winner of the 2009 Nobel prize in Economics), is one of those intriguing thinkers who, by appealing to people on both the left and right, end up politically homeless. The left vs right dichotomy imposes huge limitations on thought. In reality – Dominic Cummings is right here – people are both much more right-wing and much more left-wing than people inside the political bubble realise.

Yet it isn’t only new ideas which go unexplored.