The joy of fulfilling my youthful ambition

Half a century ago this week, I left school in Scotland and travelled to Worcester College, Oxford for an interview to read politics, philosophy and economics. I can still picture the trio of scary dons who quizzed me: the grumpy political historian ‘Copper’ LeMay; the deeply obscure philosopher Michael Hinton; and Dick Smethurst, a jovial left-leaning economist, in and out of Downing Street in Harold Wilson’s years, later a popular provost of the college.

It was Smethurst who kicked off with ‘What makes you mad?’, to which I gave the 1972 equivalent of a full-woke answer about human injustice – though the truth, then and now, is that I’m rarely moved to anger; more often to quizzical regret, whether at financial folly, executive greed or state incompetence. Smethurst who three-and-a-half years later, in my last end-of-term appraisal in front of the then provost Lord Franks, summed me up as ‘uncomfortable with economic models but fluent at describing the world as it is…’.