Notable Labour PPEs include Edward Heath, Harold Wilson and Tony Benn, who left UK’s welfare state as their legacies. They were succeeded by the likes of Peter Mandelson, Ed Miliband and Ed Balls, who call themselves New Labour so as to put some distance between the socialist-laced ideology of their older alumnus. PPEs dot the right too with Nigel Lawson, William Hague and David Cameron as some recent past prime ministers and chancellors.
In a 2017 article in The Guardian, UK historian and journalist Andy Beckett described how graduates holding Oxford University degrees in PPE or philosophy, politics and economics have pervaded British politics and establishment since 1920.
Otherwise dubbed the modern “Greats”, PPE graduates have covered the whole spectrum from the right to the left in politics, across the centre and also at the fringes too. They included analysts and protagonists, consensus seekers and ultra-capitalists, statists and libertarians, elitists and populists. They thrive as bureaucrats and are adept as spin doctors too, so goes Beckett, commenting at arm’s length given how his own Oxford degree was in modern history and not PPE.
