Varsity front page 6th March 1992

Here at Varsity, we’ve always prided ourselves on bringing the students of Cambridge the most up-to-date political news and the latest developments on every politician ever to tread the creaking boards at the Guildhall. That hasn’t always been to everyone’s taste, though: a 1949 letter to the editor from C.J. Lindley (Downing) denounces Varsity’s coverage, suggesting we “cut it down to eight pages rather than filling up with political gossip”. 66 years later, we’re still waffling away, so much so that to cover the remarkable 2015 election, we appointed our own political editor. Your humble servant in that election has now dived into the archives of Varsity and Stop Press, uncovering the tears, tantrums and triumphs of elections gone by.

Changing elections

The amount of waffle we produce for one MP was bad enough; imagine what we’d do with three. Nevertheless, until 1950, Cambridge not only had a constituency seat, but elected two university MPs to the Cambridge University constituency. Every degree-holder had a vote: the last holders of the seat were Kenneth Pickthorn (Con) and Wilson Harris, an Independent MP and editor of The Spectator. In the meantime, the majority of the student population was legally barred from voting: the voting age for most of the 20th century was 21. This all changed under Harold Wilson’s government in 1969, when the age was lowered to 18 in anticipation of the upcoming election.
Perhaps that powerful voting base is why Varsity started with the reputation it did, carrying interviews with serious heavyweights in the lead-up to the February 1950 election – even though the university constituencies had been abolished after the war. In October 1949, R.A. Butler, architect of the 1944 Education Act introducing free secondary education, wrote an article in these pages defending the Conservative achievements in government and reassuring voters that there would be no sudden reversal of the popular social schemes introduced by Attlee’s government. He was matched on the Labour side by no less a figure than Herbert Morrison, the then Deputy Prime Minister, whose column denounced Communism as a ‘faith’ and Marxism as a ‘pseudo-science’.

Yet amid all the seriousness of international relations, the Liberal Party rather charmingly found their candidate for the 1950 election in Central Norfolk in Philip Jebb, a third-year from King’s, who bumped into a Liberal organiser on a train to London three weeks before polling day. In fact, five undergraduates in all were contesting the election across the country, and over 150 of the 1,806 parliamentary candidates were Cantabs – including Philip Goodhart and David Widdicombe, ex-editors of Varsity.

Connections - where are they now?

In fact, what becomes clear through the decades of print is just how tightly-woven the Cambridge nexus is. Early on, we see two major names writing for the paper in their roles for the Labour and Conservative associations, trying to persuade readers ahead of the 1951 election. For the Conservatives, Douglas Hurd, a Trinitarian History student, defended Winston Churchill’s experience as Prime Minister, focusing on rearmament and security; Hurd went on to become Foreign Secretary under Margaret Thatcher. On the opposite side of the page, however, was Greville Janner for Labour, promoting his party as the strongest bulwark against Communism. He is now better known as Lord Janner, and is currently awaiting a court decision in December over whether or not he is fit to plead to charges of sexual abuse.

Less alarmingly, a set of interviews from 1992 with the powerful Cambridge ‘mafia’ in John Major’s Cabinet – Leon Brittan, Ken Clarke, Norman Fowler, Michael Howard, Norman Lamont and John Gummer – shows a loose cabal apparently quite surprised with their collective power. “I don’t think there is a Cambridge elite in the government,” said Michael Howard implausibly. Norman Lamont, for his part, claimed he “can’t explain why all six people went into politics or all kept in close touch”, but cited their grammar-school background as reflecting a “change in the Conservative party and a change in Britain”. Lamont (who wrote a somewhat obsequious column for Varsity in the mid-60s, reporting on Union goings-on) might then be somewhat alarmed at the full-bore resumption of private school dominance under the Cameron governments.

Since then, though, Cambridge has been quietly doing its bit to undermine the vice-like grip of the privately-schooled. In 1983, the SDP-Liberal Alliance beat Labour into third place in the city; their campaign headed by an SDP man, Matthew Oakeshott, who proclaimed rather vividly that “the Labour vote is melting like ice cream in the sun on King’s Parade”. If the surname sounds familiar, it’s probably because of his daughter Isabel: Ms Oakeshott is a journalist and the co-writer of Call Me Dave, in which allegations about sexual dalliances with a dead pig were hurled at the Prime Minister. This city’s muckraking, so ably expressed in the pages of this esteemed publication, now extends to the pristine carpets of the Piers Gaveston Club in the Other Place.

Déjà vu: Varsity front page 24th April 2015

Fun

It’s not just after finishing their studies, however, that the denizens of this city become experts in the art of urine extraction. In 1987, an SDP-Liberal candidate, Andrew Duff (later an MEP), remarked that the election promised to be “basically very good fun”, and even as far back as 1955 the Labour candidate was dubbed ‘Mr Morphine’ for his apparent apathy towards his electoral hopes. Something must have been in the water in ‘87: Stop Press with Varsity staidly reported a CUCA member excitedly saying the Conservative youth rally at Wembley in June was “just like Nuremberg”, while Cambridge’s Tory candidate, Robert Rhodes James, was so confident of victory that he spent the last day on the hustings strolling around garden parties talking to students. In the event, he received a comfortable majority of 5,060 above the second-placed SDP candidate, the notorious Shirley Williams. Perhaps he was onto something.

Yet this flippancy never quite rivalled the extraordinary scenes at Peterhouse in May 1970, when in advance of the election the then-Leader of the Opposition Ted Heath came to dine at the college at a dinner held by the eminent historian Maurice Cowling. Heath was greeted by what the Varsity report of the time twinklingly described as “cheerful protests”, organised by one John Lloyd, who told Varsity: “We didn’t want [anyone] shouting silly slogans … everyone had a good time and we all got drunk.” Another protester added: “Basically we couldn’t give a damn about Heath.” The protest was so civilised, in fact, that Peterhouse arranged not to interfere as long as the protesters stopped at 8.45pm. And stop they did: Cowling said it was “a fine example of co-operation in college life” in order to “show what a lovely college Peterhouse is”. How charming: it is not altogether surprising, then, that Mr Lloyd, one of Professor Cowling’s students, was invited back to his retirement party in 1993.

Progress and progressivism

The protests of the late 60s and early 70s, when they weren’t being impressively cordial, came from a period of dizzying social change, especially after Wilson’s significant majority in 1966. Before that election, a Varsity opinion piece confidently predicted that the push for the decriminalisation of homosexuality would fail, as would efforts for abortion reform. Needless to say, both predictions were wrong: in 1967 Parliament passed the Sexual Offences Act and the Abortion Act, setting a benchmark for liberal reform in Britain that would stand (with some amendments) to the present day.

The tenor of the period is accentuated by a heartbreaking letter to the editor the week before, in which an anonymous homosexual student says: “What [we] now need, above all, is tolerance.” A reply agrees: “The important thing is the freedom to fall in love, meet without subterfuge, and live in harmony and true partnership together. Otherwise, a life of excruciating loneliness is prescribed.” The first student speculates hopefully that in ten years, he will be able to describe the “curious directions” of his sexuality freely - and true to our reputation for forward-thinking, in February 1974 Varsity helpfully provided a double-page centre-spread under the simple title ‘HOMOSEXUALITY’, discussing the “new gay identity”, myths and realities of lesbianism and the Gay Liberation Front.

It was indeed a victory for the forces of liberalism in the wake of the Wolfenden Report of 1956, which had recommended decriminalisation. Indeed, this was in part due to Cambridge, which had in 1966 elected a well-regarded Labour MP, Robert Davies. Davies was a bright man, a fierce opponent of the Vietnam War and a left-wing critic of Wilson’s stuttering policy on the apartheid pariah state of Southern Rhodesia. Varsity’s interview with him after his win described him as “a very articulate and able man – one of the new ‘classless’ Labour MPs,” and predicted that “he may very well go a long way.”

Sometimes our predictions are more than wrong. Sometimes, they ache: less than fifteen months after he was elected, Robert Davies died suddenly at the age of 49. Yet Cambridge continued to be a bastion of progressive politics. In the ensuing by-election, Davies was replaced by his Conservative opponent David Lane, who went on to serve with distinction for nine years until he stepped down to serve as the first Chair of the Commission for Racial Equality in 1976.

Shift in the role of the press

Times changed, then, but perhaps the most striking common element of our coverage is the importance of Varsity and Stop Press as outlets. Since the broadband revolution, print has faded in its immediacy, but during the 20th century students relied on newspapers – including their own press – for up-to-date information. Stop Press with Varsity didn’t go to print until 4am after the momentous 1979 election and 5am in 1983, running with the emphatic headlines of WE GOT THE BLUES (clever) and BACK TO THE BLUES (perhaps not so much) respectively.

Varsity’s polls and statistical analyses, with varying degrees of rigour, have been a perennial feature of Cambridge elections too as far back as 1955 – when 51 per cent of undergraduates favoured the Conservatives. Inasmuch as the 2015 election seemed to be a replay of 1992, Cambridge followed the pattern as well: Labour had a surprise, narrow victory in the city, with a 580-vote majority for Anne Campbell in 1992 compared to a 599-vote majority in 2015 for Daniel Zeichner. In both instances, the win was presaged by a big Varsity poll in the preceding weeks that had indicated the potential power of the student vote: again, students opted for Labour, handing them 47 per cent of their vote in 1992. In an election where the student postal vote alone amounted to 2,500 ballot papers, their vote was truly decisive.

In retrospect, it’s clear we never quite realised just how much power we have and how respected Cambridge is as an institution. When I was writing for Varsity during this year’s election, I opined that we didn’t really appreciate how lucky we were to be able to participate in this city’s politics. Cambridge has been home to extraordinary political campaigning for decades, if not centuries. We have helped to decide the course of history in this city, sending passionate, committed representatives to the Commons off the back of ferocious campaigning and a noisy, unruly, but always thoughtful and self-aware political culture. For 800 issues Varsity has been an integral part of that culture, and we are still your indispensable guide to Cambridge politics.

Long may we continue.