There are few British politicians whose name alone can trigger an instant reaction amongst an often politically indifferent Cambridge student population. One of those names is David Willetts. As Universities Minister until last year’s cabinet reshuffle, it was from Willetts’ department that the ideological hallmark of this government’s austerity programme was delivered – the trebling of tuition fees. For most of us, this was instantly the heaviest bearing that Whitehall politics had ever had on our lives. In the wake of Nick Clegg’s back-peddling, followed by the well-attended but futile student protests of 2010, the tuition fees saga left students feeling betrayed by Westminster. Willetts has undoubtedly left his stamp on the collective political memory of our generation, but the details of that memory depend on who you ask, not least Willetts himself.

For some it was the Etonian conspiracy perfect enough to be masterminded by Hollywood; limit access to a university education to those who wouldn’t flinch at £27,000 of debt, and hey presto, the poor’s access to that great historical organ of social mobility and political enlightenment – the university – is shut down. Of course, for Willetts it is the exact opposite. Higher education is a right, but apparently not a universal one. It belongs, he says, only to “those who have the ability to benefit from it, and who universities wish to admit”. The “significant social reform” that Willetts enabled with the increase in tuition fees has, according to him, had this effect. In removing centrally administered number controls on university admissions procedures, he points out, it is the university and no longer the government that has the final say on whom it can admit for study. It goes without saying that it is also the student and not the government who now foots the better part of the bill.

So is this what the Big Society looks like in action, then? A transfer of both power and responsibility from the state to the private, or at least semi-public, level? Willetts, out of all the major figures of the 2010 Con-Lib coalition, ought to know. As the author of a series of books on Conservative thought published over the past 25 years, he has been the minister most often characterised as a thinker of modern Conservatism (subscribing to a strand he terms “Civic Conservatism”) and in 2006 was even profiled by The Spectator as “the real father of Cameronism”. Despite the fact that he no longer sits in the Cabinet, what he has to say offers a precious insight into the philosophy that underpins the behaviour of this government.

For Willetts, the trebling of tuition fees is partly, of course, a transfer of power and responsibility from the state down to the private individual; the Conservatives’ serve in a 70-odd year game of ping pong between Left and Right. Willetts is still quick to downplay the extent of these private contributions, which only “comes from graduates earning over £21,000 who make a contribution at the rate of 9 per cent of income tax”. Beyond this, however, Willetts explains the trebling of tuition fees not merely in terms of reducing the state’s role in funding the cost of tuition, but also in light of a fundamentally new imagining of what constitutes public and private benefits.
He reaches into this system of logic as he sets out for me “a good principle for funding the right to higher education”. It is because “higher education both yields public benefits and private benefits” he arrives to the view “that the balance of public funding and private funding” should reflect this division. This means “rightly substantial public funding for higher education, including through maintenance grants”, but it also demands private contribution, as the public should not have to fund the private benefits accrued from tertiary education.

Willetts calculates this distinction between what the university creates for the public’s benefit and what it creates for private benefit with such coolness that it passes as obvious at first glance. In fact it is not, and goes to the ideological heart of what sets this government apart from its predecessors. The political consensus forged in the construction of Labour’s post-war welfare state tended to the position that whatever was in the interests of the public-at-large was in the interest of the private individual, too. That is to say that private interests must surely benefit from populations that are on the whole happier, healthier, better educated, and richer. The belief Willetts articulates, that the university’s public value is in fact distinguishable from its private value, and that funding for higher education should “broadly reflect” this, flies in the face of this consensus. The distinction isn’t limitless; the government has agreed to write off the debts of under earning graduates, but it still crucially forms the bedrock of his thinking on tuition fees.

It is through this principle, which considers the public and private value of state provisions on separate terms, that this government has been able to apply the values of the free market to the state. An appreciation of it weaves ideological coherence between the Free Schools experiment, the increasing proportion of private provision in the NHS, and of course the trebling of tuition fees.

The basis of Willetts’ political thinking becomes clear when he talks about immigration; he refuses to pander to UKIP. He concedes that there is “genuine concern about immigration” and that “democratic politicians cannot ignore issues that are raised with them on the doorstep”. However, he adds that “often this reflects worries about other issues such as pressures on the health service”. Cambridge students, he reminds me, “who will by and large go on to well-paid jobs are likely, if anything, to be beneficiaries from migration”. In addition, he is also quick to celebrate immigration’s success in “making Cambridge a diverse city” and “helping to hold down the cost of services”. The ideological difference, he explains, between Nigel Farage and himself is that he is “fundamentally an optimist” who believes in “making a country that is better for our children”, in contrast to Farage and UKIP who “appeal to a rather bleak pessimism about Britain and its prospects which I do not share”.

David Willetts is not a knee-jerk politician. He is deeply persuaded by the views that he articulates, and his tuition fee doctrine comes from a place of reflection, not to score cheap political points. Whichever name you give it, Civic Conservatism, Cameronism, or Neoliberalism, it is an ideology which this government has embraced, and it is not getting the attention it deserves.