The ill-thought-out ideas issuing daily from the candidates to be the UK’s prime minister are a cause for alarm
The Tory leadership race has descended into slapstick politics, and it seems to have no boundaries. In the past week the two candidates have behaved like cliche-spouting populists on the stump, rather than responsible members of a party still in office. The latest excursion of the frontrunner Liz Truss – supposedly the nation’s foreign secretary – into education policy defies belief.
She proposes that Oxford and Cambridge be forced to interview for a place any high-flying student in the country with three A* grades at A-level. She says it is wrong that “you should have to put yourself forward” for these places. She might have added, God forbid that you should have to go somewhere like Leeds University – a fate she escaped by shuttling off to Merton College, Oxford. Her proposal would involve some 13,000 Oxbridge interviews from England alone, swamping and distorting the admissions system (assuming candidates can afford to await their exam results, rather than taking up conditional offers elsewhere), and discouraging applicants with less than three A*.
Simon Jenkins is a Guardian columnist
