oxford alumni Archives • The MG Harris Blog

Boris as I remember him at Oxford. A million pounds says he doesn’t remember me.

So Boris is finally Mayor of London, eh? Surely a preface to David Cameron taking over as Prime Minister in the next couple of years. Which means that finally, my contemporaries at Oxford will have taken over the country.

I worry about this slightly because I am pretty sure I wouldn’t be much good at running the country; not nearly old enough or wise enough and I know that I’m probably as smart as some of those guys, although possibly not Boris, who really is very clever indeed.

So this is the time to tell my one and only Boris Johnson story. It isn’t very good, I’m warning you. But it’s the only one I’ve got.

Boris was in the year above me at Oxford. Our paths didn’t cross because he was in the Rich Beautiful Ambitious Talented People Who Went To The Right Schools And Will One Day Run The Country set and I was in the Bright Grammar School Kids Who Will End Up Running Universities And Businesses set.

Anyway. My then-boyfriend-now-husband was another grammar school oik like me, and a chemistry student to boot. (The only way to be lower in the social ranking at Oxford would have been to have to study hard to get by, since apparently effortless academic excellence is the only way to distinguish the kind of kids who get top grades at A level anyway.) Boyfriend was a member of the Oxford Union, not a students union but the famous debating society that was the University training ground of many of Britain’s top politicians.

Boyfriend and I very, very occasionally played chess together in the bar at the Union. Once we were playing after a debate. Boris, then the Secretary of the Union – this was the year before he became President of the Oxford Union, and another Union officer came into the bar from the debating room, still resplendent in white tie. They took their drinks and proceeded to watch Boyfriend and I play chess.

Now at this point you need to realise that neither of us can actually play chess. I mean we obviously know the mechanics of the moves, but that’s it. So we are playing. Boris and his prematurely aged fellow Union officer (who was about 22 but seemed around 32) watch with growing interest, starting to comment quietly to each other about our tactics.

We grow tense, aware of their scrutiny. Their interest grows all the more. We study the board furiously. I’m vaguely aware that you have to try to plan some moves ahead. I start to think one or two moves ahead, then three, then four, and my head hurts. Boyfriend keeps his cool a bit longer than me. I crack under the pressure and make a move, any move. Boyfriend does the same. Boris and pal seem surprised, then disappointed. Boris wanders off. Boris’s aged young friend comes over to us and comments that the game had looked extremely exciting, we were both in such very strong positions, we looked like two very strong players…and his voice tails off. We smile enigmatically, saying nothing. What remains politely unsaid is the final part of Young Fogey’s assessment…”but actually you’re both a bit rubbish, aren’t you?”

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not cross about this and never was. On the contrary, I was proud to have impressed the already-famous-in-Oxford Boris Johnson even for a few minutes. Even if he was disillusioned. I actually felt sorry to let him down. He had already provided me with hours of entertainment with his amazing oratory and humour at the dispatch box of the Oxford Union. I didn’t always agree with him or even understand what he was saying, being a Scientist Of Very Narrow Focus.

But it was always clear to me that he was brilliant; possibly the most brilliant student I ever came across at Oxford.

Which is saying something because Oxford prides itself on having some smart cookies. Even so the supersmart and brilliant ones stood out a mile.

But can they actually run a country? I guess we’re going to find out…

One of the best things about staying in Oxford years after you’ve failed to escape the gravitational pull of the University is the fact that once in a while you get surprise phone calls out of the blue from friends who used to study or work here, wanting to drop by for dinner while they are in town giving a seminar/visiting a library or a lab.

In the next two months we’re due a number of these visits, but yesterday we were thrilled by a pop-in from our old friend Professor Peter Simpson, who I believe I have mentioned at least once on this blog.

Pete teaches philosophy at the City University of New York and is self-confessed Aristotelophile. We became friends many years ago, in fact Pete is one of the many dear friends I inherited from my mother. Back when he was a young graduate student trying to impress my mother, he took my sister and I to movies and introduced us to Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

Nowadays Pete is high on my list of the cleverest people in the universe. He wrote a book about Pope John Paul the Great in which it was clear to any reader that he actually understood all that continental philosophy stuff…! (Not me; I’m more comfortable with the writings of the current Pope Benedict, whose work is at least couched in language and concepts I can follow…)

I told Pete how I’d fallen under the influence of his beloved Aristotle when writing the second of the Joshua Files books. (Fellow writers, if you haven’t read the Poetics yet, I can’t recommend it enough.) I mused aloud how it was possible for one guy to be so incredibly prolific as Aristotle apparently was, dominating his contemporaries across both natural sciences and political philosophy, as well as knocking out a 42 page masterpiece in which he explained and laid down the principles of western drama, principles which stand to this day.

Pete’s answer was very interesting. “It’s because he was such an empiricist. He used exactly the same technique as when he analysed the world of animals – he first collected data, looked for patterns and governing principles. He collected all the Greek plays he could get hold of, especially the award-winning ones. He had his students help him complete the analysis.”

So Poetics wasn’t just the work of a guy who sat musing and philosophizing about what he’d seen down the Greek theatre – it was a scientific approach to the understanding of dramatic structure.

The benefits of a scientific education, hey? I can’t say enough good things about one. (Although I also wish I’d been trained to think with the razor-sharp logical clarity on philosophical matters as Professor Pete. He could argue the hind legs off a snake! First he’d argue the case for the legs…)

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