WILLIAM HAGUE

To alumni who remember, the name William Hague (Magdalen, 1979) instantly evokes a precocious sixteen-year-old giving a speech at the 1977 Conservative Party Conference.

Sporting a wavy, seventies schoolboy haircut, the very junior Hague (pictured, right) caused a sensation, immediately placing him on the political map.

In the speech he talked about rolling back the state and decried the ‘abhorrent vision’ of Jim Callaghan’s ‘promised land’ as a left-wing dystopia. He received a standing ovation, among those who stood up Margaret Thatcher.

So we start with that, in early February on a Zoom chat between London and Lord Hague’s Welsh residence, Plas Cyfronydd in Montgomeryshire.

He insists the poise and confidence he showed then had nothing to do with his brief stint as a boarder at Ripon Grammar School.

‘I didn’t settle there at all, so I don’t think of it as a school I went to.’ He left Ripon after just one term and enrolled at Wath-upon-Dearne Comprehensive School in Rotherham, South Yorkshire.

He took to debating very quickly, a generous teacher ferrying him around the competition circuit, from the tender age of 13.

He laughs. ‘It’s hard to analyse yourself as a teenager! But none of my political ambition came from any family connections.’

His parents Nigel and Stella Hague ran a soft drinks company.

But he was very ambitious, and, ‘…it’s extraordinary how calculating this little teenager was!’

By 15 he was Chairman of the local Young Conservatives, meaning a free ticket to the party conference. He attended in 1976, noticing that a seventeen-year-old made a brief speech.

The following year William came back with a carefully rehearsed speech, and suddenly he was the next big thing in politics.

‘The conference was remarkably unstructured. You had to write down on a slip of paper that you wanted to speak, and hand it to a steward. Ten minutes later I was on the rostrum. The party conferences were not stage-managed then, the way they are today. I don’t think they would take the risk today on a sixteen-year-old with no proven ability to make a speech…’

Looking ahead to his Admission as Chancellor to Oxford, which takes place on February 19, 2025 in a dedicated ceremony awash with ceremony, black gowns and crimson hoods at the University’s Sheldonian Theatre, he says,

‘I regret that my late mother won’t be at my Admission … She was a great influence on me. The day after that speech, and all the fuss it caused, she said to me, ‘Right, forget all that. You need reality again. That was great but it’s back to your A-Levels now…’ She was right’.

Two years later he matriculated at Magdalen College to read for a degree in PPE, firing the starting gun on a career that would lead to several cabinet roles, Leadership of the Conservative Party during the Tony Blair (St John’s, 1972) years, Foreign Secretary under David Cameron (Brasenose, 1985).

For the first time in an interview, Lord Hague admits that amid an ‘avalanche of letters’ that flowed through the family letter box after his big speech, he received a very warm one from the University of Cambridge, sort of inviting him to go there to study.

‘But I wrote back and said, no thanks, I want to study at Oxford because of the PPE degree. Looking back, I had already plotted that bit of me too: I really wanted to go to Oxford.’

He would ‘go to Cambridge’ vicariously, years later when he wrote two handsome volumes about two namesakes: Britain’s youngest ever Prime Minister William Pitt the Younger (1759-1806) and anti-slave campaigner William Wilberforce (1759-1833) – respectively students at Pembroke College and St John’s College, Cambridge.

But in 1979 he embarked on his studies and on student politics, duly becoming the President of the Oxford University Conservative Association and in Michaelmas Term of his final year, President of the Oxford Union, the debating society that has no formal connection with the University but remains synonymous with it.

He says he had a wonderful time at Oxford, attaining a First Class degree, but regrets not having time for any sport.

‘I took up judo in my thirties and come into the Office of Chancellor much fitter than I was as an undergraduate – not so much martial arts, now I’m sixty-three, but walking, cycling, running, gardening – something most days.’

His memories of tutors at Oxford include four tutors who all made their mark.

Above all ‘Bill Johnson, R. W. Johnson (Magdalen, 1964). I loved his tutorials because we’d range over all sorts of things that weren't really in the curriculum. That became a broad education and he was such an expert both on French politics and on South Africa. It turned out to be the dying decade of apartheid in South Africa. He’s still alive and indeed recently sent me a message from South Africa.’

‘I also had a great relationship with a very left-wing tutor, Derek Robinson (Lincoln, 1963). He taught me labour economics an industrial relations expert and an advisor to the Labour government around that time. I can still picture him sitting there saying ‘labour markets don't clear!’ It illustrated to me that forces of supply and demand don't just solve unemployment.

Other tutors included Philip Williams at Nuffield (Trinity 1937), who taught him about modern British political institutions and the young John Curtice (Sir John Curtice, (Magdalen, 1971).

‘Curtice was only in his twenties, just a few years ahead of me. Like me, he had a lot more hair in those days! He was a classic professor of political psychology and electoral statistics. This was still a pre-digital age. I can picture the reams of computer printouts that you had to have in those days. Piles and piles of election results everywhere, often getting all tangled up and, you know, as he explained things with his arms and legs moving in different directions and upsetting things. He was of course a very, very good tutor; I've always had a huge reverence for him and he still predicts the election results better than anybody else.’

Coming back into the fold as Chancellor elect since his election in November 2024 has been a busy time, he says, saying straight away that both he and his wife Ffion (née Jenkins, Jesus, 1986) have been made to feel very welcome.

He mentions visiting the University Church recently, ‘to see the Old Library and Congregation House inside St Mary’s, where the University is understood to have truly begun as a scholarly institution.’

He’s also had many visits and meetings, with the Vice-Chancellor Professor Irene Tracey, ‘and all the Pro Vice Chancellors, all the heads of Museums, and numerous other leaders and post-holders besides.’

Fizzing in the air is the innovation agenda, just a week after the visit to Oxfordshire by Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves (New College, 1997).

Reigniting the Oxford-Cambridge corridor as an engine of economic growth, Reeves confirmed the creation of an Oxford University-led Growth Commission.

Hague says, ‘To be a strongly growing economy in the 21st century, you need a climate of innovation, a lot of talent, and the supply of capital. We're pretty good on the first two. Oxford is great on the first two. So the supply of capital is what makes all the difference. Otherwise, every brilliant idea in Britain is going to be purchased by an American company. Much as we love our American friends, it would be nice to actually own something ourselves.’

The subject of how the UK should fund its Higher Education sector arises, because the innovation agenda and whether the UK can grapple successfully with, say, Artificial Intelligence rests partly on having great universities to begin with.

‘It's very difficult. It's hard to see a solution that wouldn’t involve more state support for universities. Of course, the government has now started to increase student fees in line with inflation, tuition fees. But at the same time, it’s increased the employer's national insurance contribution, which for most universities will remove the whole benefit of the increase. It's back to the earlier point about growth. Universities are the one of the prime engines of growth in the modern world economy. If you want to mention Silicon Valley, it should be the fact that Silicon Valley would not be there if Stanford University was not then.’

He's generous towards Reeves, saying he was ‘very pleased she made those announcements…the potential is fantastic.’ But he’s equally impatient to see that what is promised actually materialises, reminding me that ‘growth means people wanting to live and work in the UK, and the government has more to do on that…and I am being very polite’, he adds through invisible, gritted teeth.

Refocusing on his new role as Oxford’s Chancellor, Lord Hague says: ‘part of it is to celebrate and articulate the world of Oxford, but in the 21st Century, it’s also to help raise money.’

Hague is aware that the University is now far less dependent on the largesse of the State in 2025 than it was in the early 1980s, when 80% of its funding came from central government. By 2016 that figure had dwindled to approximately 50%, according to Emeritus Professor of History at Oxford, Lawrence Brockliss, a measure largely of the vast efforts of friends and alumni of the University to build up the endowments and incomes of the colleges, the central University and all the different faculties.

Hague is happy at this broad development, although thinks more can be done.

Casting back into his own past, Lord Hague was one of the original architects for this enormous rebalancing between private generosity and state aid. After his Oxford degree he went to INSEAD in France to acquire an MBA, thence to McKinsey and before he knew it back to Oxford.

There, in a cramped office in Little Clarendon Street under Oxford’s first Director of Development, Henry Drucker, the youthful Hague raced around the University meeting everyone, before putting together the bones of the University magazine Oxford Today, which launched in the Michaelmas Term of 1988.

‘I came up with the title of Oxford Today and I dictated the first prototype in my flat one weekend in 1988. I remember someone in the University saying the English needs improving, and my point was that it was a prototype, not the finished artefact. That, it is possible to communicate effectively with the many alumni across the world.’

The title was then produced every term for the next 29 years until the University renamed it QUAD and took it online in 2017.

There was another way that Hague never left Oxford. If you read the acknowledgements to his biography of late eighteenth century Prime Minister William Pitt the Younger (published by Harper Collins in 2004) he thanks Roy Jenkins (Balliol, 1938) for his advice on how to write such books.

I ask Hague what Jenkins, by then himself Chancellor of Oxford University and Lord Jenkins of Hillhead, said to him at Brooks’s Club on St James’s Street.

But he laughs and says that this is going to be in his Admission speech so he doesn’t want to steal from his own lines – only to say for now, that Jenkins was generous and helpful.

Why then Pitt the Younger (pictured, left), followed by a second book on his friend William Wilberforce?

Sensing a tutorial moment, Hague doesn’t flinch a bit, saying that he related very easily to this towering figure of British politics, who denounced the execution of Louis XVI in 1793 as ‘the foulest and most atrocious deed,’ almost as strongly put as the sixteen-year-old Hague denouncing Jim Callaghan’s ‘abhorrent vision’ [of state ownership and socialism.]

‘The Seventies were really dramatic, you know: two general elections, a referendum on Europe, the height of the Cold War. There was a lot to grab your attention if you were interested in politics as a young person. It sounds familiar doesn’t it?’

Pitt the Younger, the youngest ever Prime Minister aged 24, in December 1783; a reformer who spent 19 years in Downing Street, formalised the British relation to India and the Union with Ireland in 1800, survived to witness the Victory of Trafalgar but not Waterloo, forced to raise the first ever income tax to fight Napoleon, in an age governed by hard power and mercantilism rather than a free market economy. Hague sees him as

‘…a rather unexplained figure who I identified with very easily as a young politician.’

‘And I actually love the late 18th Century because I think it was the end of the old world. It's close enough in time to us that we can still reach out and touch it. Especially if you are sitting in an Oxford building of that era. You can touch this table or that bench. But it's so distant, we can hardly imagine it. It's just before steam engines, railways, telegraph communication. I think it’s a parallel to our own day. I think we are nearing the end of our old world. As AI and climate change and other things accelerate now, we are racing away to something else.’

Moving on to today’s challenges, Lord Hague compares AI to electricity, seen from 1820, a few years after Waterloo and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. ‘It’s going to change the world and we’ve no choice but to grasp it, to make good use of it. Also like electricity it’s dangerous.’

Hague is warmly mentioned in Balliol Law Fellow Richard Susskind’s (Balliol, 1973) forthcoming (March, 2025) OUP book How to Think About AI, A Guide for the Perplexed. That’s the book to get in 2025, we agree, because it’s a superb survey of everything known and unknown, delivered in non-technical language.

On another challenge, the prospect of tariffs introduced by President Trump,

‘To be clear I am not in favour of trade wars! I don't think any British prime minister of the post-war world have embarked on this or any previous American President since the Second World War, since the Great Depression; I've written articles in recent weeks - you know, Trump is not Reagan, he's not a Conservative in the sense of Conservatives of the Thatcher/Reagan time of which I was one. Trump's version of Conservatism is very, very different from that. One would question whether he really is, you know, a Conservative at all. So we all have to work with that though.’

Echoing a question I asked of Chris Patten (Balliol, 1962), Lord Patten of Barnes and Hague’s predecessor (who will happily, unlike his predecessors, attend his successor’s Admission), I ask whether there is one piece of advice he would give Oxford alumni for success in the world.

‘Oh yes that’s easy,’ he exclaims, recalling a moment when he was in media lounge following some sort of TV event, with the great Labour politician Barbara Castle (St Hugh’s, 1936).

‘She turned to me, I was still the teenager who had just given that speech, and she said ‘You will do well because you can talk, but to really succeed in politics, you need two things, single mindedness and stamina’. And then she swept out. Brilliant. I've never forgotten that - so many times when I've been slightly faltering in my public life I've thought, no: single mindedness and stamina. That's what you've always got to show. and it's really true. Most of the people who fail as ministers or political leaders just in the end haven't got those two things.’

To further illustrate the point, he says his role as Foreign Secretary had a highpoint, in terms of British soft power and overall good vibes, the day in 2012 that he accompanied over 100 Heads of State on ‘very luxurious coaches’ out to the Olympic opening ceremony in Stratford, East London; but that a year later, the day Parliament voted not to intervene alongside America to prevent Bashar al-Assad from using further chemical weapons on his own population in Syria, ‘that was the low point for me.’

To return to the world Britain finds itself in at the moment of his Admission, it is a dangerous one, no question, Hague says, who spent five years as Chair of the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), the British defence think tank.

‘I’m a very strong supporter of British expertise on understanding war, diplomacy, strategic studies, and will carry this into my role at Oxford. It’s one of the extraordinary things about soft power and hard power, and how little of the latter Britain now has.’

Hague mentions Dr. Rob Johnson, Senior Research Fellow at Pembroke College, Director of the Oxford Strategy, Statecraft, and Technology (Changing Character of War), adding that he will seek to support this bit of Oxford.

We turn to the Admission and the fact that this year there will be an armed guard formed by elaborate wooden staves (pictured), the formal symbol of power once brandished by the University of Oxford Police, once known as the Bulldogs. Hague adds that the music has been partly chosen by Ffion, who once sang in Jesus College choir.

The Admission will also be the first that isn’t folded into Encaenia, Oxford’s honorary degree ceremony held annually in June, since Harold Macmillan’s in 1960. From that moment on, Lord Hague will be the next in a great succession of Chancellors that stretches back across eight centuries of history, the precise origin of the office slightly lost in the records. We welcome him to the office and wish him and Ffion every happiness back at Oxford.