Prime minister was mistaken on Oxford's black student numbers, but wants more state school entrants at top universities
Egypt, Brussels, Pakistan, Spain – David Cameron makes Blair's shuttle diplomacy look like a go-slow movement, resulting in a prime minister largely absent from the domestic scene. This week he took aim at a target back in Britain, but it looks to have been a misfire.
On Monday Cameron said it was not right that, according to recent figures, only one black student won a place at Oxford last year. There was a flurry of texts around Whitehall as it emerged the prime minister had picked a fight with Oxford and got his facts wrong – for 2009 it was 27 black students and 14 mixed race, making 41 in total, including one Caribbean student. But even once Downing Street had released a quote admitting the technical point, it did not concede the broader one.
Cameron is expected to be making a speech on keeping immigration down at the end of this week, and it has been suggested that race relations – and reminding the public that his government is not racist – could have been percolating around his subconscious.
But he also made a point on Monday that Russell Group universities were terrible at admitting students from state schools. He probably meant to make a point more about university access than racism.
There is a view inside Tory government bolt holes that the debate on access to university has been stillborn and not to their liking. It was meant to be launched by Nick Clegg's social mobility strategy last week, but that backfired. Clegg's team said it was his first large piece of work since becoming deputy prime minister and indeed it's a serious issue. But they had not thought through his own personal experience – stints of work experience in banking and politics – before announcing an end to free internships for future generations. As a result, the headlines were about his own privileges. "The launch of the social mobility strategy was meant to be a turning point but that didn't happen," one Tory said.
Cameron's closest advisers are very mindful that issues like access to universities and social mobility should not just be the preserve of the Lib Dems. They have been scarred since photos emerged of Osborne hanging out with Oleg Deripaska on his yacht and subsequent polls showed ordinary people thought the Tory top brass were not like them. To be seen to be helping people up became a Cameroon driving force. They'll be damned if it, like protecting the NHS, social mobility is allowed to become the sole preserve of the Lib Dems.
But both parties are tied into the coalition and so both have a stake in increasing the numbers of poorer students going to university, despite Conservative backbenchers grumbling that the coalition telling universities charging £9,000 fees to open up their doors is nothing less than social engineering. Even David Willetts, the universities minister – who is a free-marketeer through and through – believes that the way to square the circle and ensure higher fees do not deter less advantaged young people from applying is to enforce the access agreement. Willetts thinks the coalition is winning – that in the end, universities will open up to less well off kids and that headline figures of £9,000 will in reality be lower.
When Cameron rounded on Oxford, many on his side stuck up for the universities and said it was the fault of the previous government not doing enough to get less privileged students into higher education. The coalition is attempting to deal with this too – through early intervention and pupil premiums. Cameron and co are more conscious than their backbenchers that fixing the school system will take too long to show in the admission figures before 2015.
If they are to right the tuition fees decision so it does not become electorally fatal, both sides need universities to open up.