I’ve been following the Conservative leadership race with uncommon interest: I knew Rory Stewart quite well about 25 years ago. We were students a year apart at Balliol College, Oxford, in the early 1990s, and though we moved in different circles and were never friends, his idiosyncratic social status as a student may provide clues about why he has been knocked out of the contest rather earlier than his supporters were hoping.
Rory Stewart was not the only Balliol graduate in the running to become Prime Minister of course: the front-runner Boris Johnson also studied at the college, several years before Stewart (or I) arrived there. But whereas Johnson trod the familiar path of the Oxford Union and the University’s Conservative Association on his long march towards elected office, Stewart shunned them both: he was in fact a member of the Labour Party (albeit an inactive one as far as I know).
Both Johnson and Stewart were also, of course, educated at Eton. A lot of nonsense has been written about Balliol in the last few weeks, mentioning it in the same breath as Eton. Although in the 1990s the majority of its students were public school, Balliol is a very different sort of place. Although Balliol has produced many senior Tories – Macmillan and Heath, as well as Boris – it was by the 1990s an almost painfully left-wing place, much prouder of its Labour products – Denis Healey and Roy Jenkins – and the journalist Christopher Hitchens, then at his irreverent peak. Although there was much snobbery at Balliol, almost all of it was of the intellectual kind, and most public schoolboys deliberately played down their social graces (one Wykehamist I knew spent most of his first year wearing a football shirt). Continue reading
Building Design magazine’s awarding of its 
There are few pleasures like exploring an unfamiliar town on foot for the first time. A new series of posts on this website, In Praise of Ordinary Places, looks at Middle England towns that are overlooked by tourists (Oxford, Bath and Stratford-upon-Avon need not apply). This is the antidote to Crap Towns. I’ll speak as I find and won’t overlook ugliness, tackiness and misery. But I’ll also celebrate authenticity, unexpected surprises, and the ordinariness of places that rarely feature in Best Places to Live contests. Having started with Bedford and Northampton I now turn to a cathedral city to the east: Peterborough.
Don’t be put off by the industrial estates and roundabouts that girdle the place: Peterborough is, at heart, an ancient cathedral city, albeit much expanded since it was designated as a New Town in the 1960s. 
