Academically, I rather lost my footing. I suppose I assumed I would always be able to muddle through. But at the end of year one I actually failed my preliminary exam in politics, to the amazement of my tutor, Wilfrid Knapp. To this day, I am not quite sure how I managed to pass philosophy and economics; certainly my tutors, John Simopoulos and Nicholas Stern, later of climate-change fame, were not confident that I had applied myself sufficiently to their subjects. I was suddenly faced with the prospect of not only failing to excel at Oxford, but failing to clear the first hurdle. I returned early in the autumn to retake the politics exam, and for all of September I had the best time of my life at Oxford, thoroughly immersed in all the books I was supposed to have read the previous year. I was especially engrossed by analytical tomes and biographies from post-war French politics.
I passed my prelim, but while the chastening fear of being tossed out of Oxford made me conscious of needing to rein in my political activities, I never really learned that lesson completely. In my second year I became president of the Junior Common Room, which took up considerable time, though it also marked the beginning of an enduring friendship with the college’s Master, the historian Alan Bullock. Through the Young Fabians I became involved in the British Youth Council, an umbrella organisation of voluntary youth and student organisations. Each of these experiences played a role in how I did politics, and what I did in politics, after Oxford. But if I had it to do over again, there is no doubt that I would concentrate on academic matters. Every time I speak to someone who is about to go up to Oxford, or any other university, I try to pass on that lesson. Forget the politics, I tell them. And the socialising. Forget stuff like the JCR. Forget student activism. The academic opportunity – the chance to read and write, think and learn – in this artificial laboratory of the mind is the one thing that will not come your way again.
I did socialise, but not in the conventional Oxford way – the fancy-dress dinners and large college balls. I would sometimes go out with one or all of my trio of PPE friends to eat and to talk. I also became close to a lovely, warm and, to me, exotic girl named Venetia Porter, one of the first intake of young women at St Catherine’s. Venetia was studying Arabic. She had grown up in Beirut, and then moved to London, where she had gone to the French Lycée. Her parents, whom I would sometimes visit with her, were separated, and also fascinatingly different. Her father, Robert Porter, was chief economist at the Ministry of Overseas Development, and was not only good company but an occasional source of rescue and support during my economics revision. Her mother was the famous, and delightfully unconventional, dress designer Thea Porter. It was she who gave me my first taste of London Bohemian life, at the Colony Room Club in Soho, where she was a member. Venetia and I were more curious observers than participants, but the Colony included an extraordinary cast of characters, and was a world away from Junior Common Room.
For a year I shared a house with Venetia and an Arabic Studies friend. It had that special, run-down quality of Oxford student lets, but it was cosy in its own way, and Venetia’s company always brightened things up. During study breaks for her, or political breaks for me, we would cook dinner, eat out or go to parties, where we danced and danced. We even enrolled in a rock ‘n’ roll class at a dancing studio across from Balliol, on Broad Street. In my final period in government thirty years later, I would cause considerable media mirth by suggesting myself as a candidate for Strictly Come Dancing. Had the producers taken me up on the idea, I suppose I would have had to come clean about my formal training.
At the end of year two, an opportunity arose to visit Venetia’s childhood city, and the wider Middle East. In my study of economics and politics, I was spending a lot of time focusing on the region. Through my UN Association work I met Lord Caradon, Britain’s UN Ambassador in the 1960s, and he organised a sponsored fact-finding trip through the Middle East during the summer. I almost didn’t make it. As term was ending, I suddenly fell ill with a form of sleeping sickness. As far as the doctors could surmise, I had probably picked it up in Africa, perhaps while rashly swimming in Lake Victoria, a notorious incubator for bilharzia, or when, in Ngara, I had waded through a swamp, swatting off tsetse flies, into Rwanda. Whatever the cause, I found myself in bed in Bigwood Road, unable to get up for nearly a month. At the suggestion of Venetia’s mother, my father took me to see a homeopath in Welbeck Street. It seemed to help, a bit. But it was mainly my determination not to miss the Middle East trip that gave me the energy to make my way to Heathrow.
As I set off, I carried with me the echoes of my father’s emotional ties with Israel. Even the most unobservant or deracinated British Jew felt a bond with the Jewish state. Especially having lived through the period of the Holocaust and Israel’s post-war creation, my father was no exception. The only time during my childhood when I can recall him being explicitly, overtly Jewish was when I was thirteen – during the pre-emptive Six-Day War that Israel launched against Egypt, Jordan and Syria after Nasser’s forces had begun massing on the Sinai border. In October 1973, just as I was starting at Oxford, Syria and Egypt joined in a surprise attack on Israel timed to coincide with the Jewish festival of Yom Kippur. Israel prevailed again, but this time it was a much more costly and close-run battle. My own views were broadly pro-Israel, but my St Catherine’s PPE friends had exposed me to the Arab side of the argument, and especially to the Palestinian cause.
My first stop was Egypt, followed by Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and finally Israel. Since the Arab League had helped set up the tour, I managed to see a range of government officials, and King Hussein of Jordan’s brother, the then Crown Prince Hassan. But the most memorable part of the trip was in Beirut, shortly before the civil war broke out between right-wing Christian militias and the pro-Palestinian Muslim left. Since their expulsion from Jordan after the 1970 civil war there, the political seat of Yasser Arafat’s Fatah and the other Palestinian military groups had been in Lebanon. I had a fascinating lunch with the Guardian’s Beirut correspondent, the quietly spoken yet passionately pro-Palestinian David Hirst. I also visited one of the Palestinian refugee camps along the road to Beirut airport, just inland from the Mediterranean.
That evening I wrote home: ‘The conditions are as gruesome as reported. Thousands of people living in unbearably cramped conditions … Of course, they will not leave the camps until they are given the opportunity to return to Palestine. It is the middle-aged and younger ones who seem most committed to return to Palestine. They are good-humoured, patient and with a will of steel. It is a desperate situation.’ I recognised that Israel’s situation was not easy either. I certainly did not take a ‘return to Palestine’ to mean the end of Israel, any more than my father did. But that the Palestinians had a national identity, and national cause, of their own seemed to me unarguable. When I returned to England I wrote an article for the Jewish Chronicle. Its message seems pretty unexceptional now, but it was less so then, especially for an Anglo-Jewish community audience. It was that until there were two states, one Israeli and the other Palestinian, there would never be peace for either people.
Back at Oxford, I again found myself practising politics as much as studying it. Labour had returned to power, as