British politicians - that narrow pool of talent

Nowhere is this more apparent than in relation to their education – and this cuts across any differences between the main political parties. When Brown shuffles off the stage, British politics (or perhaps one should say English politics, since Scotland may be going its separate, but equally parochial way) will be in the hands of a generation of late thirty and early fortysomethings, almost all of whom went to the same university at roughly the same time and studied the same subject. As well as the two Milibands, Balls and Cooper, Jacqui Smith, Ruth Kelly, James Purnell, David Cameron and William Hague all went to Oxford and read PPE. The exceptions to this rule are George Osborne (Oxford, history), Boris Johnson (Oxford, classics), Michael Gove (Oxford, English) and a few, like Andy Burnham, Chris Grayling, Nick Herbert and Nick Clegg, who went to Cambridge. (Chris Huhne, incidentally, also read PPE at Oxford, but he is now in his fifties and therefore appears to be viewed by some Lib Dem members as already past it.) No doubt they were the leading political talents among their generation of students at their respective universities, but still, this seems like a pretty narrow pool of talent to be drawing from in the first place