The Oxford Chancellorship has long been the sort of ceremonial title bestowed on the great and the good. Great statesmen and prime ministers from Lord Salisbury and Harold Macmillan to the Earl Halifax and the Duke of Wellington. The superstars of their days that lend their own gravitas to the University after distinguished careers.
Against that heritage, Imran Khan is perhaps the most conventional Chancellorship candidate on the ballot paper. He read philosophy, politics and economics, captained the University Blues cricket Team, earned fame in the English game, even more as captain of Pakistan’s cricket team (with whom he won the World Cup), before serving for twenty years climbing – and revolutionising – his country’s politics. In his four years as prime minister, Khan became a symbol for investing in education for women and girls, ending corruption and loosening the grip of Pakistan’s military establishment.
Khan is the real deal – the calibre of leader who comes around once in a generation – as pivotal for Pakistan’s 251,000,000 citizens as any of Oxford’s former prime ministers have been for Britain. The connection, by the way, between the Chancellorship and prominent prime ministers is clear. Macmillan, Lord Salisbury, Lord Stanley, the Duke of Wellginton, Grenville, the Duke of Portland, Lord North. If we include those politicians who ran the governments before the position of prime minister became recognisable with Walpole, we would surely add the Earl of Clarendon, Thomas Egerton, and Robert Dudley, who would all go on to become Chancellor of the University of Oxford.
Of all the candidates on the ballot. It is Khan who comes closest to being a peer of these giants of history – Khan ranks fourth in Oxford’s most influential graduates. He fits the mould – yet should he win, he will be the first non-British former prime minister to serve as Oxford Chancellor in the University’s 800-year history.
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Khan, in many ways, represents Britain in Pakistan as much as he represents Pakistan in Britain. Khan grew up with a passion for the sport Britian gave the world, but along the way became an ambassador for the full breadth of British values. It was a British conception of democracy and justice that he brought to Pakistan and that the country is now clamouring for. Academic freedom, liberal learning, reasoned debate are all under threat at British universities. These are goods that Khan, and his country, knows are immensely precious but terribly fragile – and that we in the West seem to take for granted.
That’s why when Khan writes that “UK higher education is a precious resource”, he’s not just speaking from his personal experience of world class education at Oxford. He means it’s a “global force for good” – it exports British civic and academic values globally. When he speaks of diversity, and of justice, it is in its original, expansive, liberal sense, not in the divisive and corrupted sense popularised by woke HR departments. Again, Khan fits the convention perfectly; a totemic former world leader and a stalwart defender of British values.
Much less conventional is that Khan is standing for election from jail. His popularity and liberalising reforms were a threat to the regime – his party has been banned. His supporters arrested and he himself is charged with at least 85 lawsuits and criminal cases. As fast as he can have a cases thrown out for lack of evidence, the regime can file two more against him. The process is the punishment. Khan leads on from jail, and though his party is banned, independents endorsed by him defy the regime by continuing to win.
There’s every chance that, come the new year, Khan will have been freed with the help of the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention, though as Lord Hannan points out, it says a lot that Khan “can more easily contest an election here than there”. In that case, Khan can become what he wants to be – the symbol for perhaps the most important export Britain offers the world. If not, and he is remains in custody, Oxford will have sent a message that will shame the world’s fifth largest democracy into reinventing itself once more.
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