The second is that universities have taken historically indifferent students and turned them into unusually capable graduates. They have increased the number of undergraduate degrees they award fivefold since 1990, while the proportion of Firsts they hand out has quadrupled – from 7 per cent in 1994 to 29 per cent in 2019. In February 1990, four lecturers at the University of Swansea sent a letter to senior management. And while she and Lister get on well, their mutual respect comes from having different, complementary skills. And so standards were sacrificed. According to Professor Fenton of Goldsmiths, “Students come to us now with an entirely different mindset. But universities were not competing to provide an education. Universities are governed by a set of incentives, laid down by successive governments. That is partly because one in two recent British graduates is not in graduate work, a rate that has consistently risen since 2001. One insider reports that Lister has a “quiet whisky” with Sedwill each week, and together they put out the latest fire started by Cummings. Sunak will inevitably acquire stature at the Treasury, but he is the weakest chancellor in recent memory, while No 10 “don’t dare let Priti [Patel, the Home Secretary] out of their sight”, says a long-time observer. Gilligan, the reporter who controversially claimed the Iraq War dossier was “sexed up”, worked with Johnson at City Hall as his “cycling tzar”. The magazine has, according to its present self-description holds a liberal, skeptical, political position. There are 80+ professionals named "Harry Lambert", who use LinkedIn to exchange information, ideas, and opportunities. A battle for academic freedom and university quality had, it seemed, been won. The unit has had a long and varied history since its inception in 1974. Her husband, James Frayne, was a close ally of Cummings for a decade. This story, like most on the New Statesman, utilizes credible sources such as Roll Call and the Washington Post. “Difficult areas of the syllabus are either omitted in their entirety or simply not examined,” they heard. Like Boris Johnson and Brexit, British universities could both have their cake and eat it. With enough funding, universities would, in turn, uphold their standards – continuing to bring elite education to a wider, less selective pool of students. In the lefty corner we have the New Statesman’s Harry Lambert and on the centre left we have Stephen Bush from the, er, New Statesman. He is overseeing public service reform, Britain’s post-Brexit trading relationships, and the future of the judiciary – briefs that align with the deal struck in 2016. They are both highly rated by Lister and Cummings, and they may represent the future of Johnson’s Downing Street. A new body was born to oversee this impossibility: the Quality Assurance Agency (QAA). Harry Lambert, special correspondent at the New Statesman, discusses Dominic Cummings with James. The unnoticed other half of his manifesto title – “unleash Britain’s potential” – is as uninformative as it is inoffensive. Credit: Alamy. He is a product of foreign conflicts, not the “courtier-fixer” that Cummings accused Heywood of being. When Javid was chancellor and Cummings issued a blanket ban on ministers attending the World Economic Forum in Davos this January, Lister texted Javid to say he could attend. We must, he said, look harder for excellence. They all result in similar rankings, producing an analogous handful of extremely limited and obscurely calculated data points. He was brought into No 10 in July by Lister, who made him a deputy chief of staff to the PM; Lister, a board director of Localis, had previously hired him to run the think tank. Mirza, another stalwart from Johnson’s time at City Hall, is an underappreciated star of the Johnson project. The Johnson project is difficult to understand partly because, as one of his friends puts it to me, “there are very few people who have been close to Boris”. By harry lambert newstatesman.com — Political power and influence is still largely the preserve of white men according to two new analyses by the New Statesman, one examining institutional power in government and the other assessing political influence online. And Oxbridge is leading the charge: 96 to 99 per cent of its English, history and languages students get “good honours”. But while his lead adviser was briefing journalists on the impossibility of a breakthrough (the Spectator, where Cummings’ wife, Mary Wakefield, works as commissioning editor, published a cover story that confidently said there would be a no-deal Brexit), Lister was quietly creating a backchannel with the Irish government, in his role as a modest but effective fixer. “Thank you for raising the issue,” began the email, “and thank you also for your patience.” After reflection, the head of department and the director of “learning and teaching” had decided that, “our normal procedures… failed us. There are 70+ professionals named "Harry Lambert", who use LinkedIn to exchange information, ideas, and opportunities. Indeed, in 2007 the UK created a Committee on Ethical Aspects of Pandemic Influenza, to assess how doctors should prioritise patients in such a crisis. 7. But Harrison was an economist with a PhD, while Booth-Smith has no grounding in economics. Grade inflation begets grade inflation. “He’ll want a legacy,” another friend of Johnson’s told me in August last year. “It’s an endless process of dealing with students who haven’t been able to buy the grade they wanted.”. Grade inflation is the inevitable outcome of the system universities operate under. “Him, me, our whole team have thought a lot about this, and we know how to do it, and there’s going to be a revolution,” Cummings is said to have told him. “Boris would have 20 ideas,” says Harri. Subscribe For daily analysis & more political coverage from Westminster and beyond subscribe for just £1 per month! She is married to Dougie Smith, a former speechwriter to David Cameron. Harry will write long reads for the magazine, following his recent cover pieces on ‘The great university con’ and ‘Dominic Cummings: the Machiavel in Downing Street’. In 2011, the government projected that it would end up paying for 30 per cent of the student loan book. Nor did Dominic Cummings, his most senior adviser, who is reported to have at first welcomed the idea. To much of the outside world, Cummings is the only figure who matters inside 10 Downing Street. A staunch believer in capitalist markets, he criticised John Maynard Keynes and hired Friedrich Hayek. To enforce standards, with more students, would mean either swaths of people failing – or the government instantly improving the education of new university students. While the adviser describes the atmosphere inside No 10 as “quite harmonious… not nasty” and dismisses talk of warring tribes, it is a place where “lots of people have collided together”. Under the 2011 plan, 50 per cent of deaths were expected over a three-week period. Technological tracking of the type being employed in Singapore does not figure in the plans. If successful, it will hand control not only to Cummings, but to a team of unknown and unelected special advisers. The power of civil servants is hard to trace. Johnson could axe Gove and Cummings, who have worked together for 13 years and known each other for two decades.