“£27,000 is a hell of a price to pay… I would not have thought about it.”

Binita Mehta talks to David Davis, Conservative MP and former Shadow Home Secretary, about his path from Warwick to Westminster.

_Let’s start with an easy one: what’s your fondest memory of Warwick?_
Oh god… my wife! I met Doreen when she was a fellow Molecular and Computer Science student, and she was actually on the bench next along, so I did not have to go very far.

_Amongst other things, you were one of the founders of Radio at Warwick. How did that come about? Did it have an impact on your future career?_
It could have done. There were two of us who were founders of Radio at Warwick. It was Tim Clark, whose idea it was. and he came to me and said: “Do you want to get it started?”, so I went and blagged five thousand pounds – which is in today’s money around 50,000. I persuaded a whole load of companies to give us free kit, we talked to the government to allow us a license and we also asked the BBC to provide us with the training, so it was a sort of big sales pitch. But then, the real difficulty… making sure people actually turned up to DJ at half past six in the morning!

_Those were the days, though, of the famous ‘Red Warwick’ student radicalism. Would you say it was difficult to be a Tory here back then?_
Well… it was unusual. The truth was that a lot of people in the socialist society were friends of mine, and were for many years after university, so it was not that fierce. And of course, in one sense I was an unusual Tory, in that I read Marcuse and Marx and the various luminaries of the time – and I knew as much about Che Guevara as any of them did! It was university. We enjoyed debating things.

_But you have not studied politics of course, so how did you end up going into it?_
Well, I wanted to be a scientist and do good things in the world – discoveries on behalf of humanity. But while I was here, it was a very political time… lots of sit-ins, marches and so on, and I became a member of the Senate Council and realised that all these science professors spent half their lives arguing over funding, whether they were getting the money for this NQR reactor, all this sort of stuff. And I thought actually I do not want to spend my life doing that sort of politics, which is sort of ironic given where I have ended up!

So I decided actually to go into business, but what also happened at the same time was a lot of student politics going on – a lot of left/right politics. In those days the Soviet Union was a dominant power, China was a dominant power and of course the country itself was afflicted by strikes. And then I realised that I needed to do something about this, I needed to chip in, and that is how I got into student politics. I think I was Deputy Chairman of Student Council. I got beaten for the presidency – I did not manage that! But I became National Chairman of the Conservative students. It seemed to happen almost by accident.

_Let’s talk about national politics then. With all the controversy that has been surrounding student fees and the rises, what is your view on the future of education in the country?_
Well, I was one of the leading opponents of tuition fees – always have been. I take the view that education is a public good. My concern is with social mobility – I am a working class boy myself – I want kids from council estates and the like to be able to come to good universities – like Warwick, Oxford, Cambridge, Imperial – and to change their own lives. I think that £27,000 is, well, a hell of a price to pay. Frankly, if it had been me, I would not have even thought about it. I would have gone out and got an apprenticeship or something – maybe taken up a life of crime! But the truth is that if you want the youngsters to get on, you must not put hurdles in their way. That is why I did not like tuition fees and why I still do not.

_What is your opinion, then, on the student demonstrations such as the one held on the 9th of November? _
Well, it was a peaceful protest, and that is very important. The violence last year was a bit of a rent-a-mob that came along determined to create violence. The right to peaceful protest is one of the things I stand for, and if you want to drag things to people’s attention, then good on you for doing it. I would rather students let their views be known by proper debate – that is the best way to put it.

_What advice would you give to budding politicians who want to follow in your footsteps from Warwick to Westminster?_
Do something else first! One of the great problems in modern politics is that large numbers of people come straight in. They go to the research department of Labour or the Tory research department or the Liberal research department – if they have one! – and they do that and then come into politics. Of course it is a way to get on in politics because you come in young, you come in well-groomed and so on, but you know I think it would be better for the country if we had more people who had worked elsewhere, whether they are doctors or lawyers or businessmen or trade unionists or whatever. The best Parliament in the last hundred years I think was probably the 1930s parliament. You look there, and really all of the characters had a hinterland – something behind them. I think that is more important than anything else.