“Go and do something that will actually get you a job,” my tutor warily advised. It was the year before I left for university and my dreams of studying politics were punctured on the spot. Instead, I trotted off to do a BSc in computer science. It was not a joyful endeavour: the degree was maths dressed up as technology and I displayed limited scientific aptitude.
Yet studying CompSci was one of the best decisions of my life. My teacher was right: Britain’s universities are overflowing with graduates who can debate the morality of free markets but are perplexed by the von Neumann architecture. By the end of my three years, I had nil desire for a career in programming, but I had developed a love of data and statistics. And when it came to finding a job, my BSc caught employers’ eyes.
British politicians have a similarly strained relationship with science. Harold Wilson embraced “the white heat” of technological change in the 1960s, but failed to see it through. Margaret Thatcher was one of the first world leaders to sound the alarm on climate change in the 1980s, another wasted opportunity. Now Boris Johnson wants to make post-Brexit Britain a “scientific superpower”, building on its success in striving for green energy and the triumph of the Oxford-AstraZeneca coronavirus vaccine.