Letters

Dark Times

The impact that ‘dark money’ is having upon Cambridge University is well investigated in the article by Nafeez Ahmed and Peter Jukes (‘Reform UK and Big Tech Palantir Co-Founder Peter Thiel’s “Political Pipeline” Recruitment Project at the World-Renowned University Revealed’, 16 July 2026). However, what seems to have been implied is that the great university was a place of “intellectual and cultural achievements”, in contrast to the “royalist” Oxford of Boris Johnson and David Cameron.

But 50 years ago, there was a thriving conservative-inclined college – the oldest in Cambridge. With Maurice Cowling – the author of political history books – as a Director of Studies and John Vincent – a young lecturer who moved to Bristol University in 1970 – holding forth, Peterhouse was seen as a safe place for right-wing intellectuals to practise.

However, without all the ‘dark money’ to shield them, the mediocrity of thought demonstrated by men like Roger Scruton and the temporary appearance of the American sociologist Edward Shils, was apparent to many of us who were studying there at the time and, indeed, even to the traditional conservative, Maurice Cowling.

Nonetheless, these people provided an academic foundation upon which it was easier to construct the pseudo-intellectual “right-wing mecca” attaching itself to the university.