An Evening with Edwina

Bespectacled and dressed in the traditional Tory blue, Edwina Currie burst onto our screens with a brilliant smile and a cheerful laugh as she joined OUCA for a virtual Speaker Event in the second week of this term. Over the course of ninety-five brilliant minutes, Currie explored topics ranging from feminism to her now very active, and quite amusing, Twitter account.

Often described as a gladiator, Currie was first elected as an MP for South Derbyshire in 1983 and was a fixture in the media and the Conservative Party despite losing her seat in 1997. She is known to be an outspoken, sincere, and humorous interviewee, and the smiles and chuckles she elicited from the President, Julia Hussain, are proof of this. 

As this event took place on the 75th anniversary of V.E. Day, Currie naturally began by sharing what the occasion meant to her. While she herself was not witness to the horrors of the war, or the intense jubilation on V.E day, she has a personal connection thereto. Having grown up in Liverpool which Currie proports to have been ‘flattened by the war’, she recalled that many of her contemporaries expressed immense trauma resultant from the war. She lamented that much thereof had been hidden by the classic English ideal of ‘keeping calm and carrying on’. She also displayed immense pride in the sacrifices that had been made during the war, and her staunch and jubilant patriotism coloured the rest of the talk. 

By now, much of the media has drawn parallels between the horrors and atrocities faced during the two World Wars and the current, ongoing, Covid-19 Crisis. In this vein, the talk of V.E Day, and the period of massive social and political upheaval that took place during the Second World War, inspired many questions about the pandemic. Her personal response to the handling of the virus outbreak was verily measured. Currie hastily acknowledged that the analysis of the handling of the ongoing situation was fraught, and that any clear outcomes or consequences would only be realised in the long run. On this point, she is in favour of an independent and exhaustive study on how the responses to the pandemic have aided in its now apparent mitigation. Clearly a lifelong and devoted reader of The Spectator, Currie made reference to a recent piece written by Matt Ridley titled ‘We know everything – and nothing – about Covid’ when she elucidated the importance of more data and the validity of the models being presented. 

She was firm in her belief that the handling of the virus must be political, as the ‘broad brushstrokes’ favoured by the politicians were less targeted and thus less discriminatory than the tactics that would have arisen from a purely scientific evaluation. Perhaps this demonstrates a cautious approach to technocracy. In her near-infinite wisdom, Currie admonished the resolutely misguided group-think that hindsight and focussing on how things should have been done differently in the past is by any means a sound answer to how to take action now. Brilliantly dubbed “Starmer Syndrome”, Currie believes that this thinking is in complete opposition to the Conservative mind. In her opinion, Conservatives are more focussed on seeking the opinions and consensus of the population and using that as a starting point for policy decisions. However, this is all dependent on the information that is available. It is clear that Currie is well aware of the misinformation that has dominated and twisted the current conversation about this outbreak. 

Anyone who has read about Edwina Currie is likely to be aware of the ‘salmonella-in-eggs’ controversy that effectively ended her tenure as a Junior Health Minister in 1988. Whilst most politicians would shy away from addressing such a controversial and surely traumatic period of their life, Currie cleverly uses it to illustrate her point about the misunderstanding and misinformation that surrounds the pandemic. Steadfast in her belief that the controversy surrounding her statements on salmonella-in-eggs were mainly contrived by the media.  Currie, however, is not upset by this, as she believes it a natural product of any free society and she likely wouldn't change that for all the eggs in the world. When asked how Currie herself handled the tough media scrutiny she was subject to, her response was an emphatic laugh, a smile, and perhaps the best advice I've ever heard ‘Mock or Block’.  

Looking to the future, Currie is hopeful that the next election might not take place in the winter. This is, I'm sure, a very touchy subject for many of us, as I personally had to spend hours upon hours in the damp, cold and foreboding Gloucestershire countryside when I went campaigning for the now Stroud MP, Siobhan Baillie. Her emphatic plea of ‘Dear God’ when mentioning the severe campaigning conditions Currie had faced when helping the Conservative cause in her local area, did, perhaps bring back traumatic memories for many. Aside from hopes of a bright summer election, she also sincerely hoped that the gains the Conservatives had made in Northern seats, where Currie herself is a resident, would yield long-term changes to the voting pattern.  Born, bred and brought-up in the North, she is aware of the massive failures in Government policy that try to address and re-balance the nation. 

Questions on the NHS and Conservative social policy allow Currie to showcase her profoundly progressive views. She is clearly massively proud of the national health service, perhaps because she says it's been instrumental in treating her husband, now 79, through multiple bouts of cancer. To her, the NHS, is one of the key bastions of how great the United Kingdom is, and that while some of the attitudes may need changing, its mere existence is applaudable. She believes that the health service, along with the freedom of social mobility, were what initially enabled her to first secure a scholarship to study at Oxford, and then become an MP. Having worked under another scholarship success story, the most honourable Margaret Thatcher, Currie is enthusiastically supportive of the role in education of bringing about opportunity and social mobility. Crucially, Currie doesn’t believe that the current Cabinet, hailed by many as one of the most diverse in history, should be judged based on their thoughts and deeds, and not their origins. For her, diversity should not be seen as an end in itself, but rather as a naturally occurring product of a free society wherein all do strive to be better, for the better. 

In an interview with the Guardian, Currie was questioned as to who was the love of her life. In response, she replied, “The love of my life? Most people who know me would say it’s me.” Having been fortunate enough to spend an evening talking to her on Zoom, I would answer similarly.

Aurora Guerrini (Communications Director) is a DPhil student reading Physical and Theoretical Chemistry at Worcester College