This is The Guardian.

At the Oxford University Debating Society in the 80s, a generation of aspiring politicians honed the art of winning using jokes rather than facts, by Simon Cooper, read by Andrew McGregor and produced by Ian Chambers.

When I arrived at Oxford in 1988 to study history in German, it was still a very British and quite amateurish university, shot through with sexual harassment, dilatantism and sherry.

Michael Gove, Boris Johnson and the much less prominent David Cameron had graduated just before I arrived, but from my messy desk at the student newspaper, Churchill, I covered a new generation of future politicians.

You couldn't miss Jacob Reese Mogg, the only undergraduate who went around in a double-breasted suit, or Dan Hannan, who at the age of 19, founded a popular Eurosceptic movement called the Oxford Campaign for an Independent Britain,

which with hindsight looks like the intellectual genesis of Brexit.

Churchill was a poor imitation of private eye.

Inaccurate, no-mic and badly written in the trademark Oxford tone of relentless irony, with jokes incomprehensible to outsiders,

but it turns out that we weren't just lampooning inconsequential teenage blow-hards, though we didn't realise it.

We were witnessing British power in the making.

Probably the main reason Oxford has produced so many Prime Ministers is the Oxford Union Debating Society.

Founded in 1823, based in a courtyard behind the core market shopping street, the union, when I encountered it, was a kind of children's house of commons.

Like its London model, it resembled the Gentleman's Club, complete with reading rooms, writing room and bar, and across the garden, Europe's largest purpose-built debating chamber.

The union was one of those Oxford institutions that conflata middle-class teenagers such as William Hague and Theresa May into feeling posh.

Union officers wore white tie, speakers black tie, and everyone called one another honourable member.

The walls were lined with busts of former Prime Ministers who had been union men.

19-year-olds debated visiting 60-year-old Cabinet Ministers and tried to lull on the front benches just like them.

Christopher Hollis, in his 1965 book on the Union, called The Place, a parody of the Parliament of 1864, rather than that of 1964.

It hadn't changed much by the 1980s.

I never became a member, but I sometimes got press tickets to debates, and I remember a young Benjamin Netanyahu dispatching hecklers, and on the 50th anniversary of Dunkirk, former Prime Minister Ted Heath, evoking Oxford in 1940, when German invasion loomed.

Heath had been elected union president in November 1938, after accusing Neville Chamberlain of turning all four cheeks to Hitler at once.

Another attraction of the union was the bar, which, almost miraculously in 80s Britain, stayed open into the early morning after debates until the deferential local police finally intervened.

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