Oxford University has educated 31 of Britain’s Prime Ministers, and Trinity ranks third in the college league table. Thirteen were educated at Christ Church, four at Balliol, three at Trinity, two at Brasenose, and one each at Hertford (Hart Hall as was), Jesus, Lincoln, Merton, Teddy Hall, St Hugh’s, St John’s, Somerville and Univ.

But Trinity cannot be blamed for the inadequacies of British statecraft in recent times. Our trio were all in office during the mid-to-late 18th century. Sir Spencer Compton (1742–1743), Pitt the Elder (1766–1768) and Lord North (1770–1782) were the 2nd, 9th and 11th holders of the post respectively. Pictures and cartoons can be found scattered around the College, and I have put a portrait of each in the study of the Lodgings.

But are they figures of whom we can be proud? I put this question to my old friend and political commentator Andrew Gimson, author of Gimson’s Prime Ministers: Brief Lives from Walpole to May, when he came for dinner last week. The answer was mixed.

There is little positive to say about Compton, alas. A favourite of George II, he served briefly and unhappily in the wake of Sir Robert Walpole and is the only British Prime Minister of whom no one has bothered to write a full-length biography. Walpole’s son Horace described him as “a great lover of private debauchery”, while the memoirist Lord Hervey dismissed him as “a plodding heavy fellow, with great application but no talents. His only pleasures were money and eating; his only knowledge of forms and precedents”.

Pitt the Elder was only at Trinity for a year and did not much enjoy it. A popular figure, known pre-earldom as “the Great Commoner”, Pitt was a far more consequential statesman. He was Prime Minister formally for only two years, but had in practice fulfilled the role under the Duke of Devonshire and Lord Newcastle. Presiding over conquests in India, North America, the West Indies and West Africa, Andrew describes him as “the greatest war leader of the period when Britain was acquiring a worldwide empire”, but notes that “war and empire are not now celebrated as they once were, and his fame has dimmed”. The baseball player Wade Boggs provocatively maintained that he was England’s greatest Prime Minister in an episode of The Simpsons, only to be knocked unconscious in Moe’s Tavern by Barney Gumble, the town drunk, who favoured Lord Palmerston.

Lord North’s fame survives largely as a benchmark, with inadequate Prime Ministers of more recent times traditionally being dismissed as “the worst since Lord North”. He famously mislaid the American colonies, but Andrew maintains that he is unfairly maligned and would not have held office for 12 years without some talent and application. What is more, he was loveable. Attending Covent Garden, an acquaintance once asked North to identify two visually unappealing women in the box opposite, only for him to explain that they were his wife and daughter: “We are considered to be three of the ugliest people in London.” In contrast to Pitt’s volcanic rhetoric in the House of Commons, North often slept—or pretended to sleep—to avoid being drawn into argument.

North served as Chancellor of the Exchequer for three years before his premiership and then throughout it. The loss of the colonies was in part a result of his grasp of the public finances. Rather as Donald Trump has demanded that Europe contribute more to the cost of its own defence, so North demanded that the American colonists should contribute more to theirs. The Commons voted to impose a duty on tea; the colonists tipped a cargo of it into Boston Harbour; and the rest was, in due course, history. At the end of his life, North was almost blind but still cheerful, and much loved by his family.

So, we cannot claim to have nurtured Prime Ministers of the very first rank, but at least two had some virtues. Christ Church probably holds the crown with Gladstone, but who knows—some politically ambitious Trinitarian may yet be able to seize it.