Rosamund Urwin: You’ll be quids in but more likely a dullard with a first

In Evelyn Waugh’s novel Brideshead Revisited, the protagonist Charles Ryder receives advice from his cousin Jasper before starting his Oxford degree. “You want a first or a fourth,” he says. “Time spent on a good second is time thrown away.”

I’d long thought this view as dated as those degree classifications. Surely a 2.1 — and yes, I’m talking my own book — is a green light to employers? It reassures them that you hadn’t spent three years as a library hermit, and if there’s a chip on your shoulder from being “robbed” that’s preferable to the entitlement of someone with the key to the clever clogs’ club. Anyway, our intellectual inadequacy was ameliorated by £50 notes — graduates with a second earned more than peers with a first (whose mean salaries were presumably depressed by those going into academia).

That’s no longer true. This week, figures showed that among recent grads, a first wins you a £2,500 bonus. I imagine this shift reflects student ambition rather than employers’ desires: the smart kids don’t want to pile up debt just to while away time in Wetherspoons. And given how obsessed many of those who went to university are with the result, this seems wise.

The old joke runs “How do you know someone went to Oxbridge? They tell you.” The same goes for a first. The information is volunteered too eagerly, as though it’s always on the tip of the tongue. There can be pride too in a third, with its dash of élan — the degree of the dilettante, the charmer, the bounder. Complexity sits in second class. It’s where you hear excuses — sport, sickness, drinking, a hellish exam timetable, heartbreak. And it’s where people divide up the category themselves. “I got a high 2.1,” they say, a balm they’ve clearly applied to a wound for aeons. In response, a friend of mine has taken to telling people he got “a low 2.1”.

But why do graduates care so much about a set of exams they sat while they still had spots? Especially now that more employers — as with this paper’s apprenticeship scheme — are recognising that staff don’t even need a degree.

The obsession partly stems from the idea that (unlike school exams) you can’t teach to the test. And in theory this is the apogee of our intellectual endeavours. The night before I took my first finals exam, I thought: “This is the most I will ever know.” Though what my brain was loaded with — Aquinas’s philosophy, communitarianism’s failings —hasn’t seen much use since.

Degree disappointment may also be a spur to greater things, though. A few months after I left university, I had dinner with the provost of my college. “Not getting a first was the best thing that ever happened to you,” he told me. It didn’t feel like it, I said. “It was, because otherwise you’d have got stuck here like me.” Perhaps. Or maybe I’d just be a bit richer — and a lot more insufferable.

‘Hot felon’ has a special place in our society

Jeremy Meeks is the gangster-turned-model who became known as the “hot felon” (I prefer “Dreamy McMugshot”). After he was arrested in 2014, his photo was shared online by people whose motives seemed more aesthetic than an appreciation of the importance of law enforcement. Catwalk work followed. But this week, the model with the teardrop tattoo was deported from Heathrow, news that made page 11 of The Times.

What does his success say about our society? Perhaps this is the allure of the ultimate bad boy, and many of us have a mild form of the delirium that leads women to fall in love with incarcerated serial killers. A kinder reading is that we like a redemption story, and how brilliant it is that modelling — the preserve of the genetic few — has proved an equal opportunity employer.

Or maybe he’s just really, really ridiculously good-looking.

Covering up hangover hell

There were a few sore heads at Evening Standard towers yesterday, the by-product of some all-too-efficacious margaritas at The Ned in honour of our departing editor, Sarah Sands. These weren’t the type of hangovers that could be fixed with a couple of Paracetamol and a Pret bacon brioche but the thudding, miasmatic-mouthed, photophobic kind, where you convince yourself it might actually be swine flu.

The challenge is how to cope with such alcohol-induced Abaddon in the office. Always overdress. It tricks colleagues into believing you’re clear-headed. Strategic naps can be your salvation.

Even the floor of a shower with a towel laid down (or, if you’re really desperate, a loo cubicle) can make a siesta spot. And of course, get out of there as early as you can.

* Both Theresa May and Jeremy Corbyn could sit out the general election debates, since Breton cap won’t show up unless leopard-print heels does, and she has deemed herself above being interviewed for a job she knows is hers.

This is a shame for democracy. But given their drab performances at PMQs, not a great shame for the oratorical arts.