Cambridge Mafia

The "Cambridge Mafia" is a pejorative term denoting a group of British Conservative Party politicians, front-rank members of their party during the 1980s and 1990s, who attended the University of Cambridge at roughly the same time in the early 1960s. Many of them served as Chairman of the Cambridge University Conservative Association, or President of the Cambridge Union Society, and several of them held both offices. Apart from Leon Brittan, none of them attained great academic distinction at university. The group's contemporaries at Cambridge included satirist and journalist David Frost and comedian Peter Cook (both of whom were active in Footlights at the time), Canadian Supreme Court justice Ian Binnie, historian Angus Calder and Liberal Democrat politician Vince Cable.

The period of prominence of the "Mafia" was something of an aberration for the Conservative Party, which traditionally has closer links to Oxford than Cambridge. Between 1955 and 1990 the party had been led by five consecutive Oxford graduates (Anthony Eden, Harold Macmillan, Alec Douglas-Home, Edward Heath and Margaret Thatcher). In turn, the "Mafia" has been succeeded by a newer generation of Conservative politicians, again led by Oxford graduates (notably David Cameron, William Hague, George Osborne, Philip Hammond and Theresa May).