The news over the weekend that Russell Group universities are letting in students from overseas on lower grades than home students has provoked understandable fury. Having been the proud vice-chancellor for five years of the university Margaret Thatcher helped found, Buckingham, I wince at the story. The fact that undercover journalists for the Sunday Times winkled out the widespread practice made it sound even murkier than it is. The response of the Russell Group that the lower offers applied to ‘foundation’, not undergraduate degrees, and that numbers of domestic students are rising more quickly than overseas students, has been lost in the noise. Universities need to get their act together and be on the front foot, focusing more on the experience they are giving students. They will never become the powerhouses on the public stage that they should be otherwise. They will continue to be eaten alive by journalists and politicians until they change.

Monday’s concert at Epsom College was, the previous year, the last school event my predecessor Emma Pattison attended. She and her young daughter, Lettie, were killed days later. She went around after the concert chatting individually to the musicians. Emma was a magical and brilliant head, inspiring, funny, passionate about languages, learning, the arts and the development of good character. Her life epitomised the very qualities overlooked in the philistine vision for education of our political masters. Her legacy of kindness, integrity and ambition will always live on at this remarkable school and far, far beyond.

Joy and positivity are exactly what coach Brendon McCullum has brought to English cricket. We couldn’t stop watching the stunning test victory his ‘Bazball’ philosophy inspired against India last weekend, while staying with friends at St Columba’s College in Dublin. British politics could do with some Bazball leaders to set our hearts racing with their panache and bravura style. Britain needs sea change, not stolid leaders, to score some runs.

Bazball is about audacity and competence. Liz Truss, the subject of my latest book on a British PM, had the former. When writing it, the question I kept asking myself was why Thatcher, who shared so much in common with her in terms of ambition, background, ideology and courage, not to say gender, achieved so much and Truss so little? The Institute of Economic Affairs was Truss’s favourite thinktank. Another question I ask myself is whether my father, Arthur Seldon, who co-founded the IEA, would have been exasperated or forgiving that she blew a golden opportunity to reset the economy.

The qualities the next prime minister will need to exhibit is the subject of my forthcoming Isaiah Berlin lecture at Hampstead Synagogue. The inaugural lecture in the series was delivered by the great chief rabbi Jonathan Sacks. How many today even know who Berlin and Sacks were? Shared history and memory have never been lower in my lifetime. Our nine great prime ministers – Walpole, Pitt the Younger, Peel, Lord Palmerston, Gladstone, Lloyd George, Churchill, Attlee, Thatcher – all exhibited a sense of history, alongside moral seriousness. They transformed the country, strengthened the union and elevated Britain’s standing in the world. These weather-makers come around every 30 or so years. That’s the length of time since Thatcher, the last agenda-changing PM, stood down. We are overdue a great prime minister, and the need is pressing.

I have never known more ignorance of history than among today’s politicians. Trying to redress this is becoming a pet obsession. We heard earlier this month that the Museum of the Prime Minister has received the go-ahead for its foundational exhibition in Westminster Hall. The idea for the museum, first floated in these pages no less, is now becoming a reality.

My week ended in Canterbury talking to the Dean, David Monteith, about a trail from the city to Folkestone. It was the port from which many soldiers left to fight in the first world war, to connect with the Western Front Way to Switzerland and then on to Freiburg. It will be a pilgrim path connecting two great mediaeval cathedrals. The older I am, the more convinced I am that long walks and pilgrimages are the answer to just about everything.