An ear for political language
When Tony Blair won a landslide victory in 1997, ending 18 years of Conservative Party rule in Britain, Tom O’Grady celebrated. “I was watching TV and cheering on my sofa at 1 a.m.,” he recalls. Given his fervor for politics, and the fact that he was nurtured by an “extremely liberal family frequently discussing poverty and public services,” O’Grady says it’s hardly surprising that today he is completing a doctorate in political science at MIT. Or that the subject of his dissertation is the evolution of anti-welfare policies in the UK. The son of parents employed by the National Health Service, O’Grady engaged in formal and informal political activism as a student. He took a gap year after secondary school to do volunteer work with street youth in Ecuador. As a college student at the University of Edinburgh, he headed up the student Labour Party. He thought he fancied a life in elective politics...