After saying goodbye to the much-beloved former Principal of Somerville College, Baroness Janet Royall, a new Royle has come to the throne (pun very much intended). Diplomat and former Somervillian Catherine Royle has become Somerville’s thirteenth principal. After finishing her PPE degree at Somerville, Catherine did an MScEcon in Strategic Studies at the University of Aberystwyth in Wales. She was posted to Chile as it transitioned from dictatorship to democracy, and then spent seven years working on UK policies towards Iraq. Later, she served in Dublin, and then returned to London as an advisor to Peter Hain during the drafting of the Treaty of Lisbon. She spent seven years in Latin America, first as Deputy Head of Mission in Buenos Aires, and then as the British Ambassador to Venezuela. After being posted to Kabul in 2010, in 2015 she became the Political Adviser to the Commander at Joint Force Command Brunssum in the Netherlands, as part of NATO. After such an impressive and challenging career, The Oxford Blue sat down with Catherine to discuss the past, the present, and the future.

Lucy: So you were at Somerville back when it was still an all-women’s college in the early 1980s. What was that like?

Catherine: I didn’t actually apply to Somerville—I’d been to a mixed state school and so I had a lot of friends who were boys, and social pressures were very different in those days, so I chose not to apply to a women’s college. However, Somerville offered me a place, and so I took it. The thing that it gave me was female role models—it didn’t affect socialising much, but I really appreciated having incredible women here as Fellows and tutors and so forth. I’ve worked in very male-dominated environments all my life – at my last job, it was probably 90% male and 10% female – so actually, having that background at an all-female institution has been quite significant. 

Lucy: How has PPE changed since you were studying at Oxford?

Catherine: It gets a bad rep – mostly because of one or two politicians – which I think is a great shame. One of the reasons I wanted to do it was because I felt that if you were going to study any of them (Politics, Philosophy, and Economics), you had to study the other two in order to really understand the interconnectedness of some of those issues. That, I feel, has not changed. You do end up specialising, and I ended up doing a lot of international politics, since that was where my interest was, but having the background stood me in really good stead, especially when I became an international relations practitioner. The main advantage of it, really, is critical thinking, which is quite rare these days.

Lucy: What has been the most rewarding aspect of your career in the Foreign Office?

Catherine: The breadth of experience you get. You get to do all sorts of things that money can’t buy: you get access to people, to places, to events that are not things you can get involved with in another way. I feel very privileged for that. You also have an amazing bunch of colleagues; they’re usually extremely interesting people and well worth getting to know. I’m fortunate to be continuing down a path where these opportunities will continue, and where the people I meet will continue to be extremely interesting. 

Lucy: What has been the most challenging aspect of your career?

Catherine: The most challenging job I ever had was when I was in Afghanistan – I did two years in the Embassy and was quite involved in support for the Afghan police. We had a particular problem with different visions—the military, the police, nations doing bilateral stuff—and our problem was that we all saw it differently. I was asked to pull together the international support and work with the Afghans to build a coherent way forward. That year was really, really difficult for me. Someone once asked me what that job was like and I said, “Well, on a good day, it’s running up and down an escalator, and on a bad day, they put snipers on the sides.” It really was tough. We made progress, but boy was it tough.

Lucy: What has been the most interesting aspect of your career?

Catherine: Diplomacy is really about people. It’s understanding complexity and finding solutions, but solutions involve people. I think that’s really fascinating. I’ve always liked the challenge of finding a way forward: it’s an awful lot easier to criticise something than to come up with a constructive idea, but it’s nowhere near as satisfying. Being able to actually make a difference is the most interesting bit of it.

Lucy: A principal who shares your name is Catherine Hughes, who was also a diplomat. Somerville has grants in her name to allow students to travel – I was wondering whether you think that there is anywhere Oxford students should visit to expand their worldview?

Catherine: Almost anywhere you go, the key is to immerse yourself and talk to people. It doesn’t really matter where you go: if you’re from London, you could go to Newcastle and have a completely new cultural experience. It’s really about taking the trouble to talk to people—that’s what makes the difference. This idea that you have to go a long way from home is just not true. 

Lucy: Excluding the most recent, who has been your favourite principal at Somerville so far?

Catherine: My principal was Daphne Park, and as JCR President, I knew her very well, and I was in touch with her afterwards as well. Daphne inspired my career – she would talk about her experiences (omitting that she was a spy) and she just gave me a passion for international relations and made me feel I could do it. She was one of my referees for the Foreign Office. 

Lucy: How do you feel Oxford has changed since you were here?

Catherine: Oxford is more equitable: there’s an emphasis on people being here because of merit. Access and reaching out to let people know that they would fit in at Oxford was there, in a way, but it’s really grown, which is really great to see. The main things which make Oxford great are still there, such as the tutorial system. The pressures now are different, but they’ve always been there.

Lucy: This may be controversial, but how did you feel when Somerville began to accept men?

Catherine: I was worried about it when Somerville went mixed. Men’s colleges started to go mixed in the late 1970s, so not long before I began my degree, but they had so few women that it was almost tokenism. However, the women’s colleges went about 50/50, so we were actively losing places for women. I do, however, understand the reasons for going mixed. I understand why people are nostalgic, but there were great reasons to move forwards, and what’s great is that Somerville has remained a feminist college. It’s just that now it has feminist men, as well as feminist women, and the world needs feminist men, so it’s a net gain.

Lucy: How do you intend to change Oxford?

Catherine: I don’t know yet. I have a huge advantage in that, with Somerville, I’m taking over an institution which is at the top of its game. It will need to evolve, that’s the way of the world, but I have the luxury of time. I’m improving on what’s working very well – we already have the RISE campaign on the way, and I still need to understand what’s going on in Oxford. I’m keen on bringing practitioners and academics together, and as a personal project, I’d like to work on an oral history of the British civilians who went to Afghanistan, of whom there are thousands. The military always write their histories, but the contribution of civilians is not captured.

Lucy: Is there anything you’ve already decided you want to do? Any specific changes?

Catherine: At this sort of job, you have to be authentic. I think inevitably there will be things that I do differently, which I might not even know I’m doing differently. It will naturally happen that things change.

Lucy: What are your immediate plans for Somerville?

Catherine: Well, as I said, I only just got here. I intend to spend the first year really understanding the job, and building the necessary relationships inside the college and inside the university. I will no doubt bring people in from my past lives and build new networks, but I think the first year will be all about learning.

Lucy: Do you have a message for current Oxford students?

Catherine: I think it’s a huge privilege to come here. Be aware of that and make the most of it. Try to grow both academically and personally. There are so many opportunities in Oxford—you can’t do everything, but try something that stretches you. Oxford is a very safe environment in which to try new things, and if it doesn’t work out, it doesn’t work out and it’s not the end of the world. Use this opportunity. We’re in troubled times at the moment, and what’s important is to move away from the anger and look for solutions. Anger never helps. You don’t make peace with your friends, you make it with your enemies. You have to be open-minded, and I think if we can all do that, the world will be a better place. If you’re going to be something, be kind.