The Observer panel

What would you do if you were a magpie?

This is one of the unsettling questions being put to Oxbridge applicants in the hope the universities can enrol Britain's brightest
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Karol Sikora

OK, I have a bad press. I've just hired a smart PR agency in Mayfair to do some serious rebranding. I've found a partner, as humans don't like single magpies though the joy and sorrow stuff is, of course, a complete myth. I've enrolled on a nest construction course and booked to see a society psychiatrist for behavioural therapy. I'm genetically hard-wired to evict birds from nests and cause trouble, so making myself unpopular. This will be corrected and now that prices are falling I'll buy a place in Chelsea. As for a name change, the attractive lady in the spin place suggests Magpie Reloaded. What do you think?

• Karol Sikora is a cancer specialist

Donald Macleod

I would wish I weren't, in which case I would say I never answer hypothetical questions, before realising that eminences never answer the actual question, but simply say it's all Brown's fault. At this point I would say that if I were a magpie I would collect: socks, ties, books, screws, screwdrivers, scraps of wood, clerical jokes... Later I would progress to collecting good contacts: as many earls, lords, ladies and union leaders needed to get a job in the Foreign Office, or a safe Labour seat. The government would guarantee them against the hazards of boom and bust.

• Donald Macleod is principal of the Free Church School

Barbara Gunnell

If as a school-leaver I had been asked that question by Cambridge I would have applied elsewhere - to Bristol, perhaps, a more beautiful city and where the philosophy department did in fact teach me to mistrust that kind of psychobabble. Today, if my parents were sufficiently wealthy, I might instead apply to a top American college, where they at least take their pop psychology seriously. In 2006, the most heavily subscribed course at Harvard was on how to be happy, knocking Introductory Economics off the number one slot for the first time in years. The rest is history.

• Barbara Gunnell is associate editor of the New Statesman

Diane Abbott

If I were a magpie, I would soar through the sky looking for a poet to write exquisite haiku about me. Spying a poet on the street would be hard. Victorian poets were easy to spot. They dressed in properly poetic disorder. But nowadays even bank clerks dress like poets. So I would seek out an area such as Stoke Newington where many poets and other artists reside. I would search for someone staring moodily out of their window. I would pose artistically on a branch well within eyeshot. I would wait for the muse to strike. And my brief bird existence would be immortalised.

• Diane Abbott is MP for Hackney North and Stoke Newington

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