No-one actually cares what students think – we should just ignore them

Maybe the country is missing a few things about the molten magma of rage that has erupted after some students at Magdalen College, Oxford, decided to take a picture down.

First, the students involved aren’t even the kind of precocious, pretentious, mini politician, PPE undergraduate types that people seem to imagine them to be. William Hague (1979-82) was the paramount exemplar of the type. No, that would be the Junior Common Room. These Magdalenites are graduate students, in the Middle Common Room, and as such many will be from abroad and, as it happens, paying full-fat fees and far from being funded by the British taxpayer. Thus these students of biochemistry or economics may be less inclined to be Her Majesty’s liege men and women than, say, Oliver Dowden or Gavin Williamson.

Mr Williamson is following the general edict that seems to have been circulated around government to seize on any story that can remotely play into the “culture wars”, weaponise it for political purposes, and stand back and watch the Labour Party make fools of themselves by appearing to be “unpatriotic”. The education secretary has no sway, of course; these students can put whatever pictures they like up in their little den. It shouldn’t really be anyone else’s business but theirs if they want to replace Elizabeth II with, say, Jeremy Corbyn, Angela Merkel or the late Keith Chegwin. Or Cecil Rhodes, in my view.

More important, though, is just to remember that this is the sort of fun and games students of all kinds get up to, and much the best policy is to generally ignore it. Ever since the Oxford Union passed a motion in 1933 declaring that this house would not fight for King and country, students have been craving national attention, with varying degrees of success (and I don’t really think Hitler took much notice of the development).

Some many years ago, I ran the JCR at an Oxford college and we were always trying to get attacked by the national media. We once sent an impertinent letter to the editor of The Sun, on headed notepaper with the college crest on and everything, pompously informing him that we’d cancelled our subscription because of their coverage of the miners’ strike. We got nothing back, not even a made-up quote from a Page 3 girl about how we’d “failed to understand the treachery of Arthur Scargill and the enemy within”.

We even proposed (I can’t remember if we did actually do this) to send £50 of JCR funds to the bereaved relatives of Argentine servicemen killed in the Falklands War, to match a previous donation to a British military charity. The debate was as lively as you’d imagine it to be, notions of false moral equivalence being tested to the limits, and our resident Royal Navy officer trainee, an excitable sort of sailor, turned up in full uniform, including his ceremonial sword, which he happily wielded in the students’ bar later on.

As an exercise in junior democracy, it was energising stuff, if shameful, and it got people out of the bar and into the meeting. I rather hoped our (apparently) unpatriotic gesture would create some sort of storm. But, from Fleet Street to Downing Street to Buenos Aries, no one gave a rat’s sh*t about what we thought. Which is as it should be.

The culture wars are upon us, and there is a plentiful enough supply of cultural warriors to keep them going for some time. Everything is game – statues of slave owners and imperialists, Ollie Robinson’s old tweets, a new royal yacht, Meghan Markle’s kids, the Union Jack, the Proms, even masks and vaccines for the extremists – and everything is toxified. It’s all very depressing.

Curiously, though, “taking the knee”, thus far, looks to be too sensitive for Boris Johnson to want to stir things up and encourage the booing, presumably because he’s not sure where the balance of public opinion is on that, and he might actually ruin the entire competition for the fans.

Williamson, with his appalling ratings among the Tory grassroots, will surely be hoping to get some easy credit for his stance, because there’s no better way to get on in today’s Conservative party than to get yourself a really good dog whistle. No matter, for him, that he is also supposed to be in favour of unfettered freedom of speech and thought in academic institutions, which ought to include choice of symbols and iconography, and will shortly be legislating to that effect.

Maybe the president of the Magdalen MCR or of the Oxford Union Society should invite him to debate the motion that this house has the right to take down any picture it wants. I’d tear myself away from the bar to see that.