10 APRIL 1964, Page 19

shall always he eternally grateful that I had

the opportunity to be an undergraduate at Oxford. It would be nice to think that my heirs, if am. can

have that same, chance. Yet your leading article, written presumably with the blessing of a former Tory Cabinet Minister, if not by himself, suggests that I should not have that chance, on the good Socialist grounds that 'because everyone can't have it, nobody should.' What a frightening philosophy coming from such a source! Here is the hoary old left-Wing obsession with a mythical equality coming out in the most unlikely places.

Oxford and Cambridge tend to take the cream. You admit there is no real way of stopping that with- out destroying the opportunity for anyone to have that priceless three years, which, with great respect to other universities, can never be quite the same any- where else.

Well, why try to stop it? Whatever the system, sonic universities will be pre-eminent. What on earth does it matter? For heaven's sake let's leave the Socialists to make their educational schemes to lit their preconceived ideas of society. Undergraduates are not cogs in a machine for producing a blueprint educational system. They are human beings and to deprive them of the chance of undergraduate life at Oxford or Cambridge is a terrifying admission' that the State is now boss. 1984. here I conic! No never, not from Tory mouths!