CONFOUND THE DONS
MRS Thatcher should certainly run for the Chancellorship of Oxford. When the dons snubbed her in the matter of an honorary degree, some, to make amends for the Insult, thought of erecting a statue of her in as prominent a place in Oxford as could be found. This amusing riposte was aban- doned only on the practical grounds that the statue would be vandalised. A cam- Paign for the chancellorship would avoid the vandal problem and add far more to the stock of public pleasure. It would also enable those Oxonians dismayed by the ,,.°41rIal snub to express their displeasure. 1 his latter group includes many who are not dons, and many who are not Thatcher- ites. Even the scientific dons who denied her the fellowship, partly because the Royal Society had just honoured her, might reflect that if they want the Govern- ment to give more money to Oxford, there is a case for making the Prime Minister Chancellor. The universities do not have enough money to do everything they would like to do: in Oxford, very painful deci- sions are being made about which subjects should suffer. As Chancellor, Mrs Thatch- er would be more obliged to listen to supplications about, say, the loss of clinical medicine than she is now. But the disagree- able prospect of being asked for money is not the one which is liable to deter her from standing. It is the disagreeable pros- pect of defeat. She will get the same advice from her colleagues as Harold Macmillan, quoted last week in the Diary by Peter Levi, got from his: 'They said I had nothing to gain and everything to lose.' But apart from the fact that in her finer moments Mrs Thatcher does not enter that defeatist state of mind, and the likelihood that she too would win, she does not have everything to lose. She would emerge from a defeat at the hands of the Oxford-educated Estab- lishment with her standing as a radical immeasurably enhanced. No populist ab- out to fight a general election would ever have received better evidence that she had not become 'one of them'.
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