Boris slams Brown on Oxford’s future
Boris Johnson yesterday launched a sensational attack on Gordon Brown, branding him a threat to Oxford University. In an exclusive interview with The Oxford Student, the Conservative shadow minister for Higher Education described the man widely expected to become Prime Minister as “bovine” and promised to defend Oxford against “social engineering”.
Speaking from his Westminster office, Johnson said, “We all know Brown wants to interfere. He has very deep-rooted, chippy, classbased instincts about Oxford, so I can’t believe he’ll be good news. He’s a meddler and a control freak.” “I hope he will follow the Prime Minister’s university-funding policy, which matches any private donations made to universities. And we hope he gives universities tax breaks, and sets them free from regulation.
“I hope from Brown we’ll see some good things. But he has had a nasty tendency to try to use Oxford as a laboratory for social engineering when it was never intended for that purpose.” Gordon Brown sparked controversy in 2000 following Magdalen College’s rejection of Tyneside stateschool candidate Laura Spence. The Chancellor later told the TUC that Oxford’s admissions system was “an absolute scandal.
Slamming the “old-establishment interview,” Brown told delegates, “I say it is time to end the old Britain, where what mattered was the privilege you were born into, not the potential you were born with.” Johnson, a former editor of The Spectator magazine, was an infamous figure in 1980’s Oxford. A Classics scholar at Balliol, he was a Union President and a regular target of the Evelyn gossip column.
Most recently, it has emerged that Johnson was a member, alongside Conservative Party leader David Cameron, of the notorious Bullingdon Club, an aristocratic drinking society. Yesterday Johnson promised that the Conservative leadership would “defend” Oxford from the Chancellor, who served as student rector of Edinburgh University. He said, “Cameron and I, we owe Oxford a lot. So if Gordon makes a move against Oxford, we’ll be watching him.
“It would be politically insane to do anything against the interests of Oxford.” Andrew Hobson, the tutor for admissions at Magdalen who found himself at the centre of the Laura Spence controversy, declined to endorse Johnson’s denunciation of the Chancellor. Hobson said, “As a college, we had to defend ourselves quite vigorously. “But I think even Brown acknowledges he got that one wrong. And I must say, he’s got a lot of things right, too.
So I think I’ll leave the talking to Boris.” Johnson, in the elliptical phraseology that has become his trademark, prophesised a bleak future under the Chancellor’s leadership. “Brown’s going to be a great cloud of gloom and divisiveness,” he told this newspaper. “In the words of Pericles, the spring will go out of the air.” “He will be a sort of brooding, low presence over the skies of Oxford, like some great squatting incubus.
“I’ve no idea if Oxford students support Brown. I hope not. But whatever Oxford students think, I support them. As long as they vote Tory.” He continued, “Brown is a wrathful, low-hanging fruit. He looks quite bovine, and his attitude to Oxford is that of a bullock with an ingrowing toenail. Really, I just think he’s bad news.” Local Labour MP Andrew Smith brushed off Johnson’s remarks.
He said, “I don’t think people take these outbursts too seriously, certainly not Oxford students, nor Gordon Brown. It’s archetypal Boris, meandering between baseless insult and studied buffoonery.” “Gordon Brown has great respect for scholarship. What he doesn’t have any time for is social elitism, the patrician airs and graces which David Cameron can’t escape, and Boris Johnson doesn’t want to.” Mark Baker, co-chair of OULC, said, “It sounds like a load of bollocks to me.
I don’t know where he’s got the myth that Brown is a control freak from. He’s a realistic and rational social democrat.” Alex Stafford, Chair-elect of OUCA, said, “We hope that Brown holds an election soon, so a new Conservative government gets in.” A University spokesperson said, “Mr Johnson is fully entitled to express a personal view and does so on many subjects, but this is not a matter on which the University would wish to comment.” The Treasury declined to comment.
10th May 2007