Dark Blue, Indeed?

Baroness Falkner of Margravine and Akua Reindorf KC tear to shreds the draft Conversion Practices Bill. Still, perhaps they are just more delicate flowers at Oxford, or perhaps it is because his students are scientists, but Matt Rattley would have been only moderately eccentric if he had been teaching an arts degree at Durham in better days.

I have never set foot in the City of Oxford, and although I visited the City of Cambridge a few times when an aunt and uncle lived nearby before retiring back to Saint Helena, they had no connection to the University. So I have no boat in the race. I merely observe that Nathan Cofnas, whose only field is not the study of race realism but the thing itself, is obviously trying to relaunch himself at Oxford, where he shows no sign of being rebuffed, specifically by the college from which Lola Salem was suspended. Her story was suppressed over the summer by the distraction of attention to Jason Arday, whose only serious error turns out to have been that he called the Police and Carter Ruck. That was hardly a reason to hound him to his death.

If Cofnas can get in at Oxford, then so can James Orr, sacked as Head of Policy for Reform UK and removed from anything very responsible at Cambridge. Although the restrictions that Orr’s compound is alleged to breach would have been laughed out or met with bemusement even at Durham back in the day. No such strictures existed when most undergraduates were not possessed of the age of majority. How do the Oxbridge authorities think that their colleges originated?

Not that the infantilisation is to stop there. Not only are parliamentary candidates to be “vetted”, bearing in mind that every member of the gigantic 2024 Labour intake had been vetted by Peter Mandelson, but elected MPs and their choices of staff are to be given Enhanced DBS checks, so every morsel of malicious gossip that the Police had ever heard and every anonymous allegation ever sent through the post, before being subjected to “anti-harassment training”. What would count as “harassment”? Stating the reality of biological sex? Insisting on the presumption of innocence in rape cases? What if you failed?

The more pressing need is for drug testing, since in December 2021 cocaine was found in 11 out of 12 powder rooms in the Palace of Westminster on the same randomly chosen evening, Mr Speaker Hoyle promised “full and effective action”, and then nothing happened. But they will not rest until they have a Lanyard Class HR Department that managed MPs, including by allocating their staff out of a central pool of the socially and politically monolithic. Resist.