When I was at Magdalen

 The government are really busy at the moment.  It's tough for them.  They've got the fallout from a global pandemic to deal with.  Oliver Dowden is far too busy trying to save the music industry to be commenting on a decision to suspend an elite sportsman for a tweet.  Gavin Williamson has his hands full trying to address some of the issues that now face millions of school and college children, since they have lost a year of 'normal' education.  There's no way he's got time to wage a culture war over a £2.99 Athena poster.

Oh, wait.  Sorry.  I was wrong.  Plenty of time.  It is so important for the government to manipulated what you think.  Quick, get Julia Hartley Brewer on the case, send the dog whistles out.  None of this is any less important than actually running the country effectively because Boris is in charge with his unshakeable belief that it will be alright in the end.  I mean why wouldn't it?  He has lived his whole life in chaos and it's all fine for him, just like my Grandad who had never had a car accident but had seen loads.

Now it's time to prepare yourself for the tweets and articles that start with, "When I was at Magdalen.."

It's not as if it will be hard to find National Press journalists that went to Oxford.  Several posh people went there (eg Dido Harding).  People who know that you don't have to pronounce all the letters in the word.  Rather than pronouncing it Mag- da- len, like the Mary (please don't tell me she's pronounced differently) Instead, you just miss out all the consonants because your teeth were wired together at birth to stop you getting too fat or saying anything obvious like, "Couldn't we just fix that building we are renting out to poor people for 90% of their wage?"  Missing out the consonants means that it is pronounced as Maudlin, like some ancient grief-stricken aunt.

Re-framing an Oxford college as a den of Marxist activity is a really weird thing to do.  Many of the students at this Oxford college will have benefitted from the past of colonialism and many will go on to benefit from exploiting people because that's how the rich stay rich.  They won't even know they are doing it.  But yesterday they voted to take down a poster that was put up (probably ironically) in the eighties.  

If, like me, you worked hard to go to University, rather than it being something that was expected and you ended up in a Poly (or former polytechnic) then this decision is rather like a corridor meeting in halls where you decide that you no longer want to keep the traffic cone that Billy stole on the night out in Fresher's week, that someone has scrawled 'Warning, wet bitches!' on in marker pen.  For most of us the idea that even common rooms are run like mini governments with debating, shouting and voting is a revelation in itself.  This is why people from Oxford go on to run the country - they've been playing at it their whole lives.

For those of us with better things to do we must realise that this in not 'Breaking News'.  It's only worthy of a front page splash because the government want to distract us from the appalling job they are doing.  Let's try not to be fooled.

One of the very popular posters of the Queen you could buy from Athena in the 1980s