Magdalen College, Oxford, is over-represented at The Spectator. Not long ago, Paul Johnson and Matthew d’Ancona were fixtures here. Today, there are Sam Leith, Douglas Murray, and Harry Mount. Unbeknownst to them, there is also me. I was there at the same time as all three, and a while after Matt Ridley.

Poor white kids who are clever enough to go to Britain’s ancient universities will find it much harder to get a look in

Poor white kids who are clever enough to go to Britain’s ancient universities will find it much harder to get a look in

Murray, I believe, spent time in a bad state school, but like Leith and Ridley reached Oxford via Eton; for Mount it was Westminster. I came the other way, a route which is now at the heart of a row over whether white kids from disadvantaged backgrounds are being shut out of many Oxbridge diversity schemes.

At Oxford and Cambridge, there are at least 15 scholarships, bursaries or financial aid schemes aimed at students from a black, Asian, and minority ethnic (BAME) background. Poor white kids who are clever enough to go to Britain’s ancient universities will find it much harder to get a look in.

I was one of the lucky ones. When I attended King’s Heath Boys in Birmingham in the mid 1980s, it was a violent sink school in a deprived area. Historically it was a Secondary Modern, but when the city aldermen were told to adopt comprehensives they renamed it and went to no further trouble. The grammar schools remained, the 11........

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