So Thursday came and Oxford went to the pollsAnd made its coward vote and the streets resoundedTo the triumphant cheers of the lost souls –The profiteers, the dunderheads, the smarties.From Autumn Journal by Louis MacNeice, (1938)

So Thursday came and Oxford went to the pollsAnd made its coward vote and the streets resoundedTo the triumphant cheers of the lost souls –The profiteers, the dunderheads, the smarties.From Autumn Journal by Louis MacNeice, (1938)

The electorate quite often gets it wrong, even if we are not meant to admit as much. It certainly got it wrong at the Oxford by-election held in October 1938, when the left allied itself around a ‘Progressive Independent’ candidate in the hope of defeating the Conservative, Quintin Hogg (later Baron Hailsham, of course). Labour’s Patrick Gordon Walker and the Liberal party’s Ivor Davies had both been persuaded to stand aside, allowing the master of Balliol, Sandy Lindsay, to take the fight to the complacent idiot, Hogg.

The two missing words in the King’s Andrew statement

The seismic arrest of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor

Britain’s right is falling into the same trap as the left

It was gown versus gown, given that Hogg was a former president of the Oxford Union and the election divided the country between the intellectuals, especially the lefties and the commies – the ‘pansy left’ as Orwell sometimes dubbed them – who wished for our country to stand up to Hitler and the commoners who were simply crossing their fingers and hoping Chamberlain was right, or had their heads buried up to six feet in the........

© The Spectator