Malala joins Oxford’s boozy debating club
( but stays off the port)
NOTHING appears to faze the Nobel Prize-winning activist Malala Yousafzai – not even the antics of a group of rowdy posh students who like to knock back port while boasting how rich they are.
I hear that Malala has become a regular at the infamous weekly Port and Policy meetings organised by Oxford University’s Conservative Association.
The event, which i s held on Sunday nights, is a forum for insightful speeches and political ideas and was Prime Minister Theresa May’s favourite haunt when she was studying at Oxford in the 1970s.
But some members of the debating club were caught up in controversy earlier this year. At a Port and Policy party, members are said to have knocked back up to 43 shots of port each and bellowed raucous chants such as ‘My castle’s bigger than yours’ and ‘I’ll buy their families’ when stewards refused to serve them more alcohol.
One member was reportedly suspended ‘following drunkenness at an event’.
A university source said: ‘Malala seems to really enjoy Port and Policy events. She is very chatty and gets involved in the more serious side of things. Obviously there has been some controversy surrounding the parties in the past but she just comes along and talks to everyone.’
Another source said Malala has been attending the events for at least two terms.
There is no suggestion that Malala, 21, who is in the second year of her Philosophy, Politics and Economics degree at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, joins in with the boozy antics.
After all, she has weightier matters on her mind than portsoaked parties.
She is famous for her advocacy of female education – a mission she launched after being shot on a bus by a Taliban gunman in 2012 just for going to school. She fled Pakistan and moved to Birmingham with her family in the wake of the shooting incident and is now a global heroine as the youngest Nobel Peace Prize winner. One person who is delighted that Malala has been welcomed into the Port and Policy inner circle is leading Brexiteer MP Jacob Rees-Mogg, who is the honorary president of the society. He said: ‘This is excellent news and the right thing for Oxford University Conservative Association to do for an exceptional person.’ And Malala is in good company: as well as Mrs May, former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was a regular at Port and Policy events, as was BBC Today programme presenter Nick Robinson.