You don’t have to be Left-wing to run an Oxbridge college... but it helps

there is also, by my count, one former Labour press officer, two former Labour peers, a former Labour adviser, and at least four former BBC executives.

Do you sense a pattern? These people form part of our new elite – an establishment that is capable and clever, but also marinated in a quasiBlairite bien pensant ideology. Its members are invariably pro-Remain and pro-intervention, and their idea of political diversity is appointing Chris Patten, the wettest Tory of all, to some august role in their institution.

And once they get on the merry-goround of public sinecures, there is no detaching them. They flit from the top of the Labour Party to the highest ranks of the BBC or some post in the Environment Agency. Even Tory administrations indulge their rise. The Government recently announced, for example, that it wants to appoint former Green Party candidate Tony Juniper as chair of Natural England.

Liz Truss, the Chief Secretary to the Treasury, said last week that politicians and quangos should stop telling people what to do all the time. That’s fine as far as politicians are concerned. We can kick them out of office. But the quangocracy, run by a self-sustaining elite of disturbing uniformity, exercises power without responsibility.

Perhaps, then, Oxbridge colleges are the best places for them. Being Master, or Provost, or Principal is largely a figurehead position, and it is to be hoped the damage can be contained to demands that octopus be removed from the Freshers’ Week menu. Elsewhere, however, it would be nice if a free-market Tory might be made head of Public Health England or whatever for a change. Or better still, such positions should be