The academic Left is reaping the bitter rewards of its own political intolerance

My editor says: “Would you mind writing a piece about the Leftists at Oxford? I know you moonlight as a historian and I wouldn’t want to ruin your career prospects.” “Goodness me,” I laughed, “I’ll never get a job at Oxford now! Not after working 10 years at the Telegraph!”

That’s the context to a week of no-platforming at Britain’s second-best university. Amber Rudd was uninvited from an Oxford society event half an hour before she was due to speak and Professor Selina Todd was dropped from the Oxford International Women’s Festival. Prof Todd, who teaches women’s history at St Hilda’s, has also been threatened with violence and appointed two security guards for her protection. Her crime? She’s been labelled “transphobic” – what the Left calls a “trans-exclusionary radical feminist”, or “terf ”. If I were Prof Todd I’d see if I could get a ticket into space so that I could introduce myself at parties as an astro-terf.

There’s a fightback against noplatforming going on, but a part of me wonders, what’s the point? Who wants to speak at anything in Oxford any more? Universities have been dominated by the liberal-Left for decades, but this has intensified as conservatives have dropped out of academia and academia increasingly ascribes to itself a cultural identity: in many faculties it is assumed that to be a scholar is by definition to be

Left-wing, an attitude only hardened by Brexit, which the universities overwhelmingly opposed. As is almost always the case with the Left, the louder the virtue-signalling, the more regressive the institution.

I can’t think of a career where the pay is more unequal, elitism more commonplace, nor bullying more a way of life. I recently had dinner at high table and endured an hour of being told how progressive the college is. It took a superhuman effort not to point out that everyone around the table, bar one guest from Asia, was an old, white man.

There is an element of performance in university culture: what’s presented as an ideological contest is often a fight over jobs, resources and authority. If you find the language of the terf vs trans battle opaque, with its largely irrelevant arguments about sex vs gender, then it’s because this is an internal identity politics spat that has nothing to do with you, the average woman or even the trans person who just wants to be boring and ordinary. It’s Bolsheviks vs Mensheviks; trots vs Stalinists.

It is, quite literally, a turf war.

If it seems particularly unpleasant then that just reflects the wider tone of liberal-Left politics, a politics that, on campus, not only doesn’t care for conservative opinion but never encounters it and thus never even considers it beyond a rote denunciation of “bigotry”. To repeat, the striking character of academia is not intellectual Left-wingery – serious Marxists are few and far between – but its narrow-minded elitism.

For example, in the last decade, Oxbridge has appointed a number of liberal journalists as masters of colleges, including Will Hutton ( Observer editor) and Alan Rusbridger ( Guardian editor). This will have been not just on their merits but because the face and name of a journalist lends itself to fundraising, so the primary motivation is pecuniary. But their appointment also helps reinforce the wall that has always existed between the university and the conservative country beyond it, and given that these liberal-Left figures have spent their career demonising Tories, portraying them as wicked and ignorant, it’s no wonder that students would feel that a) Ms Rudd does not belong in Oxford and b) they have a moral duty to keep her out.

Ms Rudd is in fact a soft-Remainer; it would presumably be worse if she were a full-blown Leaver. Will Hutton has, in the pages of Guardian (because there is no other newspaper in elitesville), compared Brexiteers to fascists. You can’t argue with that. It’s really not worth it. All I can say is that the day will come when some loony Remainer will decide that Mr Hutton isn’t Remainery enough and will call him a fascist, because that’s what the Left is like. Having gone to war on the Church, the family, capitalism and the Tories – calling them everything under the sun – many on the liberalLeft now find the spirit of intolerance they unleashed turned against them.

The irony is, they can probably count on conservatives to rush to their defence, not only because Tories believe in the free exchange of ideas but because they are usually very nice people when you get to know them. If Oxford wants to quell student fanaticism and send a message about free speech, it could start by appointing a dozen or so Tories as college masters. I’d pay good money to see Mark Francois run St Hilda’s.

I once had dinner at high table and endured an hour of being told how progressive and diverse the college is. Literally everyone around the table – bar one guest from Asia – was an old, white man