What WILL Oxford’s blue stockings say about the red stockings!
A Vietnamese airline tycoon’s paid £155m to rename a college. But wait for the turbulence when the woke mob see the uniforms that helped her fortunes soar
WHAT a strange world we live in. One minute it’s studious business as usual at Oxford University’s Linacre College, named after humanist and physician Thomas Linacre (1460-1524), who was personal doctor to Henry VIII and whose pupils included Erasmus and Sir Thomas More. The next, it’s all change. For this week it was announced that the name carved in stone at the entrance to ‘one of the greenest colleges in Oxford’ is to be changed to Thao College in honour of a Vietnamese billionairess who founded the budget airline VietJet Air and has been fined several times for perking up her flights with semi-naked stewardesses.
She recently offered Linacre £155million, one of the largest donations ever to an Oxford college.
Nguyen Thi Phuong Thao, known as Madam Thao, is a mother of two with a self-made Vietnamese fortune.
She is president of the Sovico Group, which has interests including offshore oil, gas exploration and fossil fuel financing. Not forgetting VietJet Air, also known as Bikini Airlines thanks to Madam Thao’s enthusiasm for scantily clad beauties in the aisles.
Sometimes they wear swimsuits. On other occasions they sport red and yellow two-pieces and red lacy stockings. They even pop up beaming in their swimmers in the company calendar.
With all of which Madam Thao is completely comfortable.
‘You have the right to wear anything you like, either the bikini or the traditional ao dai,’ she has said, referring to the modest Vietnamese long tunic that is worn over trousers. ‘We don’t mind people associating the airline with the bikini image. If that makes people happy, then we are happy.’
While the in-air swimwear policy has perked up excitable passengers and, in barely a decade, helped to turn start-up VietJet into a competitor with the national airline, it has caused a stir among both business commentators and feminists, who can’t quite believe this is happening in the 21st century.
I’m not sure even Sir Richard Branson would have dared, back in the day.
LORd knows what Linacre College’s 550 postgraduate students will make of it. This, after all, is a university where ‘cancel culture’ is rampant and where students at Magdalen College voted this summer to remove a portrait of the Queen from their common room because of her ‘links to colonialisation’. Are they really going to embrace Bikini Airlines?
But who on earth is this tiny (barely 5ft tall) self-made tycoon who juggles parenthood with top-flight business and is always exquisitely presented but doesn’t give a fig about semi-nudity?
Nguyen Thi Phuong Thao, was born in 1970 to a teacher and a pharmacist in Hanoi, Vietnam. She says ‘a happy, calm childhood, surrounded by relatives’ equipped her with the life skills she needed: ‘To have a sense of sacrifice and care, being meticulous, graceful and generous, and giving without asking.’
Soon after moving to Moscow to study for a degree in finance and economics at the Plekhanov Russian University of Economics, she started trading in fax machines and latex rubber on the side.
She had little money but the concept was simple. She worked as a trade distributor, receiving clothing, office equipment and consumer goods on credit from suppliers in South Korea, Hong Kong and Japan, and selling them on to customers desperate for Western goods before the collapse of the Soviet Union.
‘I earned the trust of the suppliers by always being honest with them,’ she has said. ‘They gave me more and more products with longer credit terms.’ By the age of 21 she had made her first million.
After gaining a masters degree in economic management from another Russian university, she returned to Vietnam and threw herself into private banking and property. And when her eldest son, Tommy — who went on to study at Oxford University — was just a baby, she spotted another gap in the market: for budget air travel for Vietnam’s increasingly mobile middle class.
After years of obsessive research, in 2007 she launched the first privately run low-cost airline in Vietnam. A decade later she took it public and became South-East Asia’s only female billionaire. Today, VietJet carries more passengers a year than the country’s national carrier, Vietnam Air.
Thao’s work ethic is extraordinary: she is usually working until 2am, then up again at 5am. Her husband, Nguyen Thanh Hùng, is also a successful businessman.
She attributes her success to the power of being female, because ‘women have the virtue of sacrifice, patience and resilience to overcome difficulties and achieve satisfaction from life’.
For years she has been a regular in Forbes magazine’s list of the 100 most powerful women in the world. Earlier this year her net worth was estimated at $2.1 billion (£1.53 billion).
But she also takes risks and is a whiz at profitable publicity.
Such as the time when, midway through the inaugural flight from Ho Chi Minh City to the holiday resort of Nha Trang, five flight attendants launched into a surprise dance in bikinis. The airline was slapped with a hefty fine — and sales shot up.
And in 2018, when Vietnam’s Under-23 men’s football team were returning from a thrashing by Uzbekistan at a tournament in China and were also the recipients of an improvised (and allegedly rather interactive) performance by Viet-Jet stewardesses.
BUT while Madam Thao may be bold in business, in person she is softly spoken, chats happily to all staff and prefers being called ‘sister’ to ‘Madam’. She is unfailingly courteous and lives a low-key life. So why does she do it? ‘What is a lot of money for?’ she said in a recent interview. ‘A lot of money is to realise big dreams and help more people.’ Which she has done. In spades. Under her leadership, the Sovico Group has become an official partner to the United Nations and UNESCO. She has many awards for philanthropy and this year the French government awarded her the Legion of Honour.
Which brings us back to Linacre College. From the university’s old guard have come dreary rumblings about tradition and usurping one of the ‘great scholars of his time’.
From the students have come further rumblings about Madam Thao’s eco-credentials and, of course, those dancing bikini girls.
Both factions have asked why her name on a college library or sports hall wasn’t enough.
What an ungrateful fuss. Let’s just hope they pause for a minute, recognise how much they can all benefit and pray that the university’s woke brigade aren’t too righton to embrace their very modern fairy godmother.