CHRIS SKIDMORE,

the newly appointed minister for universities, was once in a Oxford punk band which recorded lewd lyrics about the Queen Mother only weeks after her death. As he tries to attract the world’s best young brains to Oxford and Cambridge, he’ll be deeply embarrassed to be reminded that the group, Bob Nylon and the Elastic Band, had a song called Oxford Reject that included the lyric: ‘Hey Oxford reject, you’re always gonna be a reject, you’re still a reject in my eyes.’