A question of access

When a Prime Minister gets his facts wrong as spectacularly as David Cameron did yesterday with his comment that  ‘only one black person went to Oxford last year’ everyone wonders why. Now, the simplest explanation is that it was a straight cock-up. One of the pitfalls of these Cameron Direct events is that errors can come out. Another theory doing the rounds this morning is that Cameron is giving a speech on immigration later this week, with some tough language in it, and so was trying too hard to show that he is anti-racist.

But whatever the explanation, Cameron needs to be careful about how he approaches the university access issue. The Tory backbencher Margot James, hardly a natural rebel, warns in The Times (£) this morning that the coalition is going about improving access the wrong way. Her views are widely shared among her colleagues, and in particular the 2010 intake.