Braverman’s brush with the law

Ah student politics: is there anything quite like it? The strange creatures it attracts, the passions it unleashes, the adolescent ambition and the glorious pettiness of it all; so vicious precisely because the stakes are so small. Such an ignoble tradition has spawned many of our lords and masters – Boris Johnson was an unabashed Union hack at Oxford while William Hague was ‘convicted of electoral malpractice’ in one election of the Oxford University Conservative Association (OUCA).

And having spent some time recently in the Cambridge University archives, Mr S is delighted to see the route from the common room to the Commons is still alive and well. For perusing copies of the Varsity student newspaper, Steerpike stumbled across an explosive story from May 2000, the front page splash no next. ‘Conservatives in corruption crisis’ the headline screamed, along with a prominent photo of a 20-year-old smiling student by the name of Suella Fernandes.