Nazis, Aidan Burley and memories of the bad old days

News of the antics of Aiden Burley and his friends at a Nazi-themed stag party in France made me think about the strange ways some Tories like to have fun.

When I was at university in the mid-1980s the Tories were in their pomp. My time at Cambridge was sandwiched between the two Thatcher-era landslides of 1983 and 1987 and those of us on the left felt pretty embattled. Through a mixture of ignorance and accident I ended up at a particularly ‘traditional’ college, Magdalene, which was then all-male and proud of its public school rugger-and-rowing reputation. I was seen as something of a pinko because I went on few marches against grant cuts, dyed my hair, wore an earring and didn’t eat meat. The college culture revolved around the bar and the chaps were very proud of a competition they devised to see how many ten pence pieces they could fit under their foreskins.