He may have caught your eye at the Freshers’ Fair for first-year undergraduates, held in the examination schools on the High Street. He was signing up for the rugger club and the law society; he was a tall, athletic student wearing a navy jersey, chinos and black loafers. Or he may have caught your eye elsewhere over the past three decades, for the tall figure at the Freshers’ Fair was none other than the Hon. Sir Oliver Bury Popplewell, the High Court judge who pretended ignorance of what Linford Christie was packing in his ‘lunchbox’, and decided that Jonathan Aitken’s sword of truth was not so simple after all.
Yes, believe it or not, this pillar of the establishment, a man whose life has been like an effortless golden thread linking Charterhouse to Cambridge to the Bar to the Bench to the presidency of the MMC (Monopolies and Mergers Commission); a man who has four strapping sons and a dozen grandchildren; this man has now become an undergraduate at Oxford, where he is reading PPE at Harris Manchester College on Mansfield Road, just across the road from the department of geography and environment.
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