Why the Oxford Queen portrait row matters
The sheer scale of the outrage over Magdalen College Oxford electing to remove a portrait of the Queen from the postgraduate common room can seem on the face of it to be absurd; why should we care what pictures a group of students choose to put on the wall? We didn’t care when they put it up in 2013. Why should we mind if they happen to have better decor available today? A little digging however shows that, as is generally the case, this latest flashpoint is less about the putative cause and more to do with ideology. The portrait was taken down because ‘for some students depictions of the monarch
