The News From The Dark Blues

Is it all just a little easy to say it’s been another bad week for Oxford? Perhaps, but that doesn’t make it any less true. Cue more cheap Tab jibes about there never being a good week to be an Oxonian.

Reluctant as I am to report on a scandal that doesn’t involve everyone’s favourite group with a penchant for Nazi ‘banter’ (OUCA for the unitiated), a current Oxford dPhil student has been found culpable of torture in a Canadian court. It’s quite a story. The man is Mehdi Hashemi Rafsanjani, who is the son of a former Iranian President no less. To compound matters, he was only let into Oxford on a “let-off clause” (owing to his poor English language skills) and also has considerable links with Colonel Gaddafi, suggesting Oxford should be rather more careful about who it is happy to take money from.

Enough of other stuff: back onto OUCA. In the fallout to ‘Nazi-gate’ – reports of which extended to The Daily Mail, The Torygraph and The Sunday Mirror – three OUCA officers have resigned. Former President Joe Cooke said in his letter of resignation that the society “has become an aberration of the Conservative movement, a cancer on the Conservative cause.” He also wrote of the society’s “commitment to drinking before all else.” In an interview, Cooke detailed the ridiculousness of OUCA, who “went campaigning in white tie, and this was in an industrial estate.” What more is there to say about OUCA – the gift that keeps giving to student hacks?

And you can’t get much further away from OUCA than uber-lefty college Wadham. They recently proved this yet again by inviting the French gay porn star Thierry Schaffauser to speak about his experiences. I doubt many who attended will forget his speech soon. Amongst his pearls were: “I don’t do barebacking,” “fisting is too technical, ” and “the fact that I moved to this country, can speak English, is thanks to sex work.”

But what about toilet work? That’s what one poor finalist at Teddy Hall had to resort to after she was locked in the toilet for three and a half hours late at night. After closing and locking the door, the lock jammed. Since she was without her phone, she had to wait for a scout to come. With no sign of anyone, she resorted to shouting; someone finally heard her cries and contacted a locksmith. Even then, it took almost half an hour for the locksmith to come.

She said: “The whole time I was just thinking, crap, getting stuck in your toilet is really stupid.” It’s hard to argue. Understandably, she wants to remain anonymous.