Peter Oborne

Decline and fall of the Hooray Henry

Peter Oborne on why undergraduates dunked Andrew Marr in a Cambridge pond, and why such an outrage would not be perpetrated today

TWENTY-FIVE years on, Andrew Marr recollects the episode well but insists that it was all down to mistaken identity. They were after the Jews, he claims, and they got me as second best. Marr’s account is at any rate open to challenge. There was plenty about the future political editor of the BBC which a Cambridge University undergraduate dining club on its mettle would have found both appetising and provocative.

He affected a little goatee beard at the time. That could easily have done the trick on its own. So might his little flat cap, carefully modelled on photographs of Lenin in exile. The little denim bag he swung jauntily over his shoulders, a fashion statement on the hard Left in the late 1970s, must also be taken into account. If it displayed, as it frequently did, the latest issue of the Socialist Organiser, a Trotskyite rag, then that would have been conclusive.

Marr, in short, was a walking target. There is no need to invoke anti-Semitism – no more in evidence in Cambridge undergraduate circles a generation ago than it is today – to explain why one chilly Cambridge evening, with the wind howling straight from Siberia, Marr was thrown head first into the Pembroke College pond.

The dunking of Andrew Marr was, in short, one of those innocent events that have long been part of English university life. For centuries, earnest students have been debagged, defenestrated, thrown into rivers, and on numerous occasions had the contents of their rooms wrecked by high-spirited university bloods. It is a practice that most people, especially women, find silly and baffling; and it is dying. Perhaps it is to do with the gentler temper of the undergraduates; perhaps it is caused by paranoia, during the current Labour-inspired Kulturkampf over admissions, about anything that smacks of campus elitism.

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