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. He is 76 and will be 79 when he graduates, old even by the standards of Harris Manchester, where undergraduates have to be at least 21 to apply.
So Justice Popplecarrot, as Private Eye inevitably christened him, has come up, to be the oldest undergraduate the ancient university has ever matriculated, and when I go to his rooms I find myself thoroughly charmed. So charmed that I abandon my planned little joke about whether that was a lunchbox in his pocket or was he just pleased to see me, because Oliver, as I have been asked to call him, offers me sherry from a tumbler and proudly shows me the kitchenette and bathroom he shares with another undergraduate, and I somehow could nothing common do or mean, etc.,
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