When you think how many young people there were in the academic year of 1989 who might have wished for a place at Brasenose College, Oxford, it seems . . . well, lucky to say the least, that one should have gone to Will Palin.

Then again perhaps not lucky. The natural thing, more likely, given that his dad, the TV celebrity Michael Palin, was a BNC man. Then I dismissed this unworthy thought — the lad was surely at this college entirely on his own merits. Dad’s fame could have played no part in it.

Such might have been my view, as I read of Will’s success in his father’s Travelling to Work diaries. Then something happens to make me think there was perhaps something fishier going on. Will’s sister, too, lands herself a place at Brasenose.

The admission of two children of one famous father to a highly competitive Oxford institution (the alma mater of David Cameron, of course) would seem to be family good fortune of a very rare kind.

In the case of neither child do we learn details of the A-level results. Of Will, we are told he gains passes in English, history and biology (an odd combination) but not what his grades were. These hardly mattered, in fact, since he was told he was ‘in’ eight months earlier.

Proud dad, opening a letter to Will from BNC on December, 1988, recorded: “He’s offered a place . . . And I’m thumping the table with joy.”

What a depressing picture this presents of the way things were, so very recently, at Oxford.