When does an item of news, or a report of current events, become history? For instance, is the story of how Oxford University snubbed Margaret Thatcher by turning down the proposal to grant her an honorary degree history — yet?

That it was a snub is not in question. After all, Mrs Thatcher was a graduate of Somerville College and, as Noel Annan (1916-2000) points out in his book Our Age (Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1990), “Every Oxford graduate who had become prime minister could expect to receive an honorary degree from his alma mater and it was unthinkable that the first woman ever to hold that office would not be so honoured. The unthinkable was thought; and the proposal in 1985 to confer the honour was voted down. It was an unparalleled snub.”

But is it history? On the one hand, it happened 26 years ago; on the other, the issues that gave rise to it are still — or perhaps again — very pertinent; very much alive and kicking — even if this time around, the decline in public spending is being advocated in the name of deficit-cutting rather than 1980s-type inflation-fighting.

Lord Annan asks why the educated classes hate the prime minister “with a bitterness that had not been seen since the days of Neville Chamberlain?” Answer: “Because she rejected nearly all their beliefs and practices.” And, of course, she cut the state subsidies of so many hallowed institutions that provided their bread and butter.

Lord Annan goes on: “Teachers and medical consultants were to be judged on their performance, dons on the contribution they made to the nation’s need for trained manpower.” And again: “To the intellectuals Margaret Thatcher’s policies looked like monstrous interference with professional standards of excellence: they and they alone could could set the standards required in scholarship or medical care or good schooling. But to her supporters the professionals had been allowed for too long to identify their own self-interest with that of the nation.”

Not that the notion of promoting a smaller role for the state in the economy was new even in Mrs Thatcher’s day. Back in the 1860s, Gladstone’s postmaster general, the blind MP Henry Fawcett, advocated keeping public expenditure to a minimum.

He opposed “any scheme, however well-intentioned it may be, since it will indefinitely increase any evil it seeks to alleviate, if it lessens individual responsibility by encouraging people to rely less on themselves and more upon the state”.

Incidentally, the radical Mr Fawcett featured large in the great evolution debate between Bishop of Oxford Samuel Wilberforce and Thomas Huxley, held at the Oxford University Museum on June 30, 1860. He reportedly said loudly that he reckoned the Bishop had not even read Darwin’s Origin of Species, published seven months previously.

The point here is that each generation hates the feeling of being marginalised. As Lord Annan writes in Our Age (his age): “As each generation turns to make its exit from the stage it hears a disagreeable sound.

“People in the audience are talking not listening; they are indifferent to what their elders are saying on stage, worse they are uttering heresies.”

Now, I suppose, the question is: will Oxford ever give the present prime minister, another Oxford graduate, an honorary degree? Or has the tradition of giving former prime ministers such honours died out? After all, Tony Blair, yet another Oxford graduate prime minister, has not been given one. But the powers that be seem to be capricious in such matters: at one stage even Harold Macmillan (admittedly before he became the prime minister) was, so-to-speak, blackballed for such a degree; but then the university relented. On the other hand, someone who sent up all authority and once described a fictional Right Hon as someone “who looked as if he had been poured into his clothes and had forgotten to say ‘When!’” did receive one, (much to the annoyance of some academics). I mean, of course, P. G. Wodehouse.