The three-word, one-sentence final paragraph of The Times’s obituary on Lord St John of Fawsley, the former Norman St John Stevas, was exactly as one might have expected: “He was unmarried.” Of the preceding 1,000 words or so, only one — ‘flamboyant’ (the ‘gay’ of our day) — gave any hint about the private life of the gentleman under scrutiny.

It was left to the Daily Telegraph to suggest just how ‘unmarried’ the former lawyer, politician, royal expert and Master of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, had been. At Emmanuel, the obituarist told us: “[He] was . . . accused of spending an excessive amount of time with a small clique of mainly public school-educated young men who, it was alleged, were favoured with introductions to royalty and captains of industry, to dinners at White’s, private theatrical performances at the Master’s Lodge and long, affectionate letters. Such personal privileges were extended to very few. Other undergraduates would recall the Master cutting them off in mid-sentence with some disparaging remark in Latin. To bitchy colleagues in other colleges, Emmanuel became known as ‘Meine Camp’.”

I feel sure many of my readers will recognise the type — once a familiar one on the Oxford college scene. Leaving aside any question of sexual impropriety, which I do not allege, this sort of favouritism to an elite set is one of the things that continue to give Oxbridge a bad name.