Adam Boulton, Editor-At-Large

Mostly I find it easy to report and comment dispassionately and without taking sides.

Just as well, since that is an occupational requirement for political reporters working on British television.

Contrary to conventional wisdom I think it's only worth getting cross about the small things.

This week my goat has been well and truly got by an old bete noir - Oxford University, which happens to be where I did my first degree.


I've been shocked yet again by how small-minded the self-regarding "big brains" are at the world-famous seat of learning.

This time the row is over the removal of a photograph of Theresa May hanging over a staircase as a result of student protests and vandalism.

The Prime Minister's picture was one of a new set of 12 prominent women who had studied at Oxford's Geography department.

Image: Students defaced the portrait of Mrs May, included in a display of 12 important female Oxford geographers

Under the inevitable hashtag, #NotAllGeographers, the campaigners demanded Mrs May be removed because of "what she embodies" as "a power of the day".

The young geniuses posted witty slogans around the picture such as "hostile environment for immigrants".

With typical mealy-mouthed apologetics, the university authorities say the photo has not been removed for good and will be put back once it can be made safe from further defacement.

That's not the point.

The problem is that Oxford University has form, a record of making sanctimonious "politically correct" gestures which trash the history of the elite institution which students and lecturers happily exploit for their own benefit.

Their sanctimony is particularly vicious against women politicians.

Even her bitterest Labour opponent, Neil Kinnock, still says that he respects Thatcher for being Britain's first woman Prime Minister, if nothing else.

In the 1980s, shortly after I left Oxford, the university blocked awarding an honorary doctorate to Margaret Thatcher, even though she was the UK's first woman Prime Minister and a graduate of the university (in chemistry as it happens).

In that case it was the teachers not the students who were to blame.

Oxford has a laughably inept system of government, long ripe for reform, where the "sovereign body" is the congregation made up of 4,500 dons and researchers.

That's right, every eccentric corduroy jacketed, sherry-swiller in the place gets to vent their prejudice.

In the first volume of his masterly biography of Thatcher, Charles Moore records how academics at Somerville College, Oxford, sneered at Margaret Hilda Roberts when she was an undergraduate and later when Mrs Thatcher became Prime Minister.

When she came to dinner shortly after winning the 1979 election the dons smuggly told her "we're all wearing black".

At a later dinner in 1993 in the College's Margaret Thatcher Suite "seeing the bust of the ex-Prime Minister there one of her contemporaries went up and covered it with a windcheater, to widespread amusement".

Thatcher bequeathed her papers to Cambridge University.

Image: Oxford geography students have taken down a portrait of Theresa May. Pic: NotAllGeographers

Meanwhile, Oxford squabbled for years about naming buildings after Thatcher even though it happily memorialised foreign billionaires in the (Wafiq) Said Business School and the (Len) Blavatnik School of Government and at the Islamic Centre.

And even though it had embraced and honoured male politicians including Harold Macmillan, Roy Jenkins and Chris Patten, who is currently chancellor of the university.

The point about Margaret Thatcher and Theresa May is that they are indisputably people and women of achievement.

As Britain's first and second female prime ministers they should be respected for that, irrespective of what you think of their political philosophy.

Even her bitterest Labour opponent, Neil Kinnock, still says that he respects Thatcher for being Britain's first woman Prime Minister, if nothing else.

Thatcher left a strong and controversial legacy of achievement.

So far Mrs May hasn't really had the chance "to embody" much at all.

But both are noteworthy graduates of Oxford University who can't be wished away by juvenile and self-indulgent gestures.

If the students at the University can't see that and their teachers make excuses for them - neither is as clever as they think they are.

I'm grateful to have been to Oxford because it is a useful stamp on your life's passport but, for me always, the best thing about the city of dreaming spires is leaving the petty and fetid place which its occupants have made it.

Sky Views is a series of comment pieces by Sky News editors and correspondents, published every morning.

Previously on Sky Views: Jason Farrell - London's troubles don't justify Trump's gun laws