Known for an exclusive ball where female students receiving sought-after invitations were rated for beauty/sexiness in a secret members’ competition, this not-so-secret club was populated with all the rowing club jocks and wealthy public school boys who dominated common room culture. We were just acquaintances, but you seemed like a nice guy. And I wanted to understand why you, and so many of your peers, were drawn to that environment. So I asked. Had you thought about what it might feel like to be your female peer, barred from membership in your exclusive club and aware of the implicit evaluation of her taking place whether she was invited to the ball or not? About the message it sent me about where my worth lay and how I didn’t fully belong? Were these really your values and what you stood for? Loading As I recall, your reaction to having your choices questioned was similar then to your reaction when Wolf refuted your story and called you out on your language – injured outrage and sulky resentment. And seeing yourself as the one in need of an apology. Why does it matter that Wolf was not at Oxford with us and had nothing to do with discussions about Christmas trees among a group of international students far from home? And why does it matter to remind you of our encounter all these years later?

Of course, you’ve recently had to apologise to another woman for being loose with the truth. And every lie in the political scourge of "alternative facts" needs calling out. But it’s not the individual lies themselves that matter so much as their context. That you were mistaken about an encounter with Wolf is less important than the giant lie you were peddling when you used her to illustrate your anecdote — the one that casts you as an everyman hero, fighting against "shrill elitists" everywhere. Dr Denise Meyer asked Angus Taylor to explain his membership of a men-only drinking society. That giant lie looms large in this week of a generation-defining general election here in Britain, where looseness with the truth has been a feature of conservative campaigning for years. It’s the same giant lie that public school boys Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage, and their chum, billionaire Donald Trump, are successfully peddling – that you and they are the champions of the ordinary, downtrodden everyman, that you help that everyman "take back control" and "be great again" in the face of his very real frustrations and sense of injustice. You and they point the finger of blame at other imagined elites or competitors for resources while the giant lie obscures the reality that it is you who are the sons of privilege, the real elite, and the ones who continue to perpetuate inequality and injustice. When you mentioned Wolf and a battle to preserve a Christmas tree in your first speech to Parliament, you were attempting to portray yourself as a heroic, embattled (yet "mainstream") underdog fighting against "politically correct voices who insist that they know what is best for people who are not remotely like them". But you were not an underdog. Instead of countenancing a more inclusive decoration of the common room for the holidays as a way to help minority students feel more welcome, you portray yourself fighting and winning the right to maintain your own symbols of belonging. Those same minority students probably didn’t receive invitations to join your covert club and powerful old boys’ network either. You were the elite then, and you have remained the elite.