'The lack of women was a terrible deprivation': Melvyn Bragg on Oxford, Boris Johnson, and Trump

As he publishes his memoir, the legendary broadcaster also recalls how the Russians tried to recruit him as a spy 

Melvyn Bragg is publishing a new memoir. 

Melvyn Bragg “went up” to Oxford University in 1958, sporting an Elvis Presley look-alike haircut. He spent three glorious, carefree years in its gilded hallways. The Carlisle man was part of a postwar working-class generation – along with filmmakers Dennis Potter and Ken Loach – that breached the walls of the medieval city, although it was still an elitist bastion when he studied history there. Inheritance trumped scholarship, which fostered a nasty snobbishness.

Bragg cites, for example, the notorious Bullingdon Club, which was considered a breeding ground for political eminence in the late 1950s. Club members thought nothing of smashing up a restaurant, reckoning “a few fivers would make things okay with the serfs”. He mentions that the club coughed up two of Britain’s “worst prime ministers, who went on to become spivs” (David Cameron and Boris Johnson).