Short of the Queen announcing she was to privatise herself, taking her corgis, crown and royal train set off to Monaco, it could hardly have caused more spluttering in Whitehall: Oxford University's threat to go private, telling Gordon Brown where to stick his access regulator.
The challenge was all the more surprising coming from Michael Beloff, an intimate of Tony and Cherie Blair. Dons have muttered about UDI before, but only after too much port at high table. No serious player had formalised the threat, and they don't come more serious than Beloff, fearsome QC and president of Trinity College. It exposed the ample right flank of Charles Clarke, the education secretary: a battle of gown v clown.
Beloff was responding to Clarke's insistence that Oxford increase the proportion of its state school students from 55% to 77%. Clarke's diktat was attacked as a cynical revival of the class war. Yet Oxford does have a case to answer: how can it justify taking up to 45% of its freshers from independent schools when only 7% of nippers receive private educations?
Crunching across the quad one sees why state-school sorts find this place intimidating, an impression confirmed by the president's cavernous drawing room with signed photograph on the grand piano of the Blairs. "Were you up at Oxford yourself?" inquires a voice so precise it could only be an Oxford don's. But instead of some tweedy old fruit from Evelyn Waugh, the president is in a fleece. He even sports a beard. Here, only porters are shaved and suited.
So come on Mikey, how can you justify taking so few state pupils? "When I was at Oxford as an undergraduate the ratio of state to privately educated students was 70-30 in favour of the state. Then grammar schools were abolished." Governments must indeed take much of the blame, but surely Oxford should trawl those bog-standard comps for bright pupils; research shows that while oiks find it harder to reach university, once there they outshine toffs. "We do use the criterion of academic potential to select. The idea that the university is institutionally biased is absurd: if you were a tutor, who would you be interested in teaching - someone bright or someone less bright?" He chunters on about "outreach" schemes - which have been in place for years, with patchy results - to encourage state pupils, and how a cursory glance round hall proves the college is not "mono-class". But the figures don't lie: shouldn't tutors be looking a little harder for rough diamonds and a little less for polished brogues? "What weight you give different factors are matters of judgment," he says. "Potential students are a combination of myriad factors."
He means class has grown more complicated: there are plenty of educated, pushy, even wealthy parents in the state system. He invited a few undergraduates from state schools for drinks and discovered many had teacher parents. He adds that just as there is pressure from government to "diversify", there is pressure from college graduates who consider it their birthright to send sprogs to Oxford. He insists every application is treated on merit but admits: "I asked myself a question... after talking to American friends who as heads of universities are able to give preference to children of prominent politicians." Unlike Beloff, presumably: Trinity rejected one Euan Blair. "If someone said, 'My son is bright enough and I am prepared to give the college two million quid', would I give them a place?" It is revealing he asked himself the question, but he redeems himself: "If we had 80 places and he came 81st, what would I say to the person who came 81st (instead)? I couldn't justify it."
His objection to quotas is a lawyerly one. "What worries me is us lawyers are taught to treat people as individuals, not as groups. To make an assumption that because they are at a state school they are disadvantaged is (like) saying Arabs are likely to be terrorists or black young males likely to be muggers. Parents might have scrimped and saved. Not everyone is the Etonian son of a baron." A wry dig, one assumes, at himself, the Etonian son of the educationist Lord Beloff. He admits his education was a huge advantage: "At Eton I had tea with a group of four, and indisputably I was the least intellectually able. Two became fellows at All Souls and the other got the best economics first at Cambridge since the war. Of course you are pulled up."
If public schools provide such advantages, shouldn't universities engage in a bit of social engineering to level the field? "I don't think it is the proper objective of a university. Gordon Brown famously complained about bias. Now the Department for Education and Skills has moved on and said, 'We don't care if there is no bias; we simply want you to achieve a particular target'." He concedes the strategy might work but his suspicion - and strongest argument - is that "we are being made to compensate" for failures in the state system. "If its standards are rising, why do we need quotas? There is a certain paradox there." Indeed.
But then he spoils it by saying: "If I go to speak at Winchester and if I am reasonably eloquent I will probably persuade at least one person to apply who might get in, whereas if I go to a comprehensive the chances of even one applicant are small." And in one remark we see the problem of self-perpetuating elites: even in the Soviet Union the high-ups sought the best schools for their progeny; in Britain, the elite is still being helped to do so.
It is worth recalling Beloff's silky tongue has defended such charmers as Nicholas van Hoogstraten, the Moonies and the British government; he even gave a character reference to his old mucker Jeffrey Archer. Beloff is surely right that Labour targets are random and unlikely to benefit the really disadvantaged. But is his objection that these quotas are too crude, or inherently unfair? The first time I ask he emphasises their crudeness, but later he suggests his objection is more fundamental. "In a society of this kind I think it is unnecessary," he argues. "We just don't have a society riven by institutionalised discrimination."
He points out that even 500 years ago Cardinal Wolsey was a "butcher's son who became the most powerful man in England". He concedes that in the American Deep South there was an argument for affirmative action, but not here. So does he believe ours is a classless society? "It's certainly a very mobile society." His grandparents were Russian "so I am a relative newcomer", which might explain his lack of interest in class.