Harry Mount

Algy Cluff is the longest-serving oilman in the North Sea. He was one of the first to drill for oil there, in 1972, and at the last government handout of drilling licences, two years ago, there he was again, making a handsome gas discovery. Now 76, he’s also the least likely oilman you can imagine. Tall, rangy, dressed in Savile Row pinstripes; he is no J.R. Ewing. His diffident, patrician voice is so gentle that I have to turn my tape recorder up to transcribe this interview. Cluff’s Who’s Who entry lists membership of 11 clubs. But there is no clubman stuffiness about him. He’s full of wonderful anecdotes, many of them involving The Spectator, which he owned from 1981 to 1985, before he became chairman for 20 years.

The Prime Minister is pretty angry with Boris. But the idea that they’ve competed with each other since school is wrong. Boris is two years older than Cameron — and differences in age are like dog years when you’re young. When I was 13, 15-year-olds seemed like grown-ups, 6ft tall with three days’ growth. When I interviewed Cameron last year, he said he’d hardly known Boris at Eton because he was in College — the scholars’ house — and two years above him. Cameron did remember Boris on the rugby field because he was so dishevelled and ferocious. And he watched him in a few debates at the Oxford Union. But that was as close as they got in their youth. I asked Cameron if there was anything in the idea of these two boys vying to be PM.

Back in October, I wrote about how Corbyn had replaced the shadow cabinet's Oxbridge and Harvard elite with red-brick university graduates. This week's reshuffle has continued the trend. Maria Eagle - alma mater, Pembroke College, Oxford - has been demoted, and replaced by Emily Thornberry, who went to the University of Kent.  Admittedly, the sacked Michael Dugher and Pat McFadden didn't go to Oxbridge, but to Nottingham and Edinburgh respectively. Still, they are both higher-achieving universities than Northumbria University, where Emma Lewell-Buck, the new shadow local government minister, did her politics and media studies undergraduate degree.  I don't want to be intellectually snobbish. There's nothing wrong with the universities attended by the new Corbyn set.

‘I’d rather entrust the government of the United States to the first 400 people listed in the Boston telephone directory than to the faculty of Harvard University,’ said William F. Buckley Jr, the American conservative writer. Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour party must be hoping British voters agree. Under Corbyn, the Labour party — once the clever party — has had a brain transplant. It’s out with the Oxbridge and Harvard graduates with first-class degrees; in with the red-brick university graduates. Or, in Corbyn’s case, a non-graduate. Corbyn got two Es at A-level at Adams’ Grammar School in Newport, Shropshire. He did a year of trade union studies at the North London Polytechnic before dropping out.

‘Jeremy Corbyn night’ at the Forum in Kentish Town on Monday should have been a scene of orgiastic pleasure for socialist Labour. Corbyn’s victory was the triumph the grand old reactionaries of north London have been waiting a generation for. But they weren’t happy; they were as angry and full of bile as ever. The scene took me right back to my childhood in Islington in the 1970s. My neighbours in the queue outside the Forum had posher voices than you hear at Annabel’s. The smart greybeards from the £2 million villas of Kentish Town and Islington were joined by a new generation of under-thirties: white, university-educated, also with upmarket voices. And how they lapped up the tide of anger pouring from the stage.

‘Jeremy Corbyn Night’ at the Forum in Kentish Town, on Monday night, should have been a scene of orgiastic pleasure for socialist Labour. Corbyn’s victory was the triumph the grand old reactionaries of north London have been waiting a generation for. But they weren’t happy; they were as angry and full of bile as ever. The scene took me right back to my childhood in Islington in the 1970s. My neighbours in the queue outside the Forum had posher voices than you hear at Annabel’s. The smart greybeards from the £2 million villas of Kentish Town and Islington were joined by a new generation of under-thirties: white, university-educated, also with upmarket voices. And how they lapped up the tide of anger pouring from the stage.