Glorious Accession Day

A nation rejoices ... Young Tories at the Dreaming Spires are beside themselves ... Theresa May sets the gala dinner ablaze ... Tories in a pickle ... Sunak v Truss ... What would Nanny say? ... Patriotism awakes ... Barely Legal reports from the Dart 

On the 6th of February 1952, thoroughly ordinary Lilibet climbed up a tree in Kenya and climbed back down as queen. Across the ocean, daddy Albert had filled his last ashtray. 

For Elizabeth, Accession Day (as the 6th is called) is a quiet opportunity to remember the father she knew for barely 25 years. 

But since genuine emotion disturbs Britain's waxwork Establishment, the day has been remodelled into yet another gush of pageantry, trinketry and idolatry, opium for Her Majesty's loyal masses and deft advertising for brand UK. 

Nowhere is this parody of patriotism more lustily rendered than within the ranks of young Torydom at Dreaming Spires University. 

On Accession Day morning, you could spot the young fogeys by their union jack brooches, oversized waistcoats and double-breasted suits. 

You could hear them too - from the quadrangles came chorus after chorus of God Save the Queen, with unbroken voices squeaking out a hurrah for all 70 of HM's years on the throne.

At my college, the lickspittles had been quivering all week. Word had got round, you see, that the guest of honour at Accession Day dinner would be none other than Theresa May, back from the political dead - soon to travel to Orstralia for Liberal Party fund-raising activities. 

Two years ago, in the first golden days of the Johnsonian Age, there would have been no warm welcomes for this failed chaperone of Brexit and atrocious dancer. 

Month after month of government scandal has changed all that. As we filed into the dining hall, the chatter from the blue ribbon set was positively nostalgic: 

"After all, she was too boring to ever party," said one, who spends his summers working for conservative MPs. "And at least we know how many children she has," (which is to say, precisely none). 

Mrs May sat at the High Table, next to her fund manager husband, who was once a history student at this college. They seemed perfectly unable to look at one another. 

On Theresa's left was a JP Morgan banker, whose lavish donations have sponsored a new college wine cellar. The pair chattered away while the choir performed Zadok the Priest and other English songs written by German expatriates. 

Later, when she met the choristers at the rector's after-dinner drinks, I'm told she complimented them for "trying out an atonal style". 

The wannabe-conservatives spent dinner plotting - they would approach Mrs May after the meal, I heard them say, and invite her back to the student bar. 

Of course, they never worked up the courage. But their starstruck glances and nostalgic tones said it all. This was the wishful thinking of a rueful flock, wondering what could have been if they hadn't changed shepherds.

Young fogeys

It's no wonder. With each revelation of yet another illegal party at Number 10, more and more Tory rats are leaping from the Boris-shaped ship. 

Not because they condemn his lawless, hypocritical mode of governing - but because the polling has hit basement-level. 

The conventional wisdom is that, even if the PM survives a vote of no-confidence, he is a lame duck. His own cabinet is moving on: senior ministers have distanced themselves from his flailing efforts to smear Keir Starmer as a friend to paedophiles. 

And the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rishi Sunak, has quarantined himself from the foppish turmoil, instead wooing middle Britain with a suite of digestible cost-of-living measures.

Like most frontbenchers, Sunak has an Oxbridge degree – in PPE (Politics, Philosophy and Economics) no less, the same degree as David Cameron, Rupert Murdoch and countless British grandees, right and left.

But unlike the usual whitewashed crop, Sunak has a good immigrant pedigree and spent his teenage summers waiting tables at a curry restaurant. He is also spectacularly wealthy, thanks to his felicitous pairing with an Indian tech heiress. 

Just the sort of guy every junior conservative dreams he will become: the slick, electable face of aspirational Britain. 

In fact, at my college, Sunak is a favourite son, since it was here that he studied for his Bachelor's.

One young tory is asking the college to fund a "discussion group" in Sunak's honour. This flunkey, whose social media is mostly pictures of fox hunts, studied at Sunak's high school and is now at his old college.

He thinks, therefore, that he too will automatically become Chancellor and, if everything goes to plan, PM.

Other Dreaming Spires Tories favour Liz Truss, the foreign secretary, also once a student at this university. Few, if any, are backing Boris's horse. 

That might seem surprising - after all, Johnson was, in his blue-blood, more Oxbridge than Oxbridge. But if he thought he could take the university Tories for granted, he was wrong. 

For, at the heart of the conservatism practised in this place, there is a gaping need for approval – a desperation to take tea with the vicar, to be respectable, to hear from matronly women what a good little boy you are.

Boris's antics have betrayed that need: he's given the party a grubby name, even within the Establishment, and has made his followers grubby by association. 

At least Accession Day let our tortured Tories set aside these fearful thoughts. As I left dinner, I passed a crop of spotty teenagers, clutching bottles of champagne and wet with tears, as they choked out I Vow to Thee My Country on the college lawn. 

It must be a hard life.