I’d resisted tweeting for 4 days, six hours and 27 minutes. It was agony. I wanted to tell everyone. Every person I had ever known. Everyone I met. This was earth-shattering news and my journey in life was about to change completely. I’d just been given a set of keys to help shape the world: and if I get it right, the new future will not just be for me, but for a whole generation. 14th January 2020, I was offered an unconditional offer to study at Oxford University. Apart from my unbridled excitement and pride at making it to one of the world’s most revered, elite, powerful centres of reason, inquiry and philosophical openness, you might ask, why does this matter so much?

As conservatives it is natural that we spend a lot of time thinking about and defending the private ownership of the means of production, however lately I have come to wonder if something else is at play – that slowly the very concept of ownership is being eroded and that things that people used to have, they’ll instead have to rent. What’s worse this is being pioneered by the very corporations that we fight to defend (simply because you can make many times more money by continually charging someone to use something: say a lamp, than a one-time sale).

Homeownership has always been central to conservative politics, and it is no coincidence that conservatism at its best has often been focussed on putting people on the housing ladder. In the 1980s, Margaret Thatcher set out to create a property-owning democracy in Britain. Of her many liberalising reforms, few are more famous than the Right to Buy scheme which introduced, for the first time for many middle-class Britons, the prospect of property ownership.

Recent loosenings of lockdown restrictions have, of course, finally allowed one to experience the joys of consumerism. Those familiar with Oxford are of course aware that along with the spires, the pubs, and the tacky tourist shops, this dreamy city is home to a selection of bookstores. From the Oxford-grown Blackwell’s to the elegant out posting of the Waterstones on Broad Street, to the Jericho vintage book store, Oxford has provided me with a worthy means of restarting the economy: hoarding books.

You won’t have heard of David T Johnson. That is not surprising. He is an obscure American diplomat who served such an uneventful tenure as Assistant Secretary of State for International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs that Wikipedia doesn’t even know when he left the job. More importantly, in 2004 he was the second-in-command at the US Embassy in London. Working in an embassy, his job was mainly to massage the ego of his host country, hold a lot of champagne receptions and keep a tight hold on the Ferrero Rocher expenditure.

As we enter Lockdown 2.0/ the death of democracy/ Tier 4 or whatever you would like to call it, we should all seek cultural enrichment. As true Conservatives, this cultural enrichment ought to include a collection of the finest portrayals of the one and only Margaret Thatcher. To guide you on this journey, I have selected her best and most unique portrayals.

OUCA’s first speaker event of Michaelmas term was with Felicity Buchan, the new Conservative MP for Kensington. Educated in Scotland, she came to Christ Church a year early, studying law, before going into banking and then politics. As MP for Kensington, a seat that was won by only 150 votes last year, she was keen to highlight the difficult but ultimately rewarding nature of being MP for a marginal seat.

In Frankenstein, Mary Shelley has a character state that “Everything must have a beginning…and that beginning must be linked to something that went before.” A piece of obvious reasoning, this has dogged philosophers and astrophysicists for as long as there have been people doing philosophy and astrophysics, rather than proper jobs.

With the fall of the Soviet Union, and China’s emergence into world markets it seems like capitalism has little place to go on earth, unless we start selling water to the fish, what now? If we want continued growth, continuing to find efficiencies and new technologies can keep us going for only a while: instead we must boldly go…

“If it were done when ’tis done”, schemed Macbeth, “then ’twere well it were done quickly.” Clearly the Scottish Tories know their Shakespeare, as last week’s defenestration of Jackson Carlaw and his replacement by Douglas Ross was an infinite improvement on the Thame of Glamis’ bloody coup.