As far as I can see, the wild expansion of universities, which began under John Major and exploded under the Blair Creature, had three real purposes. By raising the school leaving age to 21 it kept the official unemployment figures down and compelled those involved to pay their own dole by borrowing the money for fees, rents and food.

It completed the foolish switch to an American-style school policy, which began with the smashing-up of the selective state grammar schools in the 1960s and 1970s. This created a high school system in which the 11-18 years are used mainly to socialise children into citizens of an egalitarian state, with a little education on the side. Education of a sort then begins in college, which costs a fortune. But real university tuition starts only when the young stay at college, for even longer and at even greater cost, to do second ‘Masters’ degrees.

Third and perhaps most important was the transformation of universities from serious places of learning into hard-driving businesses, cramming in the numbers, joining the property rental business and paying giant salaries to their bosses. I suspect many British towns and cities nowadays depend heavily on these shaky places, founded almost entirely on debt. How they will cope in the new world of savagely rising prices and taxes, I cannot tell.