According to The Independent newspaper, the December 1977 report recounted how a group of students -- allegedly including current Attorney General Dominic Grieve – threw the now Home Office minister Damian Green off a bridge, narrowly missing some rusty spikes.
Famous incident
Neither politician has confirmed the accuracy of the report, which was written by Eamonn Matthews and Michael Crick -- who have both become acclaimed journalists -- for Oxford's student newspaper Cherwell.
Mr Crick told the newspaper: ‘I stand by my story, and it has always amused me. It was a very famous incident at the time. Everybody in the university was talking about it.’
In the original description of the incident, which occurred in the grounds of Magdalen College, the Cherwell report said Mr Green – now responsible for overseeing the police -- was ‘dropped from a height of 12 feet into one-and-a-half feet of water. In his fall he missed being impaled on some rusty spikes by only a few inches. Fortunately, it was his shoulder which hit the stony bottom first.’
Out of character
The report added that Mr Green told Cherwell: ‘I could easily have hit my head on the bottom, been concussed and drowned.’
Mr Crick commented that he did not think Mr Grieve – who has since spoken out against anti-social behaviour on many occasions -- was anything more than a bystander to the events because it would have been ‘so out of character’.
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