Cambridge University may have more Boat Race wins under its belt than Oxford (80 to Oxford’s 75), but in the Prime Minister stakes Oxford is well ahead with 25 educated here, against only 13 there since 1721. Astonishingly, too, 13 of those Oxford-educated prime ministers came from one college, Christ Church. And of the 12 Prime Ministers who have held office since the Second World War, none were at Cambridge and eight were at Oxford – with Churchill, Callaghan, Major, and Brown at neither.

Only Lord North, as I said last week, has represented an Oxfordshire constituency while in office since 1721 – when Cambridge- educated Robert Walpole (1676-1745) moved into 10 Downing Street – but several others have had strong Oxfordshire connections.

William Ewart Gladstone (1809-1898) was MP (or Burgess as it was called) for Oxford University from 1847 until 1865, when he was heavily defeated by Tory Sir William Heathcote in a poll which, under a new Act, lasted five days and permitted postal votes for the first time.

He then offered himself (successfully) as a candidate in South Lanarkshire and became Prime Minister in 1868. Despite that defeat, in a speech to the Oxford Union he said that he would “almost like to kiss every stone in the ancient walls of Oxford”.

All the same he was hopelessly traditionalist, at least to modern eyes. He deplored slackness in academic dress, the disappearance of the gold tassel (or toffs) on the mortar boards of anyone judged by the university authorities to be blue blooded, and any hint of women being included in academic life – even though his daughter went on to become principal of Newnham College, Cambridge.

Then there was Herbert Henry Asquith (1852-1928) known as HH, who became the Earl of Oxford and Asquith in 1925 and was nominated as Chancellor of the University of Oxford in the same year, but lost to Viscount Cave in a contest dominated by party political feeling.

He died at his home at The Wharf, Sutton Courtenay, and is buried in the churchyard there.

But even before the office of Prime Minister had evolved into an official position (usually taken to be when George I asked Robert Walpole to take up the reins) chiefs of government with Oxfordshire backgrounds were very much to the fore; not least John Churchill, first Duke of Marlborough, who dominated politics during much of Queen Anne’s reign – until ousted by Robert Harley (1661-1724) who became Earl of Oxford and Mortimer in 1711.

Harley was educated at a small school in Shilton, near Burford, run by the Rev Samuel Birch, a former vicar of Bampton who had lost that job through being a nonconformist. No fewer than 14 of his pupils went on to occupy high office including Lord Chancellor Viscount Harcourt (1661-1730) and Lord Chief Justice Thomas Trevor (1658-1730).

Lastly, of course, there was Winston Churchill (1874-1965), born at Blenheim and buried at Bladon. He gives me the excuse to quote one Oxfordshire Prime Minister pronouncing on another: “Mr Gladstone read Homer for fun, which I thought served him right.”

As for all those statistics about Oxford-educated Prime Ministers: they may change tomorrow.