I had an English grandfather who attended the university, and even ran in the early 1920s against some of those depicted in that Chariots of Fire movie, but he also spent a great deal of time learning to climb on the roofs of the university which stood him in good stead later.
But this story is not about him.
In fact, the first part is about Cambridge Analytica, who don’t actually have anything to do with the university but chose the name because it made the London-based company sound more authoritative.
At the time of writing it has just come to light that the folk behind this shady company have been acting as the mercenaries of the digital world.
Facebook is implicated in this and this story has a lot more to come out, I suspect.
It appears if you had enough money, you were able to hire them to influence an election in your favour. One might think that is no different than what political parties do now with advertising agencies and the like creating spin, but this is far more manipulative and worrying.
If the obscenely rich can pay to sway public opinion, the whole basis of democracy begins to crumble, and we may as well not bother.
This company obtained, probably illegally, data from Facebook from people who had done a personality quiz (which did come out of Cambridge University) and then used those users’ friends networks to profile people and then individually target all of them to manipulate their voting decision-making.
Our old mate Trump’s team used the services of Cambridge Analytica very successfully. It was engineered by Steve Bannon. They created psychological profiles of 230 million Americans, then worked on them to vote for Trump. And it worked!
It is now looking likely Cambridge Analytica was also involved in swaying the Brexit vote, and was funded by Russians. President for life, and possibly longer, Putin has been having a great run of successes in recent times and must be very pleased with himself.
But let’s finish with something more uplifting. Well perhaps not if you were Professor Stephen Hawking and his family, but I’d like to make mention of this remarkable human being.
There are not too many of us who are admired globally and then globally missed when we go but Mandela, Mother Theresa and Hawking are three that come to mind.
Hawking, of course, died a couple of weeks ago.
He began his academic career at Oxford but did his graduate work at Cambridge University in the early 1960s and remained there.
He was undoubtedly a genius with his theories and work around astrophysics and cosmology. Many of us bought his book ‘A Brief History of Time’ in 1988 and were somewhat flummoxed but I can see my copy from where I sit. I’m determined to reread it now and see if I’ve got any cleverer over the passage of thirty years. One would hope so but possibly not.
However, many of us admire him more for how he battled the debilitating motor neurone disease that began when he was just 21. This cruel disease slowly and steadily robbed him of his physical abilities and yet he carried on using that magnificent brain throughout his 76 years.
At the time of his diagnosis he was told he might only live another two years.
He remained incredible productive and clever to the end, despite not being able to do much other than blink.
I like the story of how in 2009, to prove his theory that time travel into the past is effectively impossible, he held a party open to all. There was champagne and hors d’oeuvres so who among us wouldn’t want to attend?
He sat in the room with the booze and food all on his own and no one turned up. He publicised the party afterwards, knowing only time travellers would know to turn up, and yet they didn’t bother.
I like that.
His ashes will be buried in Westminster Abbey near Isaac Newton and Charles Darwin.
