Seventeen years ago, I wrote a book, The Oxbridge Conspiracy, about continuing élitism in British higher education. Published by Michael Joseph, it caused quite a stir.
The Guardian, The Times, the Telegraph, the Independent, the Mail and a host of other newspapers denounced it as "chippy" and the result, clearly, of an inferior education. On Start the Week, Melvyn Bragg all but laughed at the absurdity of my premise.
Despite the fact that my book had received more publicity than almost any non-fiction book that appeared in 1994, Penguin, which was due to bring it out in paperback, withdrew the title, so that it sold fewer than 200 copies. Dillons's the precursor to Waterstone's, refused to stock it.
It was as if the Oxbridge-educated ruling class had united to flush me down the toilet.
I won't go into the details, which are still painful after all these years. But, listening this morning to The Class Ceiling on Radio 4, written and presented by Polly Toynbee, all my old frustrations resurfaced, like acid reflux.
Toynbee was discussing upward mobility. As a fully-subscribed 1960s liberal, she wants to see a Britain in which talented people, no matter their social or economic background, or race, have the same opportunity as the established middle class to reach the top in their chosen profession.
Fair enough. I agree - though I do think there is rather more to class than broadening the gene pool in the race for the top jobs. Would the UK really be a better nation if more of our leaders came from sink estates and then sent their own children to private schools and Oxbridge?
But what really angered me was Toynbee's constant, though unspoken, assertion that the best basis for future success was attendance at Oxford and Cambridge - or the "top universities" as she coyly put it.
Again and again, she and her interviewees dropped the names of the two ancient universities into the conversation. Over and over, we heard stories of how poor and underprivileged children were transformed by the Oxbridge experience. One young woman talked about how she had been overawed when she first arrived at Cambridge - all those posh voices and undergraduate gowns at dinner - but gradually came to regard both as normal and part of her life.
There were, I think, two fleeting references to other universities - Birmingham and Warwick - but all the rest were to Oxford and Cambridge. It was as if the best and most desirable panacea for England's ills (and the stress on Oxbridge is overwhelmingly an English phenomenon) would be another two thousand working class students enrolling each year at our two finest and most exclusive seats of learning.
Oddly, Toynbee herself turned her back on Oxford. The daughter of the literary critic Philip Toynbee and granddaughter of the historian Arnold Toynbee, she was granted a scholarship to read history at St Anne's College, Oxford despite having only one A-level, but left without taking a degree to become a journalist.
It was the same for Max Hastings and Auberon Waugh. Indeed, there is a long history of Oxbridge undergraduates who dropped out but still, decades on, regard themselves as Oxford men and women.
Undaunted, Toynbee went on to make a considerable career as a liberal journalist and member of the ruling Establishment. And now, at the age of 64, as she examines what is wrong with the British class system, she can't help concluding that not nearly enough bright young people are being admitted to .. yes, where else? ... Oxford and Cambridge.
I doubt that her response is conscious. She is a fair-minded, progressive woman and, I would say, sincerely believes that the working class is a seriously under-utilised intellectual resource.
But the idea that the country will move smoothly into a new, classless age once we are all - or more of us - empowered to enter the portals of the ancient universities is a nonsense.
What Britain needs is a sharp improvement in the teaching of children at the primary and secondary level, which means both more meritocracy and more selection (i.e. grammar schools open to all). It needs more young people studying "hard" subjects at university and more youngsters who are bright, but not academically inclined, being accepted into rigorous apprenticeships.
What it does not need is a doubling in size of Oxford and Cambridge and the assumption that with Oxbridge values more widely assimilated, all will be for the best in this best of all possible worlds.