Evil People who went to Cambridge

Alumni lists on websites are filled with smiling portraits of the great and the good.

Everyone wants to go study in the same establishment as Stephen Fry or at the very least that guy from Downton Abbey, but most colleges have also been home to characters the discerning sixth former might be less willing to associate themselves with.

You won’t see as many of these names in the prospectus, but evil people are just as good at exams.

Enoch Powell – Trinity College, double starred first in Latin and Greek
An absurdly right wing Conservative MP of the 1960s, Enoch Powell makes the evil list for being one of Britain’s most notorious voices against immigration. He delivered the infamous “Rivers of Blood” speech, which boiled over with racist claims, stating that immigrants would destroy the British Isles and predicting racially motivated violence.

He compared the immigration policy of his day to watching a nation heaping up its own funeral pyre. Proof if ever it were needed that supposedly clever people can be disgustingly bigoted.

He is now being investigated as a possible member of the Westminster paedophile ring which carried out satanic cult-type abuse in children’s homes in the 1980’s and 90’s.

Nick Griffin – History then Law at Downing, 2:2
Another prominent racist, Nick Griffin is known to us as from his fifteen-year leadership of the BNP. He was active in the National Front from the age of 14, and has been bought up on several charges of inciting racial hatred.

In his time at Cambridge, he became a boxing blue and fought in three Varsity matches against Oxford.

He apparently took up the sport before coming to university, following an episode of fisticuffs in Lewisham with a member of an anti-fascist party.

Oliver Cromwell – Sidney Sussex
According to Wikipedia, Oliver Cromwell is one of the most controversial figures in the history of the British Isles. The leader of the Roundheads in the English civil war is sometimes known as a hero of liberty who led an army against a tyrannical King – but the brutalities he committed himself were appalling.

As head of a Puritan army he led a massacre of Irish Catholics, taking 2,500 lives in a single storm of Dublin. Under his command, civilians were murdered and priests were tortured, terrifying the nation.

Prior to initiating the near genocide of the UK’s Catholics population, he studied the newly-founded and Sidney Sussex, which was then best known for being chock full of Puritans rather by than its proximity to Sainsbury’s. However, Cromwell left the towering spires to look after his family after the death of his dad and so never gained a degree.

The Cambridge Spy Ring – Kim Philby, Anthony Blunt, Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean – Trinity

During the cold war in the 1930s, Trinity was home to a ring of treacherous spies, who had reacted to the threat of Fascism by becoming communists and betraying secrets to the Kremlin. Treason-tastic.

Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean both worked for the foreign office but did a runner to the USSR when a finger was pointed in 1951. Kim Philby worked for MI16 and has been dubbed the biggest traitor, giving away the names of as many British agents as he could. Philby managed to hang on in there until 1961 before being discovered and Anthony Blunt, who was in MI5, had his cover blown in 1964.

By all accounts, their information was never completely trusted by the Russians since they were prolific boozers.

Alistair Crowley – Trinity, Philosophy then changed to English, left before exams were over
Trinity’s Alistair Crowley was an occultist, poet and all-round fruitcake dubbed ‘the wickedest man in the world,’ by the national press.

The quirky character founded a satanic religion known as Thelema whose guiding rule was ‘do what thou wilt’ – encouraging absolute liberty at the expense of others. His book ‘Magick in Theory and Practice’ has been seen to advocate child molestation, child sacrifice and murder.

He practiced black magic, and is rumoured to have placed a curse on his doctor, who died within 24 hours of his patient. There is also a conspiracy theory that he came back to life and had plastic surgery to replace Paul McCartney in the Beatles from 1966, but this may or may not be complete bullshit.

Whilst at uni, he habitually visited prostitutes and was president of the chess club for two years.

Germaine Greer – Newnham, doctorate, wrote her thesis on Shakespeare’s early comedies.
The author of ‘The Female Eunuch’ is a well-known ex-Newnhamite. While she was considered a revolutionary in her day, she makes the evil list for recent appalling hate speeches against transpeople.

In the 1990s she rallied to stop a colleague, Rachel Padman, from becoming a Newnham fellow for no other reason than her being trans. More recently, the only thing anyone remembers from her speech at the Union last year is the tirade when she stated that transwomen are not women since they don’t understand what it is like to own ‘hairy sweaty vaginas’.

This woman is a hopeless bigot.

Apparently she also was also a member the footlights.

Nick Clegg – Archaeology and Anthropology, Robinson, 2:1
It is no secret that Cleggy once graced the red bricks of Robinson’s halls. While perhaps more tragic than evil, he is definitely dislikeable enough to make this list. He occupies the same place in the nation’s hearts as lukewarm baths.

Nick is not a textbook villain and you can imagine tolerating him on a skiing holiday if he was someone’s drippy dad, but he will be remembered as the man who betrayed a generation to spend the rest of their lives in debt, and missed an opportunity to inspire real change for a comfy seat on D Cam’s lap.

David Starkey History, Fitzwilliam, 1st and PhD
Again not quite from the darkest pit of hell, this prominent historian is best described as a bit of a knob. The Sunday Herald dubbed him Britain’s rudest man.

In 2009 he complained that Henry VIII was being unfairly judged because historians focussed on the women he murdered. In 2011 he argued on Newsnight that the cause if the 2011 riots was black culture; “the problem is that white people have become black”.

The archetypal small, rich white dude.

Ali Niaz

nb: photo may or may not bear resemblance to evil alumnus in question

Niaz’s evil pre-dates his Cambridge days, so his inclusion in this list is also fairly tenuous. A scary London gang member from his early teenage years, he became a drug dealer from the age of 14. He was shot aged 16 and the bullet is still lodged in his skull –blimey.

In 2009 he went to prison for selling Heroin, where he took A-levels and bucked up his ideas.

He ended up at Cambridge studying a Postgraduate certificate in sustainable leadership in business, presumably bopping along to fifteen seconds of One Direction at Cindies with the rest of us.

Anyone who has ever gone to Johns
It is basically Slytherin. You know it, I know it. Everyone who applied there knows it.

Okay, so halfway through this list the interpretation of ‘evil’ became a bit flexible. All we can take away from this exercise is that while this university does have infamous alumni, it has far fewer than expected.

Once again Cambridge has proved itself kind of vanilla compared to Oxford.