Chelsea Clinton to study at Oxford

The only child of President and Mrs Clinton has decided to follow in her father's footsteps and spend some time studying at Oxford University, it emerged yesterday. The American television talkshow host and socialite, Larry King, said Chelsea Clinton had told him that she planned to go to Oxford in the autumn of 2001, immediately after she graduates from Stanford.

The only child of President and Mrs Clinton has decided to follow in her father's footsteps and spend some time studying at Oxford University, it emerged yesterday. The American television talkshow host and socialite, Larry King, said Chelsea Clinton had told him that she planned to go to Oxford in the autumn of 2001, immediately after she graduates from Stanford.

Mr King included the tantalising tidbit in his weekly column for the USA Today newspaper, but did not say when or where Chelsea had vouchsafed this information. The First Daughter, who is accompanying her father to Africa and the Middle East this week, recently spent a few days partying with her parents in Los Angeles before the Democratic Party's national convention, and may have encountered Mr King there.

There were unconfirmed reports at the start of the summer that Mr Clinton was house-hunting in and around Oxford, fuelling rumours - subsequently denied - that the President was considering a visiting professorship there after he leaves office in January. Authoritative reports of what Mr Clinton, still only 54, will do when he retires, however, are few and far between.

He is expected to pen his memoirs - for a multi-million dollar fee - and spend time establishing his presidential library in Little Rock, the capital of his home state of Arkansas. He has also quipped that he looks forward to being a Senatorial spouse, assuming that his wife is elected Senator for New York.

Chelsea, who turns 21 in February, is taking a term out from her undergraduate studies at Stanford to spend time with her father in his last months of office and help campaign for her mother. She transferred last year from the preparatory medicine course at Stanford to major in history, and Larry King quoted her as saying that her interests lay in politics, government and history.

Bill Clinton spent two years at Oxford as a Rhodes scholar from 1968-70, a period during which - third party accounts suggest - his extracurricular activities took up as much time as his studies. He travelled extensively in Europe, led protests against the Vietnam war and charmed a succession of women. He himself has had relatively little to say about his time at Oxford beyond immortalising his experiments with marijuana with the admission that he "smoked, but did not inhale" and appears to have returned home with mixed feelings, both about the august university and about life in Britain.