Lord St John bows out of college life

APPLICANTS are being invited to fill the flamboyant footsteps of Lord St John of Fawsley, who has announced he will retire as Master of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, next year, writes Cole Moreton.

Since his appointment in 1991, the 66-year-old former barrister, Conservative cabinet minister and author has been Cambridge's only rival to the media- friendly figures preferred by Oxford University, such as its Chancellor Lord Jenkins of Hillhead.

Last year he presided over the college's decision to break with 400 years of tradition and allow unmarried male and female undergraduates to live together. He was the only one of 31 Cambridge principals who did not resign from the United Oxford and Cambridge University Club over its refusal to grant full membership to women.

His successor will need to be a natural fundraiser, as Cambridge University wants to find pounds 250 million by the year 2000. Earlier this year Lord St John applied his flair to producing Foundations for the Future, an exhibition of memorabilia spanning the 800-year history of the university. It included the most highly prized documents in English Christianity, the Canterbury Gospels, and a lock of Isaac Newton's hair.

Lord St John's five-year reign has been more successful than that of John Tusa, the former head of the BBC World Service who resigned as president of Wolfson College in October 1993 after only eight months in the job, because of "an irreconcilable clash of cultures".

Mr Tusa had been an outsider to the insular Cambridge culture. Another outsider, Germaine Greer, and Baroness Thatcher had been mentioned as possible Cambridge principals, partly because of their appeal as fundraisers. But they lost out, and it is now thought highly unlikely that the next Master of Emmanuel will be a stranger to the ways of Cambridge academia.