If only President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran had come to me first - before setting in motion the chain of events that led to his Interior Minister, Ali Kordan, being impeached for deception for forging an Oxford law degree - I could have saved him a lot of trouble.

“What ho, Giley, old bean,” he could have said, if he had only had the wit to pick up the phone. “I'm most awfully sozzers to butt in at this time of the morning, when you are no doubt busy getting outside a plateful of the old eggs and b., washed down with a loud slurp of the steaming, but there's a little quelquechose that has been worrying me all night, and it just couldn't wait.”

“Press on, Moody old fellow, press on,” I should have said, mopping my upper lip with a napkin and calling for a large brandy and soda to help loosen the grey troops for a spot of problem-solving. “Do not hold back, give me the full picture, and I shall endeavour to provide what solace I can.”

“Well, it's like this,” he would have said. “There's this cove, Kordan...”

“Not, dear old ‘Knockers' Kordan who was head of pop in our year and got sent down for disembowelling the head beak's Pomeranian with an exploding conker?”

“No, not him. It's Ali Kordan, a new bug. Distinguished himself last year in the David Irving memorial lecture at the ‘Call That A Holocaust?' Conference in Tehran, when he proved that the building at Auschwitz previously described as a death camp was, in fact, a prototype drive-thru burger joint. I'm thinking of appointing him as my interior minister.”

“And the problem is?”

“I think he might not be an Oxford man.”

“What?” I snorted, fair rocketing a spume of amber soda through my nostrils. “And you're thinking of giving him a job in government? Gadzooks, a close-run thing. What is he, a Cambridge dog?”

“Not even. Could be anything. Bristol, Durham, Edinburgh. Possibly even a red-brick.”

I shuddered. Bricks, in a place of higher education. The very thought. “So then just don't take him on,” I would have said. “You don't have to be embarrassed about it. Here in Britain if they're not Oxbridge we just boot 'em out. Don't even let 'em in in the first place.”

“I know, I know,” President Ahmadinejad would have said. “But, in the first place, we are still sort of supposed to be a ‘revolutionary government', so it looks a bit narrow-minded. And, secondly, he does claim to have been at Oxford.”

“Claims?”

“Well, he always refers to it as ‘the London Oxford University'.”

“A laughable solecism, indeed,” I would have said. “But it's the sort of thing those overseas johnnies are always saying. They do rather keep themselves to themselves in college, and never quite pick up the lingo. I shouldn't let that bother you.”

“And then there's the business of the spelling mistakes in his degree certificate...”

“His what?” I would have said, spluttering into my drink a second time, and this time flinging my glass to the floor, standing up and crying: “Well, dash it all, Moody, the man's a blatant fraud!”

Because, you see, nobody who really went to Oxford has a degree certificate at all, correctly spelt or otherwise. And I speak from experience.

Oxford is not like Rydell High in Grease, where term ends with a whop-bop-a-loo-bop-a-whop-bam-boo, and everyone singing and dancing together as they head off into adult life.

At Oxford, you just do your last exam, then three days later the lease on your dog-hole house down Abingdon Road expires, and you skulk off back to London to get a job in a shop. The results only eventually come through a few months later, by which time you have worked your way up to deputy floor manager (men's underwear), and, if they confirm that you have indeed got a degree, you just think, ‘Oh, jolly good,' and go back to folding underpants.

Nobody I've ever heard of goes back to Oxford at some later date to graduate. Why on earth would you? And when?

I have a vague notion that some people (physicists, Japanese students) go back on certain dates the following year for some sort of optional ceremony, no doubt at the Sheldonian or that place with the big green dome on Broad Street (or is that the same thing?). But I've never met anyone who actually did it. What do they do, give you a scroll?

I guess they must do. And they probably take a photo of you with it, in a borrowed gown and mortar board. The very thought has always sent a shiver down my spine - because if you subsequently die in some horrific, newsworthy manner any time before you're about 50, that's the shot they use in the paper, in an oval frame, with the words cleverly set around it describing how you were dragged off into the bush by hyenas and eaten alive from the feet up.

That alone would have been reason enough for me not to go back and graduate (had the idea even occurred). Because if the photo of you having just graduated does not exist, then perhaps the inevitable violent death will not ensue.

In fact, now I think of it, the only proof I have that I got an English degree from Oxford at all is the word of a librarian at the English faculty whom I telephoned in July 1991, soon as I heard from a friend that the results were out.

“Jules Cohen?” She said. “No, nothing here, I'm afraid. Oh, wait, Coren, got it. Ooh, yes, well done.” And that was it. I punched the air, phoned my parents, and then got straight back to the sock table before the assistant store manager (hosiery) had my guts for garters (second floor, men's accessories, not actually made from gut, sir, but a perfectly serviceable synthetic alternative). But I've got to say I never saw it written down. I have no ocular proof to witness my degree (except for that weeny Othello reference at the beginning of the sentence which you probably didn't even notice).

To be honest, if I ever went up for any sort of job where they gave a hoot what degree you got, or where you got it from, I would look pretty silly. And I tell you now that I would be far more likely, like poor old Ali Kordan, to cobble something together on my laptop than schlep down to Oxford on the coach to throw my hat in the air with a lot of science wonks and seven-foot Canadian rowers picking up dubious honoraries.

Indeed, now that I know about this vacancy at the Iranian Interior Ministry for which an Oxford education has been made a very public sine qua non, I think I shall call my old pal Moody - since he did not, in the end, think to call me - and try and pull something through the old boys' network.

Times Recommends

• Resist urge to throw voters red meat
• Slay sacred cows and be candid
• We cannot let these 100 deaths deflect us