We have suspected for some time that UK universities were supping with the devil when they relied on legions of foreign, especially Chinese, students to balance the books. Last week the mask slipped spectacularly at University College London.

Some months ago a Chinese student complained of ‘horrible provocation’ when Michelle Shipworth, an associate professor dealing with human behaviours, asked a seminar class of whom about a quarter were Chinese, to criticise statistics suggesting that China had one of the world’s biggest modern slavery problems.