Dominic Grieve joins the Bullingdon Club

One result of David Davis's decision to gallop off madly in all directions has been Dominic Grieve's promotion to shadow home secretary.

He is an effective, courteous performer in the Commons and has always struck me as a lawyerly, even scholarly, figure. But in Sunday's Observer Pendennis showed another side to him:

One person who will perhaps be a little anxious at the news that David Davis has been replaced as shadow Home Secretary by Dominic Grieve is Conservative MP Damian Green, who has the immigration brief in Grieve's new department.

The two men were at Oxford together in the 1970s, when Green (educated at Reading grammar school) was an undergraduate at Balliol College and his new boss (educated at Westminster public school) was at Magdalen. Green, who a contemporary remembers as an earnest sort of chap, was invited to a black-tie dinner at Magdalen and polished his shoes accordingly, but after dinner - and, sadly, history does not record the reason for this - Green found himself picked up in a display of high spirits and deposited in the Cherwell by a group of Magdalen hearties, including Dominic Grieve.

It is clear that Grieve will fit in well with David Cameron's circle. Meanwhile the parallels between Damian Green and John Mortimer's Leslie Titmuss should be explored by the nation's literary critics.