But wait a second, what's the name of John Jones doing in the list, as Poetry Professor between 1978 and 1983? Few remember him now, and certainly there is no lasting evidence that he ever wrote poems. We should be fair to his literary competence and say that at least one of his books, a treatise called The Egotistical Sublime, was part of the general discussion for a while, and that he had a proven record as a professor of English. But that was just the trouble. They had elected, as Poetry Professor, an academic professor of English. How did it happen? Contemporary accounts remark on the campaigning skills of his wife. Apparently she knew how to win an election.

An alarm bell should have rung then, but most of us were probably not listening. Many of us were listening, however, when it rang again at Peter Porter's failure to win the post in a race against Christopher Ricks. Professor (now Sir Christopher)  Ricks is a scholar, critic and lecturer of titanic prowess, and all are agreed that he did a mighty job. But he was not a poet. It could be said that he fell into the same hallowed category as erstwhile incumbents A. C. Bradley, J. W. Mackail, W. P. Ker and Maurice Bowra, who were not poets either, but knew an awful lot about it. (Lest you doubt his credentials, remember that it was Bowra who told Isaiah Berlin about Anna Akhmatova. Berlin had never heard of her. Bowra really had read everything.)

Knowing a lot about it, however, is not the same as doing it, and surely the importance of the post — the thing that makes it decisively different from all the other Professorships of literature in Oxford — depends on its holder being a mature poet with some actual, concrete, hard-won stuff to impart about how poetry gets written. All kinds of people can read poetry, and more than a few of them can study it: but only a poet can write it. If poets write it for a long time, they find a lot out, not just about their own work but about all the work by other people, in all ages and languages, that they think is vital. They are well placed to say why they think it so, and when they get near the finishing line they are ideally placed. They speak not so much ex cathedra as ex atelier, as it were.

From that viewpoint, I thought both Fenton and Muldoon a bit young, and I might say at this point that I would rule myself out for the same reason: despite what the clock might say, I'm only just getting started. Peter Porter, however, when he ran for the office, was ready to sum up. At the risk of losing his friendship, I might hazard that he would not have been quite as practised a lecturer as Professor Ricks. But Porter, quite apart from his stature as a poet, is a greatly learned man, a born educator, and a whole world of poetry and the arts is already in his mind, never needing to be mugged up, all ready to be brought out. (He would have been a master of the Poetry Professor's other, unofficial task, as exemplified by Auden and later by Heaney, which is to conduct the kind of informal tutorial that masquerades as a tertulia.) But the poet lost to a critic, because the critic had a superior campaign.

So there was already, to my mind at least, a prominent question mark over the electoral system before the recent election got started. But this time the press got into the act and the prominent question mark turned to vivid scarlet neon, wreathed in the smoke of hell-fire. When one of Ruth Padel's unwisely enthusiastic friends in the press informed the rest of the press of what it should have known already, namely that Walcott had a sexual harassment case in his past, the election for the Oxford Professorship of Poetry became an American Presidential election in parodic miniature, with character as the only issue. It should have taken only a moment's thought to realise that character is just about the last parameter by which to measure the English poets, among whom the Earl of Rochester and Lord Byron are locked in contention for the title of most wicked and both are outdone for male chauvinism by Milton in 50 different passages of Paradise Lost. But nobody was thinking except Walcott.