It could be that he had a lot to think about. I have no idea. Or rather I have some idea, but it is based only on the publicly available documentation, which is not very extensive. I have met people who say they know more, but they always seem to have learned it from someone else who knows everything, and him I have yet to meet. Those who were glad to see Walcott hounded out of the race were not impressed by the arguments of those of us who said that he was unlikely, at the age of 79, to launch himself from the podium and fall ravenously on the young lovely in the third row, and I quite see their point. If he had indeed once done what he was rumoured to have done, then he was a villain. But there would still have been little relevance to his qualifications to be Oxford Professor of Poetry, a post for which you want the kind of man, or indeed woman, that people would flock to hear if he, or she, were lecturing from behind bars. 

Walcott prudently retired before he could be scrutinised further, and Ruth Padel, gaining the office by default, resigned from it because her part in ensuring that her opponent should be scrutinised in the first place was itself scrutinised. The press decided the issue, and the third candidate, Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, might have been giving us his judgment on the whole pitiful business by resigning in his turn. How would he have found the post worth holding, if the press had started scrutinising him? There might have been some unpleasantness about a disputed parking space back there in the University of Allahabad. Perhaps he had been photographed allowing his fond look to linger too long on the bare midriff of a Bollywood starlet while he was signing her well-thumbed copy of his collection The Transfiguring Places. And even if he had nothing to hide, why should he let himself be treated like an elected official?

The conclusion is inescapable. Since every future election will be subject to invigilation by the press, the only solution is to scrap the election system. This would probably need to be done even if the press could somehow reach an agreement to stay out of the lives of the candidates, because already the question of who should hold the post next is subject to the demands of social engineering, which are no doubt worthy but are entirely irrelevant. Walcott wasn't running as the first black poet to aspire to the post. He was running as a great poet who happened to be black. If some time elapses before there is another great poet who happens to be black, then those are the breaks. There are no good reasons, only bad ones, for favouring P. Diddy as the next Oxford Professor of Poetry, just as there are no good reasons, only bad ones, for threatening a museum with a cut in its funds because not enough black people are coming to see the paintings. To think otherwise is just another way of patronising people of colour, and a particularly insidious one. 

The same applies to the view (we might call it the Winterson view) by which it is supposed to be a tragedy that a woman poet could not get the post. A truly accomplished woman poet, U. A. Fanthorpe, stood for the office in 1994, and lost. But if another female poet of equivalent stature were to appear, she could be appointed. Carol Ann Duffy, who revered Fanthorpe, should be of just about the right magnitude if her completed term as laureate is judged successful, or even if it isn't. But she would still be a bit young for the post. Kathleen Jamie, already impressive, should be magisterial by then; but she, too, will scarcely be ready to draw the conclusions of a lifetime. If either Duffy or Jamie gets hustled into an election ten years from now, it will be a bad sign. An appointments committee could make a principle of playing a long game.