Alumnus to be proud of No 171 showed this week that the more assertively confident form displayed recently in his job possibly came from the sense of liberation attached to knowing you will shortly be doing something else. Stephen Dorrell, rather ill-at-ease in his first few months after becoming shadow education and employment secretary, had been in much more incisive form during the committee stage of the Teaching and Higher Education Bill. Mr Dorrell studied at Brasenose College, Oxford where his international law tutor was the future Labour frontbencher and now Waikato University vice-chancellor, Bryan Gould.