Oxford Union

At school, one of the things that I enjoyed was debating.

And so naturally I got involved in debating at university and the Oxford Union Society.

But of my contemporaries who went into politics, and it was a generation which produced a number of people who went on to eminence in politics, not all of them, in fact most of them, weren't involved in university-wide politics at all.

You became a reporter on the press and journal in Aberdeen.

Qatar's Prime Minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani has warned that any further military escalation in the Middle East will simply make finding a solution more difficult.

He was speaking at the Oxford Union on the same day as the Emir of Qatar urged President Trump to continue with diplomacy rather than conduct more military strikes against Iran.

Our chief international correspondent Lise Doucette attended the Oxford Union event.

Sheikh Mohammed said Qatari mediators made five trips to Iran in the past week alone to try to avert another military escalation.

Some meetings, he said, had lasted as long as 15 to 20 hours.

I don't think you'd quite get the August 1914 rush in quite the same way.

But I think it's interesting, isn't it? 1933, the Oxford Union.

We'll not fight for king and country.

We'll not fight for king and country.

But if you look at some of the stats on what the Muslims actually feel, British Muslims actually feel about stuff, it's pretty frightening.

And I detailed them out in my Oxford Union speech.

I laid it out.

I said, the West doesn't need to be suspicious of Islam.

Not vile.

Anyway, rant over.

You had this, speaking of rants, you had a rant at Oxford Union.

I mean, you were in a debate there and you did this very clever thing that I think, even when I was watching it in the video, I was like,

She was part of that top 25%, and when Maureen returned from her trip to America, it was not long before she enrolled to study history at St. Anne's College, Oxford.

Cleve's obituary in The Guardian said that she was the first woman to be invited to speak at the Oxford Union Debating Society, which I think is nonsense, because the Oxford Union Library says that honor went to Dame Millicent Fawcett in 1908.

According to an article in The Telegraph from 2012, Maureen caused a sensation at the all-male Oxford Union when she imitated the Queen in a debate.

Even with a prestigious degree from Oxford, in 1957 entry-level jobs for women were secretarial.

Maureen secured a job at London's Evening Standard newspaper as secretary to the editor Percy Elland.