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RICHARD EDEN: Earl of Balfour condemns 'woke' Cambridge University over 'supine' response after pro-Palestine protesters vandalise a portrait of his ancestor Arthur Balfour


RICHARD EDEN: The Earl of Balfour, who watched in disgust as a portrait of his great-great uncle, the former prime minister Arthur Balfour, was repeatedly slashed and sprayed with paint.

Until now, it's perhaps been most popularly associated with one of the opening scenes from Chariots Of Fire, the 1981 Oscar-winning film starring Nigel Havers and Ben Cross as two undergraduate athletes – one an aristocrat; the other, the son of a Jewish immigrant – who belt 371 yards around its Great Court while the clock strikes 12. He's similarly dumbfounded by what he calls the 'plain ignorance of the history of the Middle East among these extremists' who attempted to justify the attack by claiming that the Balfour Declaration of 1917 'began the ethnic cleansing of Palestine'. Ben Cross and Nigel Havers pictured in a scene from 1981s Chariots of Fire which sees the students try to sprint 371 yards around Trinity College's Great Court

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