More than a decade ago I spent a day in the company of Minouche Shafik, currently the embattled president of Columbia University. The meeting took place in London at a podcasted debate on climate change which was moderated by Leo Johnson, the affable ecologist and younger brother of Boris Johnson. I quickly came to dislike Shafik.

We had been asked to choose a photograph from the entries for Prix Pictet, a global photographic award for photography and sustainability. We were then asked to comment on the chosen photograph. Leo, thinking of me as born disrupter, chose me to speak first.

My selected picture was a shot of Chinese workers crammed into a dormitory with bunk beds stacked seven high. On the face of it, the photo seemed a gloomy subject. However, I described it as a picture of optimism. These were almost certainly construction workers brought in from the countryside to build the modern high-rise apartments that were then beginning to sprout all over China; for me it was a wonderful thing that the world’s poorest were now going to be able to have access to central heating, running water, indoor bathrooms, and the comforts of life that we in the west take for granted.

Having spent fifteen years living and working in Asia to bring billions of dollars of investment into countries which had finally abandoned autarkic socialism, I was fully aware of the improvement in health and wellbeing brought about by modern housing. The panel however erupted. Predictably the Chairman of jurors of the Prix Pictet, Sir David King, a die-hard socialist and eco-fanatic jumped on my commentary. It became clear that King, formerly chief technology adviser to the government of prime minister, Tony Blair, did not care much for the world’s poor. If limiting the world’s most populous economies’ access to CO2 producing energy meant that the world’s poorest had to remain poor, so be it.

The entire podcast panel rowed into line behind Sir David King, Minouche Shafik included. She may have lacked King’s bombast, but her weasel comments aligned with the view that economic development in China was a bad thing – a remarkable standpoint given that at the time she was the senior UK bureaucrat in charge of the Department for international Development (DFID).

I immediately put her down as a ‘trimmer’; a word originally used to describe vacillating and self-serving the 17th Century British politician Lord Halifax. As an object lesson in vacuous virtue signalling ‘do-goodery’, I recommend Shafik’s book ‘What we owe each other: A new social contract’ [2021].

Superficially Shafik’s academic credentials appear impressive. Born in Egypt but grown up in America, she graduated in economics and politics from Amhurst, before crossing the Atlantic to take an MA at Cambridge and a Doctorate at Oxford. This made her the perfect DEI (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion) adornment for global institutions.

Apart from DFID, she has been a vice president of the World Bank, a deputy managing director of the IMF (International Monetary Fund) a deputy governor of the Bank of England, and Chancellor of the London School of Economics (LSE). Last year she vaulted back across the Atlantic to become President of New York’s Columbia University, one of America’s most prestigious academic institutions. In 2021 she was elevated to the House of Lords. In other words, she became a figure in that self-congratulatory global elite that both lectures and rules us.

But at Columbia, Shafik has met her Waterloo. On 17 April, Hamas supporting students from Columbia University demanded that the authorities divest from arms manufacturers and companies that invest in Israel. They illegally set up a tented village in the university’s central square. Students then began to harass Jews who they allegedly prevented from going to class.

Shafik vacillated. Instead of immediately clamping down on this criminal insurrection she negotiated with student leaders. In a weak campus email Shafik wrote, ‘we have our demands; they have theirs.’ One might well ask what right do students have to make demands? Predictably, given a centimetre the students took a kilometre; Columbia’s iconic Hamilton Building, named after its alumnus, Alexander Hamilton, the brilliant politician who was arguably the most important author of the American Constitution as well as the architect of the United States’ financial system, was occupied.

Then there appeared two more demonstrator groups, Jews for Palestine, and Jews for Israel. It is thought that professional agitators then became involved. With their blood up, students became increasing violent and out of control. Narcissistic ringleaders such as Bo Tang, who had taken Professor Frank Guridy’s history class entitled ‘Columbia – 1968’ (referring to the anti-Vietnam War student sit-ins), started to use their knowledge to create their own moment of ‘living history’. Lots of ‘selfie’ opportunities no doubt.

Finally, and way too late, Shafik caved in to pressure from trustees and donors and called in the NYPD (New York Police Department) to fully restore order before more damage could be done to Columbia’s property…and its reputation. Ignoring the issues of illegal occupation, criminal damage and threatening antisemitic behaviour, the liberal press, themselves leading critics of free speech platforms such as Elon Musk’s Twitter (now X), now hypocritically attacked Shafik for closing down free speech. No mention of course of the students’ calls for genocide, their law breaking and criminal damage. The usual left-wing suspects, The Guardian, and The New York Times have published pro-student pieces.

With her dismissal wanted by both ‘Democrats’ and ‘Republicans’, it seems unlikely that the dithering Minouche Shafik, the ultimate ‘trimmer’, will survive. The only question now is how history will treat her. Will she be seen as a great economist and brilliant public servant or as an over- promoted DEI appointee and ‘empty vessel’? I suspect the latter.