When we took our file picture of the controversial statue of Cecil Rhodes at Oriel College, the protective plastic netting that covered it had the curious effect of dressing the African adventurer in a check suit.

Why controversial? Well, members of Oxford’s loonier student fringe want shot of the statue because they consider it a symbol of “intersectional oppression”.

A group called Rhodes Must Fall declared: “We remain determined to decolonise this university and dismantle the imperialist legacy of white supremacy.”

There was a time – perhaps still is – when people would have been happy to witness the fall not just of the statue but of the whole building in High Street on which it stands.

That Oriel’s Rhodes Building had enemies became clear to me this week as I read a splendid book Oxford Life written in 1957 by Exeter College don Dacre Balsdon.

“Here,” he writes, “is the ugliest mark which the present century has so far left on Oxford architecture.” (Much uglier, including the Florey Building, had yet to come.) Balsdon writes of the inscription beneath the statue: “eLarga MVnIfICentIa/CaeCILII rhoDes.”

“A drunken stonecutter?” he asks, then supplies the answer.

“No, a donnish joke, such as earlier generations loved. You have a chronogram. Collect the M and the D and the Cs, the L, the V and the Is, and you have MDCCCLLVIIIIII – 1911, in fact, the date when this monster of a building was erected.”

Balsdon has a low opinion of another building associated with Rhodes, who was a member of Vincent’s Club and supplier, though his scholarships, of many more.

He calls Rhodes House of 1929 “surely the most extraordinary architectural monstrosity in Oxford: a bad joke in singularly good taste”.

He adds: “It might be called A Little Bit of Everything House. A classical front leads to a rotunda surmounted by a Zimbabwe, with Cotswold Manor attached.” Ouch!