We are assured by officials at Oxford’s Linacre College that heaps of due diligence mean it’s fine for this proudly sustainable establishment to rename itself, in exchange for £155m, after a Russian-educated Vietnamese airline billionaire, Nguyen Thi Phuong Thao. The Department for Education is now similarly satisfied.
But still, you can’t help wondering: did anyone Google “bikini airline”, as this donor’s Vietjet is widely known, and somehow miss the contribution of girly calendars and mid-air burlesque to its fortunes? “We don’t mind people associating the airline with the bikini image,” Thao has said. “If that makes people happy, then we are happy.”
