One purpose of the residential conference of the Committee of Vice Chancellors and Principals is to aid communication between vice chancellors and officials. But it proved the opposite for chief executive Diana Warwick, whose ability to communicate was halted by a combination of voice loss and isolation from the e-mail facility at her London office.
Even so, Ms Warwick showed that she was perfectly capable of communicating her views in extremis.
She saved the CVCP from a spectacular publicity own-goal by intervening when an over-zealous security guard decided that National Union of Students' president Doug Trainer's open-necked pink shirt contravened a dress code and attempted to exclude him from the session addressed by CVCP chairman Gareth Roberts.