Leading don attacks 'toff image' of Oxford and Cambridge Nick Clegg warned that top institutions had a duty to ensure "British society is better reflected" in their admissions to justify state funding. But Prof Lethbridge insisted Oxford and Cambridge could not "try any harder to reach out to applicants to every background in this country and every kind of school." Speaking to The Daily Telegraph, he said: "I think we need to constantly stress that, at the very top of our education system, we are utterly meritocratic. We need to counter the self-deprecatory dimension of Englishness and we need to no longer retail the Brideshead Revisited, toff image of Oxford and Cambridge which some uninformed people find as a lazy target. The comments were made in an interview to mark a vital milestone for the Gates Cambridge Trust - a £210m scholarship established at Cambridge for international students by Bill Gates, the Microsoft founder. More than 1,000 top postgraduate students from 94 countries have been recruited on to the programme since 2011, completing research in a range of academic disciplines. This month sees the 10th anniversary of the first graduations. Prof Lethbridge said the programme attracted around 4,000 applications for 90 places each year. He said that students from other countries were desperate to strive for Cambridge but feared that some bright school-leavers from Britain were being held back. "I suspect again that it is a problem of image, perception and prejudice and also a mindset which doesn't want anyone to fail," he said. Prof Lethbridge said political parties had a "particular prevalence for choosing statistics which suggest social immobility and inherited privilege" at Oxbridge but insisted that "every politician's statement on this subject over the last 10 years has been shown to be factually incorrect." He added: "We find it polemically interesting to retail the idiosyncratic dimensions of what our top universities are about. It is the country house, aristocratic image of the 19th century. When students come to Cambridge, they are absolutely astonished that it bears no resemblance to what they saw on TV and we have got to change that image.