Only three things in life are certain: death, taxes, and Malia Bouattia-related controversies. This time it is a Select Committee report that has castigated her record on anti-Semitism, in response to which student leaders have called upon her to issue a formal apology for her remarks about Zionism, or resign.

But Bouattia, we may assume, is going nowhere: partly because she still has the support of many other student leaders, but mostly because the almost 2.3 million students  at universities in the UK are almost entirely indifferent to the whole affair.

Of course, passionate cases in favour of and against Bouattia have been made by Jewish students and by fervent admirers of the NUS president. But the fact remains that the majority of those students who do not feel either ideologically devoted to or physically threatened by Bouattia’s comments regard the dispute as a remote struggle unrelated to their own interests, conducted by people they have never heard of.

Last time an NUS president was forced to resign in 2011, he was facing widespread discontent among students for his perceived failure to resist tuition fee rises. Without similar popular pressure, Bouattia’s position will be not be threatened

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