Union members were heartbroken to learn that Charlie Kirk, a highlight of the society’s Michaelmas termcard, would not be attending last night’s (15/11) speaker event, following a disappointing showing for Republicans in the US midterm elections.

“I was literally supposed to be on a plane to Cambridge right now to give their keynote address in the term card and I just said ‘America First’, literally and figuratively,” declared the conservative activist, speaking on his podcast, ‘The Charlie Kirk Show’, after cancelling his event at the Cambridge Union.

The activist’s self-proclaimed “keynote address in the term card,” scheduled for Tuesday evening, would have been one of eighteen speaker events at the Union this term.

Kirk is the director of Turning Point USA, a conservative activist group, and of Students for Trump. He has made a number of highly controversial statements in the past, most notably when he called murdered African-American George Floyd a “scumbag”.

During the pandemic, Kirk spread misinformation about Covid-19, or, in his words, the “China virus”. He declared that “the science around masks is very questionable”, suggested that the introduction of social distancing in churches was a “Democratic plot against Christianity”, and described Joe Biden’s attempts to get more students to be vaccinated as an “apartheid-style, open-air hostage situation”.

Kirk also publicised false allegations of voter fraud following Donald Trump’s 2020 election defeat, and relegated Russia’s invasion of Ukraine to a mere “border dispute”.

Moreover, last year, he suggested that human actions have not contributed to global warming, despite overwhelming scientific evidence that they have.

For egos on the Union committee, however, Kirk’s most upsetting comment will be his revelation that, although he was cancelling the Cambridge leg of his Europe tour, he might still make it to Oxford.

Speaking on his podcast, just before announcing that he wouldn’t be gracing the Cambridge Union with his presence, he stated that there “is a chance I might still go do the Oxford thing”, although he added the qualification: “probably not”.

Kirk is scheduled to take place in a debate at The Other Place on Thursday 17 November, on the motion: ‘This house believes woke culture has gone too far’.

No prizes for guessing which side Kirk has agreed to speak on.