Some weeks ago, a woman in London sent a round-robin e-mail about helping a friend of hers get a job. This friend was, our protagonist suspected, in money difficulties; she was in direct competition with a brash, rich, and “creepy” foreigner, probably lacking in professional commitment. Everyone rallied round and talked to the right people and the nice woman indeed got the job – a heartwarming tale for hard times, perhaps.

The rescued princess was Ruth Padel, just installed as Oxford Professor of Poetry, and the company of urban knights rejoiced in repulsing the old dragon of St Lucia, Derek Walcott. There can be no doubt that the Padel cavalry understood the full nobility of their cause and their actions. Their damsel, our original storyteller pointed out, was “involved and giving”. Exactly how involved she was was to become a more important question as the campaign progressed, but for the moment let that pass. In contrast Mr. Walcott was to slither all the way from New York like Satan bearing down on Paradise, to “pop over for his 3 lecture obligations and a bit of sexual harrassment”. Before the uneuphoniously titled “Lecherous Professor” pamphlets had been employed to their full potential, before John Walsh even bothered to flag up a little fun in The Independent, the Padel partigiani were already less concerned about the link between poetry and science than that between mud and adhesion. The narrative was being casually, almost prematurely characterised, the sword whetted by the hands that dispatched the “Back Padel” garden party invitations.

"The Padel partigiani were already less concerned about the link between poetry and science than that between mud and adhesion."

“Have another look at her nominators,” a hunted looking egghead muttered the morning after the election as he scrabbled about my kitchen in vain quest of palliatives. “Leaves a taste in the mouth. I did in fact vote for her, but… the names should ring a bell.”

I don’t think he was in this instance referring to Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell of Mansfield, or any particular Padel supporter, but instead to a rather glamorous intimacy that united the Padel party. There was the creator of www.padelforpoetry.org, the astrophysicist Pedro Ferreira, whom our initial correspondent thought was “handsome and charming”. There were Melvyn Bragg and Roy Foster, who recently co-chaired a jolly radio discussion on Yeats. Intellects ranged from the indomitable philosopher AC Grayling to the Guardian arts writer Charlotte Higgins, whose slim work Latin Love Lessons is rather more at my level; but both are adornments of the city circuit. The prolific novelist Angie Huth, who preferred roadtrips to university at the relevant period and so lacked a vote herself, seems to have cajoled one from her distinguished Byzantinist husband. Alice Oswald fluttered in with Carol Ann’s laureate blessing; and two gentlemen of the press sparkled amidst the W section, Geoffrey Wheatcroft and John Walsh.

“I used to know John ten years ago, and now we meet once a year at parties”, our new Professor said of the latter, an Exeter alumnus. She must be causing us, her new pupils, some degree of envy, whether in terms of social life or sex appeal – it is less Sappho, and more Cleopatra, for a fifty-year old to inspire enough fin d’amour in her swains that they take the train from Paddington to draw their swords for her in an academic election a decade later. Mr. Walsh, in particular, infamously did not content himself with the sword of nomination and voting, but got out a hatchet too, and it was his carvings that first reblazoned the old story of Derek Walcott’s susceptibility to the flesh, in The Independent. Walsh’s own progeny must have marvelled at their father’s gall in fastening down Walcott on sex, for in that golden time ten years ago he left their mother for, who but Sappho, who but Ruth. It is a situation that recalls Sandy Stranger’s advice in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie: “You’ll never get her on sex. Best try politics.” Less tasteful than the headmistress of the Marcia Blaine School, Edinburgh, Walsh galloped after the sex angle and let hypocrisy go hang: “I think it's the implication that a teacher's ‘personal and intense’ involvement in his students' lives (and possibly beds) will make them better poets that I find most creepy.”

In itself this is doubtless a reasonable proposition, if it sounds odd from the Adonis who inspired Padel’s The Soho Leopard and Home Cooking (featuring a languishing rhyme on “duck” and “f***”). Its argument comes gracefully down when the rake Walcott’s teaching technique is compared with his fair conqueress’s. One of Padel’s most notable pupils, Edward Fitzgerald QC, defender of Myra Hindley, as an undergraduate was granted a more heartening insight into the feminine psyche by his classical tutor. This certainly cannot be construed, in the same way as the Walcott allegation, as either academic blackmail or molestation. But it still nails Walsh’s own definition of “creepiness” with precision.

Inconveniently, the 2009 Professorship of Poetry election was a tale of two Walshes. The sender of the “mystery dossier”, the six pages of the Lecherous Professor that concerned Derek Walcott and Miss Nicole Niemi, had their mystery threatened at once by swift-flying speculation. Many media sources thought of John Walsh’s role in highlighting the scandal, and pencilled him in as the dispatcher of the goods to 100 academics as well. This was the least adventurous theory – some hacking has gone on here; was it perhaps a hack? The wildest report impugned Dr. Sally Mapstone, the convenor of the election’s decisive board, whose impartiality was apparently impeccable, and obviously crucial to the whole election process. A candidate for Walcott’s fatal “character assassination” who lay for some time unnoticed was the second Walsh, Patrick (no relation as far as I can gather), Padel’s own agent.

Despite the Professor’s inaugural self-description, gleaming in Brontean cadence, “I have now unjustly, not by my own doing, been tainted”, her auxiliary’s direct involvement now seems hard to gainsay. It explains the early currency of the John Walsh rumour. Why, after all, would a jobbing journalist, a confector of a casual snipe on behalf of an “old pal”, be so obsessive as to distribute one hundred copies of a dossier across a university city? It is much more likely that at some stage Patrick Walsh’s involvement was half-discovered, but its finder thought of the Exeter nominator and the Indy article and garbled it to John. Depressingly, only Padel’s functionary, whatever she may say, would have the drive to carry out such an act of professional dedication. Even more depressingly, even if the professorship is to be rescinded tomorrow, the ruse will have worked. Padel and her agent, Mr. Walsh the younger, will prosper either way as she sells more poetry than she could ever once have envisaged. This scenario admittedly requires Padel to have uttered several extraordinarily bland untruths. But her “not in my name”, “not by my own doing” declaration already looks irremediably shaky, as she has now been caught out e-mailing two separate journalists chapter and verse, page number and website, of all the Walcott juice she knew about. She framed this formulation with queenly distance, couching it between “some of my supporters…I don’t think that is fair…”.

Ruth Padel now has exponentially fewer supporters to use as shelter, which seems fair enough to me. Of the glam London gang I cited above, Melvyn Bragg and AC Grayling each competed to withdraw their support of Padel in a more noisily pompous fashion than the other. Oswyn Murray of Balliol College had called Padel’s Darwin verse-ramble “the most important modern poem since the Waste Land”. Finally conscious of how silly his defining post-retirement activity, padelophilia, had made him look, Oswyn muttered a good deal of equivocal sentences to the press, regretfully relishing the last time they would cite his name in earnestness. Charlotte Higgins of The Guardian, one of the grooviest of the Ruth Register, is now filing copy on Padel’s likely impending resignation. It’s not personal, just business, as Patrick Walsh will probably say to Derek Walcott if he ever has the bad luck to run across the Nobel laureate on a warm New York evening.

The fairy tale seems to have become Grimm’s, cautionary rather than exemplary, a warning shot, not a victory salute, to the deserving poet laureate Carol Ann Duffy, to all the sisterhood. A woman standing for election against a man is neither by necessity Christina Rossetti, nor Lady Macbeth. But poetry is a kingdom of passionate intensity, and neither extreme should be ruled out.

Talking of poetry, the conscientious reader may notice I’ve fought shy of mentioning our Professor’s much. I didn’t want to be harsh. After all, “Ruth has frightful money worries”.