A Vietnamese airline tycoon has paid £155m to rename an Oxford college

What a strange world we live in. One minute it's studious business as usual at Oxford University's Linacre College, named after humanist and physician Thomas Linacre (1460-1524), who was personal doctor to Henry VIII and whose pupils included Erasmus and Sir Thomas More.

The next, it's all change.

For this week it was announced that the name carved in stone at the entrance to 'one of the greenest colleges in Oxford' is to be changed to Thao College in honour of a Vietnamese billionaire who founded the budget airline VietJet Air and has been fined several times for perking up her flights with semi-naked stewardesses.

She recently offered Linacre £155 million, one of the largest donations ever to an Oxford college.

Nguyen Thi Phuong Thao, known as Madam Thao, is a mother of two with a self-made Vietnamese fortune.

She is president of the Sovico Group, which has interests including offshore oil, gas exploration and fossil fuel financing. Not forgetting VietJet Air, also known as Bikini Airlines thanks to Madam Thao's enthusiasm for scantily clad beauties in the aisles.

Sometimes they wear swimsuits. On other occasions they sport red and yellow two-pieces and red lacy stockings. They even pop up beaming in their swimmers in the company calendar.

With all of which Madam Thao is completely comfortable.

'You have the right to wear anything you like, either the bikini or the traditional ao dai,' she has said, referring to the modest Vietnamese long tunic that is worn over trousers. 

'We don't mind people associating the airline with the bikini image. If that makes people happy, then we are happy.'

While the in-air swimwear policy has perked up excitable passengers and, in barely a decade, helped to turn start-up VietJet into a competitor with the national airline, it has caused a stir among both business commentators and feminists, who can't quite believe this is happening in the 21st century.

I'm not sure even Sir Richard Branson would have dared, back in the day.

Lord knows what Linacre College's 550 postgraduate students will make of it. This, after all, is a university where 'cancel culture' is rampant and where students at Magdalen College voted this summer to remove a portrait of the Queen from their common room because of her 'links to colonialisation'. Are they really going to embrace Bikini Airlines?

But who on earth is this tiny (barely 5ft tall) self-made tycoon who juggles parenthood with top-flight business and is always exquisitely presented but doesn't give a fig about semi-nudity?

Nguyen Thi Phuong Thao, was born in 1970 to a teacher and a pharmacist in Hanoi, Vietnam. 

She says 'a happy, calm childhood, surrounded by relatives' equipped her with the life skills she needed: 'To have a sense of sacrifice and care, being meticulous, graceful and generous, and giving without asking.'

Soon after moving to Moscow to study for a degree in finance and economics at the Plekhanov Russian University of Economics, she started trading in fax machines and latex rubber on the

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