Chums: How a Tiny Caste of Oxford Tories Took Over the UK

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You talk of Anthony and Cleopatra in a detached manner, Mr Jones,” said the languid interviewer. “Tell me, would you die for love?” Boris Johnson, Michael Gove, David Cameron, George Osborne, Theresa May, Dominic Cummings, Daniel Hannan, Jacob Rees-Mogg: Oxford has produced most of the prominent Conservative politicians of our time. The university newspapers of thirty years ago are full of recognisable names in news stories, photos of social events, and Bullingdon Club reports. Many walked straight out of the world of student debates onto the national stage. Unfortunately, they brought their university politics with them. A searing onslaught on the smirking Oxford insinuation that politics is all just a game. It isn't. It matters' Matthew Parris

After all, “If your life passage has taken you from medieval rural home to medieval boarding school to medieval Oxford college, and finally to medieval parliament, you inevitably end up thinking: ‘What could possibly go wrong?’ If Brexit didn’t work out, the Oxford Tories could always just set up new investment vehicles inside the EU, like Rees-Mogg, or apply for European passports, like Stanley Johnson.” The sway Oxford has had and continues to have over the UK and beyond is grim as it is depressing. I think one of Kuper’s main advantages is that he is both an insider and outsider, an insider as he studied there for four years, and an outsider because he isn’t English and is a foreigner. So he gets both fresh perspective and first-hand experience, which brings an element of balance. Cameron, like many of his colleagues, had honed his public speaking and debating skills in the Oxford Union, of which Boris Johnson was once president. At university, the latter “turned self-parody into a form of self-promotion… [He] merged three archetypes from British popular culture: Brideshead, Wooster and the boarding-school bounder. The bounder is the rogue of his school, who doesn’t do his ‘prep’, smokes behind the rugger field, breaks bounds, romances girls and is always getting into ‘scrapes’. In adulthood, bounders traditionally end up hiding from their creditors in Australia.” In Chums, Simon Kuper reminds us that a lot of Brexiteers – Boris Johnson, Dominic Cummings, Jacob Rees-Mogg and Michael Gove – entered Elysium at a golden moment, the mid-1980s; the pinnacle of Thatcherism, the age of Brideshead on TV. Being silly was serious business. They carried their Arcadian personalities and politics into the rest of their lives – and Kuper, a fellow alumnus, loathes them for it. Thirteen of the seventeen postwar British prime ministers went to Oxford University. In Chums, Simon Kuper traces how the rarefied and privileged atmosphere of this narrowest of talent pools - and the friendships and worldviews it created - shaped modern Britain.

Just makes one wonder: if they spoke with different accents, weren’t affluent, weren’t Nth in a line of family members to have attended the same place – and especially if they were of different ethnicity – would that have ever gone on to where they all are today? He believes that those men returned from war with some sense of responsibility for the other classes who fought alongside them. In Chums, he calls Johnson, Rees Mogg, Cameron et al as a “generation without tragedy”. “These were people who’d experienced nothing. They’ve experienced journalism.” This review was written by Daniel Dipper. Daniel is going into his third year of studying History and Politics at Magdalen College, University ofOxford, and is the current Oxford Union Librarian as well as Magdalen’s undergraduate president. Daniel was educated in a state comprehensive school and is the first in his immediate family to go to university.

Allied candidates organised themselves into “slates”, the union version of parties but with the ideology usually left out. The slates were illegal, semi-secret, mostly hidden from the electorate, and essential to the whole enterprise. Entirely against the rules, candidates would campaign for their slates: “Vote for me as treasurer, for him as secretary and for her as president.” In other words, cheating was built into the system. I wanted to hate Kuper for how much he placed Oxford on a pedestal. Yet I understand why he does and rather begrudgingly, I fear I agree. This isn’t to say that the majority of students are linked to the corrupt assembly line that our country is built on - if anything, the book highlights how even large populations of the students are just as ‘outside’ as the rest of us peasants.a b Kuper, Simon (19 April 2022). " 'A nursery of the Commons': how the Oxford Union created today's ruling political class". The Guardian. ISSN 0261-3077 . Retrieved 2 July 2023. He went up to Oxford in 1983 as a vessel of focused ambition. Ironic about everything else, he was serious about himself. Within his peer group of public schoolboys, he felt like a poor man in a hurry. He started university with three aims, writes Sonia Purnell in Just Boris: A Tale of Blond Ambition: to get a first-class degree, to find a wife (his parents met at Oxford), and to become union president. At university he was always “thinking two decades ahead”, says his Oxford friend Lloyd Evans. A really interesting book review: thanks. I wonder how much of “Chums” relates to the popular (sic) representations of the Bullingdon Club and its members’ antics!?

Kuper, one senses, finds this millieu troublingly homoerotic. He uses the word “camp” to describe their style at least three times. The union’s debating rules were modelled on those of the Commons. Opposing speakers sat facing each other in adversarial formation, and there was the same “telling” of ayes and noes. But unlike the Commons, the union had no real power. Almost the only thing the union president could actually do was stage debates. Naturally, then, it encouraged a focus on rhetoric over policy. The institution perfected the articulacy that enabled aspiring politicians, barristers and columnists to argue any case, whether they believed it or not. In the union, a speaker might prepare one side of a debate, and then on the day suddenly have to switch to the other side to replace an opponent who had dropped out. I suspect it was this rhetorical tradition that prompted Louis MacNeice to write, in 1939: Excellent insight into the British governments over the last three decades; how they came to power (nepotism), how they stayed in power (nepotism) and how they made a complete mess of things (ill equipped to manage a school fete). In 2003 he published his book Ajax, The Dutch, the War: Football in Europe during the Second World War. He co-authored the 2009 book Soccernomics with Stefan Szymanski. The authors subsequently put forward a formula allowing Kuper to predict that Serbia and Brazil would play the 2010 FIFA World Cup Final. [27] To be in with a chance of winning a copy of Emma Dabiri’s new book along with this stunning pastel nail polish giftset from Télle Moi, simply…I’m afraid I didn’t qualify to go to Oxford – I was far too clever and insufficiently charming – but from those who did, the impression emerges that it was either milk and honey or a brutal injustice. Simon Kuper’s book Chums tells the story of how one university taught the core of today’s Brexit government how to achieve power – but not how to use it.