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

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The name-dropping of some of these sources - like Sam Gyimah - is particularly jarring (Gyimah has, rightly, not been forgiven in many quarters for his crooked campaign against Emma Dent Coad). Similarly, making people like Theresa May, Michael Gove and Jacob Rees-Mogg the object of discussion without even mentioning the horrendous, often racist, policies they implemented, is a miserable and alienating experience. Kuper, Simon (16 June 2022). "Western Europe's cynicism about Ukrainian suffering". Financial Times . Retrieved 2 July 2023. He also misses the reasons for why non-Oxbridge Brits put up with this. Why is this system able to persist in the UK and not in others. Why do Brits gleefully send their kids to Boarding school? And why do they pay such attention to class and accent in the UK? Ultimately, Oxford is part of the broader issue. Would be interesting to get a fuller picture in a longer book. What does he think will happen to the class of public school educated folk that currently dominate the Tory party? “I think it’s possible that the Johnson, Cameron, Rees-Mogg generation will prove to be a last hurrah. But I think that class is very tenacious. Eton exists to educate the ruling class and if the ruling class has to do Stem degrees or have MBAs or the ruling class has to talk about diversity, they’ll produce boys who can do that.” Johnson’s candidacy suffered from his Toryism. Conservatives may have been the largest faction within the union, but they were a minority in the university as a whole. Most Oxford dons of the time were anti-Thatcher, too. Denying her an honorary degree in 1985 to protest her cuts to education and research was the university’s seminal political statement of the decade. “Why should we feed the hand that bites us?” asked one don.

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. 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. In truth,” writes Kuper, with an even-handedness surely acquired during his early schooling in the Netherlands, “almost everyone who gets into Oxford is a mixture of privilege and merit in varying proportions.” Though mostly privilege. At the start of the 21st century, private schools (which at the time educated about 7 per cent of the population) supplied around half of Oxford’s domestic student intake. Kuper quotes the former Labour minister Andrew Adonis: “The place felt like one huge public school to which a few others of us had been smuggled in by mistake.”Kuper's book Barça: The Rise and Fall of the Club that Built Modern Football appeared in 2021. It won the Sunday Times award for Football Book of the Year 2022. [29] I found the first half of the book a bit disappointing - mostly racy tales, out of school, about bad boys. Towards the end however, it really delivered powerful insights. As Kuper writes, the British Tory government has been - and is - run by a coterie of privileged individuals many of whom consider politics to be no more than good sport. For them political office promises a continuation of the inconsequential blah-blahs they had in debating societies while at Eton and, later, at Oxford University. It allows them to display their rhetorical skills while pretending to run a country. 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.

Rhetorically engaging, fantastically written, and well researched. This book has all the hot gossip from Oxford in the 1980s, exploring how that generation of graduates was shaped, and how they are now shaping Britain. Cherwell Magazine serves as the diary for the Tories who now dominate British politics, and the Oxford debating club as a kind of lyceum for our current era. It is here we see the making of modern Britain in the post-Thatcher era.P, Ullekh N. (1 December 2013). "2014 FIFA World Cup: Simon Kuper, football writer, lists teams to watch out for". The Economic Times. ISSN 0013-0389 . Retrieved 1 July 2023.

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." For cost savings, you can change your plan at any time online in the “Settings & Account” section. If you’d like to retain your premium access and save 20%, you can opt to pay annually at the end of the trial.Of course any English person with their finely tuned class antenna would know this instinctively. President Obama, would not be expected to, but with acute insight, he wrote in his memoirs on first meeting David Cameron, that he seemed to be a man at infinite ease with himself and the world around him as if disaster would not touch him. You talk of Anthony and Cleopatra in a detached manner, Mr Jones,” said the languid interviewer. “Tell me, would you die for love?” He is scathing of those habits of tutorial teaching at the university, which too frequently rewarded bluffing and charm over industry and doubt. Still, this is not, he insists, “a personal revenge on Oxford”. It’s rather “an attempt to write a group portrait of a set of Tory Brexiteers… who took an ancient route through Oxford to power”. This book is a wry look at the British ruling class and how, in many cases, their attendance at the University of Oxford facilitated their access to the levers of political power. On p. 3, Kuper notes that since the Second World War, no fewer than 11 out of 15 British Prime Ministers went to Oxford.

The union was a reason for politically inclined students, especially Tory public schoolboys, to choose Oxford over Cambridge. At Oxford, the union’s ceaseless debates and election campaigns kept the university buzzing with politics. The union elected a president, secretary, treasurer and librarian every eight-week term. The anthropologist Fiona Graham, in her 2005 book Playing at Politics: An Ethnography of the Oxford Union, described some students as “virtually professional politicians, complete with support staff and intricate election strategies and meetings”.In early 1983, as a diffident grammar school boy, I sat in a centuries old sitting room, beside a burbling open fire, enduring an interview for a place to study English at Oriel College, Oxford. I was muttering something about Shakespeare. 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.”