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

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It helped me understand the way debates are conducted in the Commons and why outrageous lying (even to Parliament with regard to numerous violations of Covid rules) apparently does not kill political careers.

Chums: Simon Kuper’s hit 80s Oxford book gets picked up by TV Chums: Simon Kuper’s hit 80s Oxford book gets picked up by TV

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. He recalls: “Boris Mark 1 was a very conventional Tory, clearly on the right, and had what I would term an Old Etonian entitlement view: ‘I should get the top job because I’m standing for the top job.’ He didn’t have a good sense of what he was going to do with it.” Zoekresultaten voor simon kuper | Zoeken | Het Financieele Dagblad". fd.nl . Retrieved 10 July 2023. TheBookOfPhobiaaAndManias traces the rich and thought-provoking history in which our fixations have taken shape. I don’t know what I expected about a book called Chums, focused on the British political elite, their time at Oxbridge, and a look into how the establishment cemented - and continues to influence - the governmental structure we see today.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] But I don’t think that makes the difference, and the difference is being made by Oxford or Cambridge admissions, to change radically. The parents of kids whose children have gone through the private school system must be thinking they worsened their child’s chances of getting into Oxford, because Oxbridge now has these complex algorithms and targets for state school entries. Although Oxbridge is obviously still not fully reflective of UK demographics, it has improved a lot in the last five years, much more than I ever expected, since 2017. And now, it’s about just over 30% private school. This is way higher than the portion of the population that goes to private school, not much higher however than the population of sixth formers at private schools. It’s the lowest in Oxford and Cambridge history. 10 years ago if you were paying for Eton or St Pauls, you were paying for Eton plus Oxford, where that is no longer the case. Full List of Kennedy Scholars - Kennedy Memorial Trust". www.kennedytrust.org.uk . Retrieved 2 July 2023. In this Venn Diagram of private education crossing Oxford post graduate degree we have the Oxford Tories whose power an influence only has seemed to grown in the last decade. Their policies and concerns such as Brexit and Austerity has shaped the UK as it stands in 2023 and if it is to be their legacy it is a damning one.

Chums: How a Tiny Caste of Oxford - HEPI Book Review of Chums: How a Tiny Caste of Oxford - HEPI

King of all he surveyed': Boris Johnson as President of the Oxford Union with the Greek minister for culture Melina Mercouri Simon Kuper is a Journalist and Author, most notably as a sports columnist for the Financial Times. He has written extensively on class and meritocracy in British society. His infamous book ‘Chums’ was published in 2022 and detailed the Oxford of the ‘80s through a group of Tories who were shaped by their experiences in the Oxford Union.

Kuper, Simon. "Becoming French is like winning the lottery". Archived from the original on 11 December 2022 . Retrieved 6 August 2022.

Power, Privilege, Parties: the shaping of modern Britain

It was Stone who personally nurtured Cummings’s public schoolboy anarchy and who persuaded him to head to Russia after his degree to get a feel for the post-cold war world. Robertson, meanwhile, partly inspired by the historian’s abhorrence of the EU, left Oxford after his second year to devote himself to the Bruges Group of Eurosceptics that he set up while at the university. (Robertson, Kuper points out, now lives in St Moritz, where he runs the public relations firm WorldPR, responsible for the post-Brexit “global Britain” campaign. He is also Kazakhstan’s honorary consul to the Bahamas.)

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I don't want to put in any spoilers but Kuper quietly builds up a case to show the generation of Oxford Tories, were shaped by the empty debating rhetoric of the Oxford Union and the facile skills that PPE degrees inculcated into them (basically to acquire the sheen of knowing the surface detail of many things but nothing of substance). These forces created the empty and spineless political class so typical of Cameron, Johns Deng, Yii-Jeng (21 May 2022). "Book Review: Chums by Simon Kuper". The Oxford Student (Oxford's University's Student Newspaper). Kuper has twice been awarded the British Society of Magazine Editors' prize for Columnist of the Year, in 2016 [3] and 2020. [4] Books [ edit ] His main argument is that Brexit wouldn’t have happened without the nostalgic, guardians-of-Empire viewpoint of “the Oxocracy”. The trouble is, this short book is exactly the sort of lazy, provocative essay that he criticises as being at the heart of Oxford thinking. No one else but an Oxford grad could have tried to write a serious book based on a handful or written sources, a docu-drama, some personal reflections, and chats with people he already knew.

Brexit, a conspiracy hatched by public schoolboys in 1980s

They aren't just colleagues - they are peers, rivals, friends. And, when they walked out of the world of student debates onto the national stage, they brought their university politics with them.Kuper, Simon (22 September 2022). "Populism isn't over. It's getting an upgrade". Financial Times . Retrieved 2 July 2023. In the 1980s, Kuper explains, both the Oxford tutorial system and the debating style of the Tory-dominated Oxford Union favoured charm, fluency and wit over a grasp of facts and figures. Americans attending the Oxford Union made the mistake of thinking the latter mattered, he says. “They’d say, ‘97 per cent of’ or ‘there are 420,000 who...’ If you did that at the Union, it was ‘boring’ and ‘boring’ is a core upper-class insult word…Johnson is really the epitome of this. You went down better when you do a comedic performance.” Kuper, Simon (18 September 2019). "How Oxford University shaped Brexit — and Britain's next prime minister". Financial Times . Retrieved 1 July 2023. Anthony Gardner, another American contemporary of Johnson’s, later US ambassador to the EU, was less impressed: “Boris was an accomplished performer in the Oxford Union where a premium was placed on rapier wit rather than any fidelity to the facts. It was a perfect training ground for those planning to be professional amateurs. I recall how many poor American students were skewered during debates when they rather ploddingly read out statistics; albeit accurate and often relevant in their argumentation, they would be jeered by the crowds with cries of ‘boring’ or ‘facts’!”