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

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Isn’t it funny how so many of those obsessed with power and wealth, and who will do or say almost anything to keep it, inevitably wash down into the dark sewer of politics. Politics like sales, law, finance et al, has always been a perennial haven for all sorts of undesirables. It over rewards some of the darkest and damaging traits of human behaviour, such as lying, stealing, cheating, bullying and greed and yet whilst engaging in these habits you actually get held in tremendously high-esteem and become almost immune to the laws of the land. Kuper’s unique approach to sports writing, particularly on football, has earned him several prestigious accolades, including the 1994 William Hill Sports Book of the Year. He writes about sports "from an anthropological perspective." [6] Time Magazine has called him “one of the world’s leading writers on soccer” [7] and The Economic Times labeled him “one of the world's most famous football writers.” [8] Hannan, among Kuper’s key witnesses here, had grown up in Peru, where his family had a poultry farm. After the collapse of communism, he sniffed – along with Stone – a new “enemy of liberty” in European bureaucracy and found an early acolyte in his absurd Oxford contemporary Jacob Rees-Mogg. On graduating, Hannan persuaded some marginal rightwing MPs to pay him a salary as sole employee of the European Research Group; two decades later he was persuading Johnson to head the leave campaign. And so, as Kuper writes, once again “the timeless paradise of Oxford inspired its inhabitants to produce timeless fantasies like Alice in Wonderland, The Hobbit, Narnia, and, incubating from the late 1980s, Brexit”. This is an edited extract from Chums: How a Tiny Caste of Oxford Tories Took Over the UK by Simon Kuper, published by Profile on 28 April. Kuper, Simon (22 September 2022). "Populism isn't over. It's getting an upgrade". Financial Times . Retrieved 2 July 2023.

Kuper joined the Financial Times in 1994. He wrote the daily currencies column and worked in other departments, before leaving the FT in 1998. He returned in 2002 as a sports columnist and has worked there ever since. Nowadays he writes a general column for the Weekend FT on all manner of topics from politics [10] to books, and on cities including London, Paris, Johannesburg and Miami. [11] Kuper has also written for The Times and The Observer, [5] ESPN, [12] and The Spectator. [13] Johnson’s gift turned out to be for winning office, not doing anything with it. He didn’t make much of his presidency, recalls Tim Hames, a union politician of the time: “The thing was a shambles. He couldn’t organise a term card to save his life. He didn’t have the sort of support mechanism that he realised in later life that he required.” Discover the fascinating history of the humble notebook, from the bustling markets of medieval Florence to the quiet studies of our greatest thinkers. This is the perfect read for stationery fans and history buffs alike! Kuper, one senses, finds this millieu troublingly homoerotic. He uses the word “camp” to describe their style at least three times. However, despite the fun I had reading it, I would be falling into my own ideological biases if I didn't mention the sloppiness of Kuper's reasoning. The author seems to believe in a kind of Great Man Theory of History, wherein chaps from the elite think Great Thoughts, and then put those thoughts into actions, shaping world history as if there were no concrete social relations that they inhabited. Whether you agreed with the Brexit referendum or not, the fact that a populace had to be persuaded to either side cannot be ignored, but Kuper seems to think that isn't the case.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. 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. He has also contributed for many years to the FT's Weekend Magazine, as a Life & Arts columnist, [24] often with long-form essays and interviews spanning themes such as current affairs, travel, history and politics. 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’!” And that’s the overriding feeling of Chums - of people who have led protected lives, bringing about very painful and real consequences through their carelessness.

Oxford Union politics was a jolly game to them and they with their wealth and influence were always shielded from the consequences of what the did. This was the atmosphere into which Etonian Boris Johnson arrived at Oxford in 1983, the same year I was there for my interview. After getting accepted, Johnson and others like him spent their university years honing peculiarly British political skills, which involved treating politics as a game. The Oxford Union debating society is set up like the House of Commons chamber, though Union debates never result in real policies with real consequences. When not fantasy debating, the youngsters would have fun trying to get themselves elected to the few administrative positions on offer at the Union. 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." This reminds us that there is little which is healthy or natural about boarding school either. It is a cold, pathogenic system which has little room for love, compassion or sensitivity. When you compare the pupils from such a system with those from grammar or state school, you see that normal education would see pupils maybe spend up to eight hours a day with peers, whereas public school boys are around each other closer to 24/7. So in essence over a period of many years most pupils are shaped chiefly by family, but those who went to such boarding houses, are defined by private school and all that it stands for.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.”