12 saturday review Saturday April 30 2022 | the times
A-levels. This early
life allows him —
with some justifica-
tion, but perhaps
not as much as he
thinks — to dis-
tance himself from
his targets.
On Oxford’s
public schoolboys
he is particularly
damning, writing
that Johnson and the like “didn’t spend
university trying on new accents and per-
sonas; they already knew what they
wanted to be when they grew up. They
were climbing the greasy pole before most
students had even located it.”
This they did at the Oxford Union, a
debating society that valued wit, flair and
rhetoric over facts. Here they would rub
shoulders with visiting politicians who had
once stood in their little shoes and thus
came to believe that their destiny was to fill
these bigger ones.
Frivolity and entitlement were, of
course, nothing new. The difference was
that people used to grow out of it. Harold
Macmillan had been a star of the Oxford
Union too, but after graduation fought in
the First World War, at one point lying in
a shell hole for 12 hours. Seven former
Union presidents would die in that war,
including three of the four who held office
in 1912 and 1913. As George Orwell put it:
“Bertie Wooster, if he ever existed, was
killed round about 1915.” A generation
later Edward Heath would head the Union
and go on to land at Normandy.
Kuper writes about the shock of Ameri-
cans, such as the Rhodes scholar Bill Clin-
ton, at the essential silliness of Oxford life
in the 1960s. He also shares his own linger-oxford blues Boris
Johnson at a university
dance in 1985. Above:
Jacob Rees-Mogg at the
Union Society in 1991
with Kenneth Clarke and
John Patten looking onbooks
Loathe Brexit?
Blame the
Oxford chums
This forceful polemic
argues that a small
group of Tory
university friends
have hijacked Britain,
says Hugo Rifkind
A
couple of months ago a maga-
zine in New York published an
almost impenetrably hipster-
ish article about what the writ-
er called a looming “vibe shift”.
The idea seemed to be that, at some point
just around the corner, all trend-following
people would suddenly switch from think-
ing currently cool things are cool to think-
ing completely different things are cool.
Turning on a dime.
Reading Simon Kuper’s gripping Chums
I found myself wondering if one of those
happened in Britain in the early 1990s.
“When I arrived at Oxford aged 18 in
1988,” he writes, “it was still a very British
and quite amateurish university, shot
through with sexual harassment, dilet-
tantism and sherry.” Whereas when I went
to a very similar university, only seven
years later, I’m pretty sure I found a place
shot through with Britpop, clubbing and
beery lad culture. I don’t think I drank
sherry once. Vibe shift? Or was everybody
at Oxford just a total tosser?
Chums, a polemic about How a Tiny
Caste of Oxford Tories Took Over the UK,
takes as its setting the late 1980s. The
upper classes floated through Oxford as
objects of fascination rather than derision,
the Oxford University Conservative Asso-
ciation advertised itself under the slogan
“Be a socialite not a socialist” and those
who were not posh often tried very, very
hard to pretend that they were.
It is a fascinating book even if its thesis
is perhaps half banal and half overextend-
ed. Basically, it is that most senior people in
public life are Oxford graduates who have
known each other since they were all
studying together (that’s the banal bit) and
that this led to Brexit. About which, after
finishing this book, I thought: “Maybe.”
Perhaps we’re just inured to it. The fact
that only one of the 15 prime ministers
since the war went to a university other
than Oxford (Gordon Brown, who went to
Edinburgh, although Winston Churchill,
James Callaghan and John Major didn’t do
higher education) is, I suppose, remark-
able, but it gets drowned out by the way so
many bloody other people went to Oxford
too. It was indeed true of prominent
Conservative Brexiters (Boris Johnson,
Michael Gove, Daniel Hannan, Dominic
Cummings, Jacob Rees-Mogg), but also of
most other prominent Conservatives. In
the party’s leadership election of 2019,
seven of the ten candidates had been at
Oxford (Johnson, Gove, Dom-
inic Raab, Jeremy Hunt,
Matt Hancock, Mark
Harper and Rory Stewart).
Labour isn’t all that dif-
ferent. Tony Blair was
there, David Miliband was
there, Ed Balls was there.
And let’s not get started on
the media in case I lose all
my most important friends
and never work again. In-
deed, at one stage Kuper
points out that, while some
of these people were grub-
bing for power in the Ox-
ford Union, “their machina-
tions for power were
mocked in the Oxford satir-
ical magazine Passing Wind,
edited by the undergraduate
Ian Hislop”. It made me
think of the Rolling Stone journalist Matt
Taibbi’s attempt to explain the reach of
Goldman Sachs, which he concluded was
“an absurd and pointless exercise, like try-
ing to make a list of everything”.
All of these people, at any rate, feature in
the first half of Kuper’s thesis, but only
some fit into the second. The status of
Cameron is awkward in this respect
because you might think his formative ex-
periences virtually indistinguishable from
those of Johnson, right up until he took the
opposite Brexit view. Kuper, though, ab-
sents Cameron from the Oxford Brexit
mafia for two reasons: first, because he
avoided student politics (“I hardly took
part,” he once said); and second, because
he was already embedded in an Eton mafia
instead. This defined him far more, putting
fellow Etonians such as Ed Llewellyn,
Oliver Letwin and Jo Johnson into his
inner circle. “It’s not simply that Cameron
felt comfortable with Etonians, it’s also
that he felt uncomfortable with most other
Britons,” Kuper writes savagely.
Kuper does a nice line in this sort of
thing; his prose will be ticking along quite
amiably, then all of a sudden some toff is on
the floor with a knife in his back. A writer
for the Financial Times, he grew up in the
Netherlands before arriving in Britain forBook of the week
Chums
How a Tiny Caste
of Oxford Tories
Took Over the UK
by Simon Kuper,Profile, 240pp; £16.99ing shock that few of his peers seemed all
that interested when the Berlin Wall came
down. For him, though, the Cameron/
Johnson generation epitomises the climax
of “British unseriousness”. Or, as he puts it,
unsheathing that knife again: “Bertie
Wooster came back from the dead.”
Some of the Berties, though, wanted to
be more than Berties. Kuper sees in the
Oxford Tories the “shame of late birth”. He
quotes the writer Rosa Ehrenreich, a
Harvard graduate who arrived in Oxford
in 1991 and said of the generation she
found that “they were born to a poor
island, still rigidly conscious of the glorious
past, and told to adjust to the unglorious
present and the grey future represented by
Prime Minister John Major”. It was this
that gave them that Brideshead and Bull-
ingdon streak; a nostalgic longing for a
status ebbing away.
This seems unarguably true to me, but
Kuper goes further. He also — with
brilliant disdain — detects in their nascent
Euroscepticism “a jobs-protection scheme,
much like taxi drivers fighting back against
Uber”. The Oxford Tories were “spooked”
he says, by Margaret Thatcher’s 1988
Bruges speech, in which she warned of “a
European superstate exercising new domi-
nance”. His vital contention, though, is
that this spooking was personal as much as
it was political. As in they saw the status
they were destined to inherit and consid-
ered it lacking when compared with the
status of their forebears. They decided
Brussels was to blame.
This is a fine polemical argument and I
like it a lot. I do wonder, though, if it’s
completely fair. Or rather, I wonder if it is
fair about all of them — such as the
wonkish Hannan, for example — while
accepting that it is completely fair aboutrnalistA l w t n t t h p h dMatt oxford BThey started
climbing the
greasy pole at
the Oxford
Union, a
debating
society that
valued wit
and rhetoric
over facts