How Johnson, Cameron, Rees-Mogg, Gove,
Cummings and their tiny clique came todominate politics — and brought us Brexit
POLITICS
Matthew Syed
Chums How a Tiny Caste of
Oxford Tories Took Over the
UK by Simon Kuper
Profile £16.99 pp240It is the array of stories,
quotes and anecdotes that
makes this such a gripping
read. Simon Kuper, a
columnist for the Financial
Times (and a great writer
on football too) uses a
wonderfully understated style
as he exposes the hidden
depths of the establishment
and the inextricable link to
Eton and, in particular,
Oxford University.
The book largely deals with
the past ten years of British
politics, chronicling the rise
of Boris Johnson and his
university clique, and their
influence on arguably themost consequential political
decision of the past 40 years.
As Kuper puts it early on:
“I will argue in this book that
if Johnson, [Michael] Gove,
[Dan] Hannan, Dominic
Cummings and [ Jacob]
Rees-Mogg had received
rejection letters from Oxford
aged 17, we would probably
never have had Brexit.”
Some of the details are
exquisite and depressing in
equal measure. He chronicles
the traditionally strong bias
in favour of entrenched elites
when it comes to entrance
to Oxford, with knock-on
consequences for the nation.
“In the 1920s, an Etonian like
Alec Douglas-Home could be
admitted to Oxford practically
as his birthright, get a
third-class degree and still go
on to become prime minister,
the third consecutive Etonian
in the job. From 1900 to 1979,
nearly a quarter of all cabinet
ministers had been to Eton.”It’s all location,
location, location
How geography has defined our
national story for the past 10,000 years
HISTORY
Dan Jones
Geography Is Destiny
Britain and the World, a 10,000
Year History by Ian Morris
Profile £25 pp576
About 425,000 years ago, when
much of Earth was cased in ice
and Homo sapiens had not yet
evolved, a glacier in what is
now the North Sea collapsed,
releasing a vast lake that had
built up behind it. Millions of
tonnes of water smashed
through a high ridge of chalk
rock that ran between modern
Dover and Calais. It carved out
a long valley, which is today
filled by seawater. The French
call this valley La Manche (the
sleeve). We call it the English
Channel. It separates us from
Europe and joins us to it. It
has made us who we are.
Britain’s history is often
taught as having been shaped
by great men and women:
King Alfred and Elizabeth I;
Winston Churchill and
Margaret Thatcher. Yet as the
Stanford University professor
Ian Morris argues, to truly
understand how the British
became who we are, we need
to take a bigger, deeper, more
elemental look at our past.
Our place in the world,
Morris contends, has been
determined by just that: our
place in the world. We are an
archipelago people, sharing
with the Irish a close-knit
group of about 6,390 islands,
150 of them inhabited, just off
the coast of northwest Europe.
There have been many points
in history where that has made
us peripheral and backward,
but in more recent centuries it
has allowed us to shape, and
even to rule, the world.
To unpack all this, Morris
arranges his story around three
maps. The first is the Mappa
Mundi, made in about 1300
and today held at Hereford
Cathedral. Here you have to
squint and cock your head
even to find the British Isles,
which are squeezed, lozenge-
shaped, into a tiny space at the
very edge of the known globe,
as far as it gets from Jerusalem,
which sits at the centre.
This fact of geography did
not just matter to medieval
Christians. It shaped Britain
until the Middle Ages. The
great innovations of Eurasian
civilisation — agriculture,
copper, bronze, iron,
government, organised
religion and so on — tended to
spread from east to west, via
migration and a more complex
process that Morris describes
as an “evening out of
imbalances”. New things took
a long time to reach Britain.
As the Mappa Mundi suggests,
we were always on the outside.Yet, at the end of the Middle
Ages, something changed.
Morris uses a map by the
20th-century geographer/
explorer Halford Mackinder
to illustrate how the age of
Atlantic voyages, begun in the
1410s by the Portuguese,
ended up dragging Britain in
from the cold. “Between 1500
and 1700 Britain replaced
Jerusalem as the centre of the
world, turned the oceans into
highways and closed the
English Channel,” he writes.
This was not just an
accident of geography. Britain
entered the 18th century
poised to become the world’s
leading imperial power thanks
to what Morris calls a “root-
and-branch rethinking of
mobility, prosperity, security
and sovereignty”. Henry VIII
cut off our membership of
“Rome’s Original European
Union”. Britons transformed
themselves from a nation of
old world immigrants into one
of new world emigrants. And
they embraced institutions
such as slavery. It was not
always pretty, but it worked.
Morris’s final map is what
he calls the Money Map,
a vision of Earth in which
countries are assigned
space according to their
comparative wealth in 2018.
Britain appears grossly
swollen — but nowhere
near as large as the US or
Chinese-dominated East Asia.
Our arrival at this upper-mid-
table position is a well-known
tale of naval supremacy,
colonial expansion, imperial
heyday and collapse,
culminating in the
abandonment of our last
pretences at world empire.
As Morris’s previous books
— including the bestselling
Why the West Rules — For Now
— have shown, he is a writer
who likes the big picture, and
treats history as a practical
discipline, best used to assess
the present and project the
future. He is a jaunty,
accessible writer, especially
strong on his home field of
archaeology, and this is a
book brimming with neat
slogans and ideas. However,
his obsession with Brexit
makes the book feel curiously
dated. And as is often the
case in works of Big History,
grand unifying theses are
more often thought-provoking
than true. Nevertheless, this
is an Island Story fit for a 21st
century in which geography
really does matter. cWar zones Kill That Eagle, a
satirical map of Europe, 1914BOOKS
The Oxford
ALAMYBRIAN SMITH/REUTERS22 1 May 2022