student to study history and
German in 1988 not long after
Johnson and David Cameron
left — he overlapped with
Hannan and Rees-Mogg (I well
remember the latter in my
first visit to the Oxford Union
in 1991: he was wearing a
double-breasted suit and
deploying an accent I had
never heard before). As a
journalist for Cherwell, Kuper
wrote about these student
politicians as he would later
write about them for the
Financial Times when they
arrived in Westminster.
Perhaps the most
perceptive insights relate
to the moral psychology of
these youngsters, who
believed they were born to
rule. The elite Bullingdon
Club “was defiantly anti-
meritocratic: almost all its
members were selected on the
basis of their social origins and
gender. It specialised in public
statements of entitlement.
Club members went around in
a pack sacking restaurants or
the rooms of new members,
smashing bottles on the street,
humiliating hired sex workers,
and ‘debagging’ (removingthe trousers of ) lower-caste
outsiders. They would then
add insult to injury by
compensating ‘pleb’ victims
with money. The message: the
rules don’t apply to our class.
After all, Bullingdon members
were the people who weregoing to make the rules.”
Kuper’s thesis is that this
innate sense of entitlement
and superiority was central to
the ructions that would ensue
when this tightly knit clique
moved into politics. The lies
of the Brexit debate (emerging
from David Cameron, a
former Etonian and member
of the Bullingdon, and
Johnson) are examined in
detail, as are the scandals
of partygate and Covid
corruption. “Brexit has been
billed as an anti-elitist revolt,”
Kuper writes. “More precisely,
it was an anti-elitist revolt led
by an elite: a coup by one set
of Oxford public schoolboys
against [an]other.”
The only defect of the
book, for me, is the final
chapter, entitled What Is to
Be Done? One of Kuper’s
suggestions is to break the
grip of Oxbridge on Britain by
preventing these universities
teaching undergraduates and,
by implication, the
advantages that cling to
students who graduate from
there: “That would remove
Oxbridge’s biggest distortion
of British life,” he writes.
He also talks of reducing
the prestige of these
universities by making
them less selective.
“[Canada, Australia and
Sweden] mostly just have
lots of good universities, none
of which confers a life-
changing advantage.”
I confess that I struggled
with these ideas. Wouldn’t it
be more advantageous for
these universities to continue
to act as a magnet for talented
undergraduates while
broadening their intake of
the most able working-class
children? This would not
merely eat away at
entrenched privilege, but
improve the academic quality
of Oxford and Cambridge by
turning them into more
rigorous meritocracies.
Yet this is a mere quibble.
This is a fine book written
at just the right time, and
penned by a journalist with a
vivid turn of phrase. Indeed,
let me finish with arguably
the best line of the book, one
that emerges from Kuper’s
disdain for how arts graduates
dominate political elites:
“Britain does have world-class
scientists, engineers and
quants [quantitative analysts],
but they are stuck in the
engine room while the
rhetoricians drive the train.” cKuper is also excellent
on the culture at Oxford in
the postwar period, where
students were admired not for
hard work and scholarship,
but blagging and amateurism.
“Bluffing your way through
tutorials was considered an
art. Cherwell [the student
newspaper] once praised
Simon Stevens (who went
on to run the NHS from 2013
to 2021) as ‘Oxford’s most
talented off-the-cuff tutorial
faker’: ‘Recently Simes
read out almost half of an
essay to his tutor before his
partner revealed that he
was “reading” from a blank
piece of paper.’ ”
Kuper is well placed to
observe the idiosyncrasies of
Oxford in the 1980s and 1990s
because he arrived as aBoys’ club Boris Johnson, left.
David Cameron, top right, in
the Brasenose tennis teamelite who rule us
Students were
admired for
blagging and
amateurism
CHILDREN’S
BOOK OF THE WEEKNICOLETTE JONES
Wolfbane
by Michelle Paver,
illustrated by Geoff Taylor
Head of Zeus £12.99,
age 10+This is the ninth and last
of Michelle Paver’s
bestselling Chronicles of
Ancient Darkness series,
set in the Stone Age, of
which the first book, Wolf
Brother, was published in- Informed by the
author’s practice with
survival skills in wild
places, the series is set
6,000 years ago, among
clans with a belief system
of spirits, and has followed
young Torak, his profound
connection to a wolf and,
as he grows up, his
relationship with his
partner, Renn. In this story
Torak and Renn have a
race against a half-human,
soul-consuming ice demon
to save Torak’s beloved
Wolf from a ghastly death.
The book has a map and
stunning cross-hatched
images, and as always
conjures with complete
conviction a historical,
fantastical and sometimes
brutal world.
WATCH OUT FOR
A Little Bit of Hush
by Paul Stewart,
illustrated by Jane Porter
Otter-Barry £12.99, age 2-5When the Squirrel family
can’t sleep, Owl takes his
silence catcher to collect
a little bit of hush. An
ingenious picture book
with bright collage about
being alert to quietness
and finding rest.Boris Johnson was not a
particularly conscientious
student at Oxford. His
former tutor, Jonathan
Barnes, told Kuper: “If
you’re intelligent enough,
you can rub along in
philosophy on a couple of
hours a week. Boris rubbed
along on no hours a week,
and it wasn’t quite good
enough.” He recalls telling
Johnson off for copying a
translation from a textbook.
Johnson reputedly replied:
“I’ve been so busy I just
didn’t have time to put in
the mistakes.”CHEAT’S CHARTER
1 May 2022 23