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

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

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

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Kuper himself arrived at the university in 1988, and as a student journalist he first became aware of this line-up of usual suspects – Johnson, Cameron, Rees-Mogg, Gove, Cummings, but also the Milibands, Cooper, Balls, even Keir Starmer as a graduate – until the realisation dawns that Oxford joins most of the political dots.

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

In 1984, a sixth-former named Damian Furniss came to Johnson’s college, Balliol, for his entrance interview. Allied candidates organised themselves into “slates”, the union version of parties but with the ideology usually left out. Kuper argues that though the clique around Johnson believed they were born to power, unlike the swashbucklers of empire they admired, they lacked a cause to fight for. In Kuper’s time, among the “largely southern English student body”, the university had six Afro-Caribbean undergraduates. A self-proclaimed “word guy”, Luntz invented the phrase “climate change” for the George W Bush administration so as to make “global warming” seem innocuous – something he now says he regrets.All their lives they’d inhabited a rhetorical neverland, productive of smart sentences but little else, so that when Theresa May gave the leading Brexiteers the job of delivering Brexit, this “was like asking the winners of a debating competition to engineer a spaceship”.

The born-to-rule Oxford Tories - New Statesman

He doesn't mince his words: talking of past greats, he dismisses Bobby Charlton as "a dullard", Michel Platini "a weak character" and Pele "a talking puppet. As a columnist at the Financial Times, Kuper admits to being a “corresponding member of the British establishment”, but in Chums he limits his personal reminiscences. As Kuper observes, the politicians of Anthony Eden and Harold Macmillan’s vintage had been shaped not only by Eton and Oxford but also by war. Many come out wanting to make change in wider society, and I do think that’s also the case within it.

If you thought you knew the extent of the stubbornly incestuous Oxford networks that currently sit at the top of our politics, this book will still surprise you,” said The Guardian’s Tim Adams. The Union – a debating club “that enabled aspiring politicians, barristers and columnists to argue any case, whether they believed it or not” – had no actual power to make a difference to student lives. This Black History Month, we’re spotlighting some of our brilliant non-fiction by Black female authors. How can a handful of Union presidents or officers (many of whom are from Eton) all go on to achieve higher office at a similar time without there being some sort of network or pattern behind it?

Chums - Profile Books Chums - Profile Books

Discover your next non-fiction read and brilliant book gifts in the Profile newsletter, and find books to help you live well with Souvenir Press.After graduation, Johnson wrote a telling essay on Oxford politics for his sister’s book The Oxford Myth. In 2022, he wrote in the Financial Times that he had recently become a naturalized French citizen after living in Paris for more than 20 years.

Why 1980s Oxford holds the key to Britain’s ruling class

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. It’s very hard, because whatever you do, can be misrepresented but I think, certainly having more local reporters, which the BBC is now working on as well in places like Norwich or Halifax.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. But by 1984, emboldened by the twin forces of Falklands-era Thatcherism and Brideshead Revisited on the telly, archaic Tory voices – carefully laced with ironies by Johnson – were raucous again. Along with former prime ministers May and Blair and Thatcher, Chums has walk-on Oxford parts for Bill Clinton and Benazir Bhutto and Viktor Orbán. Beside the story about the “Old Etonian Leninist” Johnson, another item, headed Who Thinks They’re Who, mocks Johnson’s girlfriend Mostyn-Owen and Young, “Oxford’s answer to the gutter press”.



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