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

Product Information

A really interesting book review: thanks. I wonder how much of “Chums” relates to the popular (sic) representations of the Bullingdon Club and its members’ antics!? King of all he surveyed': Boris Johnson as President of the Oxford Union with the Greek minister for culture Melina Mercouri He is scathing of those habits of tutorial teaching at the university, which too frequently rewarded bluffing and charm over industry and doubt. Still, this is not, he insists, “a personal revenge on Oxford”. It’s rather “an attempt to write a group portrait of a set of Tory Brexiteers… who took an ancient route through Oxford to power”.

Welcome to the “chumocracy”, in England a modern word but an ancient notion. Early in the 19th century the radical pamphleteer William Cobbett derided the complacent self-interest of Britain’s ruling caste – he called it The Thing. In Simon Kuper’s Chums meet the new Thing. Same as the old Thing.The Cloud is only intended for guest and visitor access to wifi. Existing LSE staff and students are encouraged to use eduroaminstead. In this Venn Diagram of private education crossing Oxford post graduate degree we have the Oxford Tories whose power an influence only has seemed to grown in the last decade. Their policies and concerns such as Brexit and Austerity has shaped the UK as it stands in 2023 and if it is to be their legacy it is a damning one. In his 2019 diary, following the election of the current Prime Minister, Alan Bennett wrote “It’s a gang, not a government.”

He went up to Oxford in 1983 as a vessel of focused ambition. Ironic about everything else, he was serious about himself. Within his peer group of public schoolboys, he felt like a poor man in a hurry. He started university with three aims, writes Sonia Purnell in Just Boris: A Tale of Blond Ambition: to get a first-class degree, to find a wife (his parents met at Oxford), and to become union president. At university he was always “thinking two decades ahead”, says his Oxford friend Lloyd Evans. Elegant, witty, economical ... it is absurd how much influence this tiny, moneyed circle has been able to wield, and deeply depressing' The name-dropping of some of these sources - like Sam Gyimah - is particularly jarring (Gyimah has, rightly, not been forgiven in many quarters for his crooked campaign against Emma Dent Coad). Similarly, making people like Theresa May, Michael Gove and Jacob Rees-Mogg the object of discussion without even mentioning the horrendous, often racist, policies they implemented, is a miserable and alienating experience. 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. P, Ullekh N. (1 December 2013). "2014 FIFA World Cup: Simon Kuper, football writer, lists teams to watch out for". The Economic Times. ISSN 0013-0389 . Retrieved 1 July 2023.

Speakers

This captivating A-Z compendium by #KateSummerscale explores the world in 99 obsessions - from spiders to clowns to all that will make your skin crawl.

Football Against The Enemy: the story behind the story | Sporting Intelligence" . Retrieved 2 July 2023. Deng, Yii-Jeng (21 May 2022). "Book Review: Chums by Simon Kuper". The Oxford Student (Oxford's University's Student Newspaper).The Telegraph values your comments but kindly requests all posts are on topic, constructive and respectful. Please review our His book The Football Men, which was published in 2011, offered a collection of articles about the world of football over a span of 13 years, along with new pieces written specifically for this book. The Independent wrote that "Simon Kuper is a refreshing antidote to the current media obsession with 'getting the nannies [nanny goats = quotes]', however banal, from players. 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." [28]

Kuper wrote for Oxford’s independent student paper Cherwell where they would sometimes cover campus eccentrics like Rees-Mogg but he had no conception of what any of it meant at the time. “When I was writing the book, I spoke to a guy who was at Cherwell with me... He said, ‘I thought these people were the past that, they were just going to disappear as Britain moved on into modernity.’ And I thought, Wow, he had a view in the 80s. I didn’t have a view. I didn’t really have any understanding of where people sat or where they were going.” This incisive, insightful and timely book compellingly attributes recent British upheavals to rivalries within a tiny Oxford tribe. By the end of Chums, it seems reasonable to fear that only Oxford Tories will ever wield the necessary power to end the self-serving, self-satisfied rule of other Oxford Tories. See? The fun stuff they keep to themselves. Jane Gingrich ( @jrgingrich)is Professor in Comparative Political Economy at the University of Oxford. Her main research interests involve comparative political economy and comparative social policy. In particular, she is interested in contemporary restructuring of the welfare state, and the politics of institutional change. She is currently the PI of the ERC-Project "SchoolPol", which studies variation and effects of educational regimes across countries. Brexit has been billed as an anti-elitist revolt. More precisely it was an anti-elitist revolt led by an elite: a coup by one set of Oxford public schoolboys” (Boris, Cummings) “against another” (David Cameron) and the election was fought, by Johnson at least, “as if it were a Union debate”. It was a game for these people, just like communism was sport for Guy Burgess and Anthony Blunt in the 1930s, though Kuper admits that this parallel “isn’t entirely fair: though both betrayed Britain’s interests in the service of Moscow, the Brexiteers did it by mistake”.

Chair

There is a lot of circumstantial detail here and it makes a good bank holiday read. The argument: this Oxford Union based clique, centred on Johnson, Gove, Rees-Mogg and Cummings pursued their entitled vision to Brexit, thinking of none but themselves, wrapped up in privilege and with minimal cramming and overfond of japes and rhetoric.