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

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I found the first half of the book a bit disappointing - mostly racy tales, out of school, about bad boys. Towards the end however, it really delivered powerful insights. 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. In Chums, Simon Kuper reminds us that a lot of Brexiteers – Boris Johnson, Dominic Cummings, Jacob Rees-Mogg and Michael Gove – entered Elysium at a golden moment, the mid-1980s; the pinnacle of Thatcherism, the age of Brideshead on TV. Being silly was serious business. They carried their Arcadian personalities and politics into the rest of their lives – and Kuper, a fellow alumnus, loathes them for it.

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. While Chums damningly examines a very specific cadre of Tories, it’s also an indictment of the whole notion of elite universities. Kuper depicts education at Oxford in the 1980s as loose and shambolic. “I’d like to strip away some of the mystique around Oxford. [Its graduates are] not so brilliant. They sound and write better than they are. And that includes me.” He started his FT career as a reporter. His assignments have often taken him beyond his base in Paris, providing coverage and analysis on global events from different parts of the world. A union career was good practice for Westminster. You learned when an ostensible ally was lying to your face, or when you should be lying to his; when it was safe to break a rule, and when it wasn’t. Michael Heseltine, who had occupied the president’s chair – which sat on a raised dais like a throne – called it “the first step to being prime minister”. Once you had ascended the union, Downing Street felt within your grasp. Drawing on his forthcoming book, Chums: How a Tiny Caste of Oxford Tories Took Over the UK, Kuper will discuss the dynamics and effects of Britain’s ruling class and its ‘chumocracy’, with responses from Mike Savage – a sociologist of elites – and Jane Gingrich, Professor of Comparative Political Economy. In his new book, Simon details how Oxford University has produced most of the most powerful Conservative politicians of our time. They aren't just colleagues - they are peers, rivals, friends. And, when they walked out of the world of student debates onto the national stage, they brought their university politics with them. How has this reality helped define and design modern Britain?Kuper, Simon (22 September 2022). "Populism isn't over. It's getting an upgrade". Financial Times . Retrieved 2 July 2023. It’s not long since I read Sad Little Men: Private Schools and the Ruin of England, an angry account of the damage inflicted by private boarding schools which skirts around similar territory. The tones of the two books are notably different: while Beard is viscerally angry, Kuper feels more inquisitive. He also comes up with some interesting suggestions on how to correct the problems he identifies. Moravcsik, Andrew (1 November 2022). "Chums: How a Tiny Caste of Oxford Tories Took Over the UK". Foreign Affairs. No.November/December 2022. ISSN 0015-7120 . Retrieved 2 July 2023. He thinks the dominance of Oxford and Cambridge has a deleterious effect on British life. “You’re telling 99 per cent of the population: ‘You are never going to be a senior politician, a judge, a newspaper editor, a civil servant… goodbye, you’re done.’ And you say to the 1 per cent, ‘As long as you don’t commit rape and murder, you’re fine. We’ve let you in through the gate.’ It’s hugely pernicious. And it doesn’t allow for development at different ages. It doesn’t allow for lifelong learning. And it’s very much based on birth and school.”

It goes without saying, reading this history, that the overwhelming influence of a single kind of graduate from a single university (and often a single school, Eton) at the top of British public life has been profoundly damaging. Kuper offers some solutions – making Oxford exclusively a graduate research institute is one – but also hopes that the pandemic and all that has followed from it might finally mark an end to the British weakness for “the amateur ruler, lightly seasoned by Oxford tutorials”. If so, a suitable epitaph might come from Rees-Mogg, who when challenged in October 2021 as to why Tory MPs were not wearing face masks in parliament, answered: “We on this side know each other.” As if that were all that ever counted. I enjoyed the way Kuper mows down the myth that surrounded Oxford University, at least in its recent past, as a revered academic institution offering serious scholars the chance to study under the tutelage of stellar professors. Rather, Kuper sees it as a haven where lazy public schoolboys extend their adolescence into adulthood, fueled by vast quantities alcohol and the unshakeable conviction that they have it made. Brexit, writes Kuper, would come to give the Oxford Tory politicians “a chance to live in interesting times, as their ancestors had. It would raise the tediously low stakes of British politics. It would be a glorious romantic act, like the Charge of the Light Brigade, only with less personal risk.” Change the plan you will roll onto at any time during your trial by visiting the “Settings & Account” section. What happens at the end of my trial? Kuper has written several books, starting with the William Hill awarded Football Against the Enemy (1994), which was later released in the United States as Soccer Against the Enemy. [25] The Times wrote of the book: "If you like football, read it. If you don't like football, read it." [26]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. Rees-Mogg wasn’t ancestrally posh. Instead, he “adopted the persona of the institutions he attended”, diagnoses his contemporary Owen Matthews, who believes that this began as a defence mechanism for a thin, bookish child. Arriving at Oxford in 1988, he instantly became an unmissable sight, a rail-thin teenager promenading along Broad Street dressed like a Victorian vicar, in a double-breasted suit with an umbrella. In that time and place, it was about the most unconventional outfit imaginable. Allied candidates organised themselves into “slates”, the union version of parties but with the ideology usually left out. The slates were illegal, semi-secret, mostly hidden from the electorate, and essential to the whole enterprise. Entirely against the rules, candidates would campaign for their slates: “Vote for me as treasurer, for him as secretary and for her as president.” In other words, cheating was built into the system.

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. If you do nothing, you will be auto-enrolled in our premium digital monthly subscription plan and retain complete access for 65 € per month. Running the country or ruining the country? Tell me when it’s time to get out the knitting needles. The union’s debating rules were modelled on those of the Commons. Opposing speakers sat facing each other in adversarial formation, and there was the same “telling” of ayes and noes. But unlike the Commons, the union had no real power. Almost the only thing the union president could actually do was stage debates. Naturally, then, it encouraged a focus on rhetoric over policy. The institution perfected the articulacy that enabled aspiring politicians, barristers and columnists to argue any case, whether they believed it or not. In the union, a speaker might prepare one side of a debate, and then on the day suddenly have to switch to the other side to replace an opponent who had dropped out. I suspect it was this rhetorical tradition that prompted Louis MacNeice to write, in 1939: Nearly all campaigning for votes was supposedly banned under the union’s own rule 33. There were occasional attempts to enforce the rule, through tribunals featuring London lawyers, but candidates almost always flouted it.

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A video of this event is available to watch at Power, Privilege, Parties: the shaping of modern Britain. Anchoring most of these unserious Oxford politicians was a belief that it was their right to rule. They were Thatcherites but by the time they came to politics, Thatcherism had gone as far as it could go. There was simply nothing left to plausibly privatise. That generation of Tory rulers-in-waiting needed a grand project and Brexit gave them that. Kuper depicts Brexit, ultimately, as an upper-class revolution masquerading as a populist one. While some Oxford Brexiteers, like “the Karl Marx of Brexit” Daniel Hannan, were ideologues who wanted to turn Britain into a low-tax, lightly-regulated Singapore-on-Thames, for others, Brexit was simply a route to power. “Johnson doesn’t care about anything, but he does care about being re-elected.”