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

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We and our partners use data for Personalised ads and content, ad and content measurement, audience insights and product development. In 1831, William Gladstone had made such a powerful anti-reform speech at the union that a friend from Eton alerted his father, the Duke of Newcastle, who offered the 22-year-old prodigy one of the parliamentary pocket boroughs in his gift. But it’s favouring all the upper middle classes, say people from backgrounds like mine, not so much people from the poorest schools in Britain. I never became a member, but I sometimes got press tickets to debates, and I remember a young Benjamin Netanyahu dispatching hecklers, and, on the 50th anniversary of Dunkirk, former prime minister Ted Heath evoking Oxford in 1940 when German invasion loomed. In the 1980s, under Margaret Thatcher, that trend had reversed and the upper classes got their confidence back.

But I had a good time at Oxford… I wasn’t resentful of people like Johnson because I was barely aware of them. They’re gifted it by fairy godmothers, then have it nurtured at Eton/ Winchester/Charterhouse/Shrewsbury/wherever and honed at Oxford.Robbed of the chance to be wartime heroes, angered by Europe’s dominance over their sceptred isle, these latter-day Woosters hit on Brexit as a means of re-establishing their own superiority: “Ruling Britain was the prerogative of their caste. 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”. Inbred self-confidence is, of course, what the likes of Johnson, Rees-Mogg (“the only undergraduate who went around in a double-breasted suit”), Rishi Sunak (Winchester) and David Cameron (whose “accent, confidence, height and pink rude health always screamed Eton”) have in spades. If you would like to change your settings or withdraw consent at any time, the link to do so is in our privacy policy accessible from our home page. Daniel was educated in a state comprehensive school and is the first in his immediate family to go to university.

At Oxford, the union’s ceaseless debates and election campaigns kept the university buzzing with politics.

Kuper’s greatest mistake is commonplace among Oxford graduates: they think we care that they went there. Toby Young remembers the first time he saw Johnson speak at the union, in October 1983: “The motion was deadly serious – This House Would Reintroduce Capital Punishment – yet almost everything that came out of his mouth provoked gales of laughter. At speakers’ dinners, 20-year-old union “hacks” – the name given to union politicians – mingled with political power brokers up from London. Also in 2021, Kuper released The Happy Traitor, [30] an account of the life and motivations of George Blake, a British spy for the Soviet Union. Boris Johnson, Michael Gove, David Cameron, George Osborne, Theresa May, Dominic Cummings, Daniel Hannan, Jacob Rees-Mogg: Whitehall is swarming with old Oxonians.

In 1853, Edward Bradley watched “beardless gentlemen … juggle the same tricks of rhetoric as their fathers were doing in certain other debates in a certain other House”.One of the biggest culture shocks, he says, was British people’s obsession with class and where they were in the hierarchy. Boris gave a speech on the Middle East – it’s the best Middle East speech to this day I’ve ever heard, because he talked about it in terms of a playground, and kids attacking the little kid on the playground.