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

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Kuper, Simon (16 June 2022). "Western Europe's cynicism about Ukrainian suffering". Financial Times . Retrieved 2 July 2023. T’was ever thus, of course – young toffs knowing they’ll inherit the earth and being rude, mean or downright cruel to the servants (including civil ones). The 19th Century radical William Cobbett called it The Old Corruption, the Victorians talked of ‘the upper ten thousand’, while in the 1950s it became The Establishment. You might have hoped, though, that by the 21st Century, with its social movements against all forms of inequality, such rampant disparity might have been ‘levelled up’ by now. Some chance. Some sobering statistics in his quietly devastating critique of the shallow pool the Westminster establishment fishes from to recruit for its political elite. 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.

This book is a wry look at the British ruling class and how, in many cases, their attendance at the University of Oxford facilitated their access to the levers of political power. On p. 3, Kuper notes that since the Second World War, no fewer than 11 out of 15 British Prime Ministers went to Oxford. 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. 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.”Rhetorically engaging, fantastically written, and well researched. This book has all the hot gossip from Oxford in the 1980s, exploring how that generation of graduates was shaped, and how they are now shaping Britain. Cherwell Magazine serves as the diary for the Tories who now dominate British politics, and the Oxford debating club as a kind of lyceum for our current era. It is here we see the making of modern Britain in the post-Thatcher era. Secrecy came naturally to John le Carré, and there were some secrets that he fought fiercely to keep, nowhere more so than in his private life. Seemingly content in his marriage, the novelist conducted a string of love affairs over four decades. To keep these relationships secret, he made use of tradecraft that he had learned as a spy: code names and cover stories, cut outs, safe houses and dead letter boxes. I don't want to put in any spoilers but Kuper quietly builds up a case to show the generation of Oxford Tories, were shaped by the empty debating rhetoric of the Oxford Union and the facile skills that PPE degrees inculcated into them (basically to acquire the sheen of knowing the surface detail of many things but nothing of substance). These forces created the empty and spineless political class so typical of Cameron, Johnson and Gove. What aside from gaining and holding on to power did these men believe in? These were not able and serious people yet they have and continue to wield real power of millions of Britons. Oxford Union politics was a jolly game to them and they with their wealth and influence were always shielded from the consequences of what the did. It was Stone who personally nurtured Cummings’s public schoolboy anarchy and who persuaded him to head to Russia after his degree to get a feel for the post-cold war world. Robertson, meanwhile, partly inspired by the historian’s abhorrence of the EU, left Oxford after his second year to devote himself to the Bruges Group of Eurosceptics that he set up while at the university. (Robertson, Kuper points out, now lives in St Moritz, where he runs the public relations firm WorldPR, responsible for the post-Brexit “global Britain” campaign. He is also Kazakhstan’s honorary consul to the Bahamas.)

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”. A searing onslaught on the smirking Oxford insinuation that politics is all just a game. It isn't. It matters' Matthew Parris Football Against The Enemy: the story behind the story | Sporting Intelligence" . Retrieved 2 July 2023. In 2003 he published his book Ajax, The Dutch, the War: Football in Europe during the Second World War. He co-authored the 2009 book Soccernomics with Stefan Szymanski. The authors subsequently put forward a formula allowing Kuper to predict that Serbia and Brazil would play the 2010 FIFA World Cup Final. [27]

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Simon Kuper’s new book, Chums: How A Tiny Caste of Oxford Tories Took Over the UK, is, the subtitle promises, the story of how a cadre of Oxford-educated Tories glommed on to power and, ultimately, fomented Brexit. Kuper is a Financial Times columnist who went to university in Oxford in the 1980s at roughly the same time as Boris Johnson, Jacob Rees-Mogg, Michael Gove, David Cameron, Dominic Cummings and many other Tory grandees. 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. However his central point - when he’s not spoiling his argument by ranting - that the system needs a shake up , I buy that wholeheartedly.

Simon Kuper is a British, and naturalized French, author and journalist, best known for his work at the Financial Times and as a football writer. After studies at Oxford, Harvard University and the Technische Universität Berlin, Kuper started his career in journalism at the FT in 1994, where he today writes about a wide range of topics, such as politics, society, culture, sports and urban planning. [2] 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. 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.The conversation about Chumswill, no doubt, rumble on for years to come, and that conversation – if directed correctly – has so much value. The future doesn’t have to look like Chumsand I don’t anticipate it will, but we all need to play our part to make sure that is truly the case. Gove grew into a recognisable Oxford character in outsized glasses, speaking with an exaggerated oratorical air even in daily life. When the future Guardian journalist Luke Harding arrived at Oxford in 1987, Gove led his freshers’ tour of the union. “He was basically the same [as in 2021],” recalls Harding. “He had this preternatural self-confidence, this faux-courtly manner. He seemed somewhat parodic, someone who wasn’t going to flourish in the real world.” Yet he has gone on to become the Jeeves to Johnson’s Wooster.

Quote : “ what makes it so hard is not that you had it bad , but that you are so pissed that so many others had it good “. A video of this event is available to watch at Power, Privilege, Parties: the shaping of modern Britain. In his 2019 diary, following the election of the current Prime Minister, Alan Bennett wrote “It’s a gang, not a government.” I too learned at Oxford how to write and speak for a living without much knowledge.” Confesses the author point and he is clearly fully aware of his privilege and the life-long advantages it has given him. He later adds,Kuper, Simon (22 September 2022). "Populism isn't over. It's getting an upgrade". Financial Times . Retrieved 2 July 2023. As Kuper writes, the British Tory government has been - and is - run by a coterie of privileged individuals many of whom consider politics to be no more than good sport. For them political office promises a continuation of the inconsequential blah-blahs they had in debating societies while at Eton and, later, at Oxford University. It allows them to display their rhetorical skills while pretending to run a country.