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

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The description of the system is good, but the analysis is a bit thin. Admittedly, Eton and Oxford do have a grip on the ruling class in the UK, but it would be far more interesting to understand why that might be? After all, the UK has more than one ancient and famous university, there is more than one ancient school. What is the grip of these institutions that helps them to maintain their place. It could be money and endowments, but these exist elsewhere. We are never quite given an insight into why that might be. 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, 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. The narrative, praised for its detailed exploration and understanding of Blake's complex character, sheds light on Blake's ideological shifts and personal struggles with identity and marks a significant addition to Kuper's body of work. [31] Jacob Rees-Mogg speaks at the Oxford Union Society in 1991. Listening are Kenneth Clarke and John Patten. Photograph: Edward Webb/Alamy

Chumsis a snapshot of a time gone by, bringing alive 1980s Oxford in vivid detail. It acts as a warning about a future without social mobility, showing the disproportionate influence closed networks can play. Simon Kuper’s writing makes the book a gripping read from start to finish, taking you step-by-step from university days and the Oxford Union right to Coronavirusand the heart of government. The book’s thesis, that Oxford (and specifically the Oxford Union) played a formative role in the rise of politicians like Johnson and the idea of Brexit, is thought-provoking; however, I feel we need to consider the counterfactual to judge the extent to which this is true. Ultimately, if Oxford was cut out of the story, would Johnson still be PM? I think the answer is most probably. 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.

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Johnson learned at school to defeat opponents whose arguments were better simply by ignoring their arguments. He discovered how to win elections and debates not by boring the audience with detail, but with carefully timed jokes, calculated lowerings of voice, and ad hominem jibes. Deng, Yii-Jeng (21 May 2022). "Book Review: Chums by Simon Kuper". The Oxford Student (Oxford's University's Student Newspaper). A video of this event is available to watch at Power, Privilege, Parties: the shaping of modern Britain. But what to do about it? Well, Kuper argues a) that Oxford could become a postgraduate research institute only, or b) that both it and Cambridge could become more rigorous meritocracies (which the latter at least would say it already is). “What about retraining gifted but under-qualified adults, or expanding their summer schools for promising disadvantaged teenagers? Oxbridge for all could raise lots of people’s sights. Rather than getting rid of Oxbridge’s excellence, we could spread it much more widely.”

In truth,” writes Kuper, with an even-handedness surely acquired during his early schooling in the Netherlands, “almost everyone who gets into Oxford is a mixture of privilege and merit in varying proportions.” Though mostly privilege. At the start of the 21st century, private schools (which at the time educated about 7 per cent of the population) supplied around half of Oxford’s domestic student intake. Kuper quotes the former Labour minister Andrew Adonis: “The place felt like one huge public school to which a few others of us had been smuggled in by mistake.” Kuper, one senses, finds this millieu troublingly homoerotic. He uses the word “camp” to describe their style at least three times. 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.

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During the Second World War, Edward Heath was mentioned in dispatches and awarded an MBE for active service in the Normandy landings. “He said later that seeing Europe destroy itself again left him ‘with the deep belief that remains with me to this day: that the peoples of Europe must never again be allowed to fight each other’. In 1973, he took the UK into the EEC.” 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.” Kuper, Simon (16 June 2022). "Western Europe's cynicism about Ukrainian suffering". Financial Times . Retrieved 2 July 2023. This reminds us that there is little which is healthy or natural about boarding school either. It is a cold, pathogenic system which has little room for love, compassion or sensitivity. When you compare the pupils from such a system with those from grammar or state school, you see that normal education would see pupils maybe spend up to eight hours a day with peers, whereas public school boys are around each other closer to 24/7. So in essence over a period of many years most pupils are shaped chiefly by family, but those who went to such boarding houses, are defined by private school and all that it stands for. 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.