If Brexit didn’t work out, the Oxford Tories could always just set up new investment vehicles inside the EU, like Rees-Mogg, or apply for European passports, like Stanley Johnson." It helped me understand the way debates are conducted in the Commons and why outrageous lying (even to Parliament with regard to numerous violations of Covid rules) apparently does not kill political careers. Discover the captivating origins and hidden meanings of the flags that we all know today in this sparkling tour through this universal subject! 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. After graduation, Johnson wrote a telling essay on Oxford politics for his sister’s book The Oxford Myth. He starts, characteristically, by stating the case against the union: “Nothing but a massage-parlour for the egos of the assorted twits, twerps, toffs and misfits that inhabit it … To many undergraduates, the union niffs of the purest, most naked politics, stripped of all issues except personality and ambition … Ordinary punters are frequently discouraged from voting by this thought: are they doing anything else but fattening the CVs of those who get elected?”

Hannan, among Kuper’s key witnesses here, had grown up in Peru, where his family had a poultry farm. After the collapse of communism, he sniffed – along with Stone – a new “enemy of liberty” in European bureaucracy and found an early acolyte in his absurd Oxford contemporary Jacob Rees-Mogg. On graduating, Hannan persuaded some marginal rightwing MPs to pay him a salary as sole employee of the European Research Group; two decades later he was persuading Johnson to head the leave campaign. And so, as Kuper writes, once again “the timeless paradise of Oxford inspired its inhabitants to produce timeless fantasies like Alice in Wonderland, The Hobbit, Narnia, and, incubating from the late 1980s, Brexit”. 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!? A video of this event is available to watch at Power, Privilege, Parties: the shaping of modern Britain. 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. What does he think will happen to the class of public school educated folk that currently dominate the Tory party? “I think it’s possible that the Johnson, Cameron, Rees-Mogg generation will prove to be a last hurrah. But I think that class is very tenacious. Eton exists to educate the ruling class and if the ruling class has to do Stem degrees or have MBAs or the ruling class has to talk about diversity, they’ll produce boys who can do that.”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. 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, 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. If your life passage has taken you from medieval rural home to medieval boarding school to medieval Oxford college and finally to medieval parliament, you inevitably end up thinking: ‘What could possibly go wrong?’.”

Running the country or ruining the country? Tell me when it’s time to get out the knitting needles. 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.” Irresistible by Joshua Paul Dale delves into the surprisingly ancient origins of Japan’s #kawaii culture and uncovers the cross-cultural pollination of the globalised world 🦊 In Chums, Kuper observes that Classics is by far the most common degree among Tory Brexiteers. “[Johnson is] a very seventh rate Homer, rather than a modern analyst who reads a lot of documents and then digests them... What is true has never been something he’s particularly interested in. He’s a myth maker.”

Kuper, Simon (22 September 2022). "Populism isn't over. It's getting an upgrade". Financial Times . Retrieved 2 July 2023. Kuper, one senses, finds this millieu troublingly homoerotic. He uses the word “camp” to describe their style at least three times.