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| A still from The Riot Club (2014), which is believed to depict the hedonism of the Bullingdon Club. Photograph: Blueprint Pictures/Sportsphoto/Allstar |
The Bullingdon is on its uppers. Let’s all celebrate by
trashing a restaurant
Barbara Ellen
Tories at Oxford have banned the notorious club. Oh where
will the posh boys hang out?
Sun 14 Oct 2018 05.59 BST Last modified on Wed 10 Jul 2019
10.38 BST
Is Britain finally starting to get over its embarrassing crush
on posh boys? The Bullingdon Club, the 200-year-old, male-only club reserved
for the aristocracy and the very wealthy, has been shunned by the Oxford
University Conservative Association. It has been added to OUCA’s proscribed
list, having “no place in the modern party”. While past members include David
Cameron, Boris Johnson and George Osborne, people recently invited to join the
Bullingdon have been turning it down, those who join are branded “losers” and,
in 2016, it was said to be on the brink of closure for lack of members.
It feels as though I should do something to mark the end of
a truly heavenly era – throw bread rolls around a restaurant, intimidate
waiting staff, burn a £50 note in front of a homeless person – all from that
repertoire of jolly Bullingdon japes you’d hear about. While I never understood
how these things were amusing, that’s only because I’m dead common.
State-educated common. Council house-bred common. So common, that if any
Bullingdon boy had crossed my path, they might have tried to shag me for a bet.
I’m simply not cultivated enough to comprehend the joy of trashing a restaurant
and then, with gentlemanly elan, leaving a cheque to cover the damage. That’s
class for you, innit? Or is it? Some people might say that it was Magaluf for
toffs.
This probably means that we won’t get to see that bewitching
photograph any more – you know, of Cameron, Johnson and their mates, looking
“born to rule” in their Bullingdon finery, the one that resembles a Brideshead
Revisited/Clockwork Orange mashup. Though you can’t see it anyway. It was
hastily banned from publication by the Oxford photographers who owned it,
around the time when – hang on, let me think – ah yes, when Cameron was gearing
up to become “Dave”, the relatable/down-to-earth Conservative party leader,
going on to become prime minister, leading a coalition government, with a
cabinet stuffed with… old Etonians and multimillionaires.
When Boris met Dave: from Bullingdon to Brexit – in pictures
There lies the rub. In some ways, it’s a shame that the
Bullingdon is on the wane. (It was convenient having them all herded into one
place, where you could keep an eye on them.) And who really cares if some
drunken idiots want to pathetically boast about Daddy’s fortune at tragic
student dinners?
It didn’t even matter that such people felt entitled to
power. The only thing that ever matters is when the electorate buys into the
forelock-tugging, better-than-us nonsense. The cabinet is hardly full of
ordinary folk now, but political fashions come and go and, right now, it feels
encouragingly as though the British have had their fill of the
Bullingdon-style, toff-supremacist attitude. In recent times, it seems to have
gone beyond Boris fatigue to the point where even Boris fatigue is fatigued. While
the OUCA has decided the attitude that Bullingdon represents has no place in
its modern party, perhaps it should never have had a place in modern British
governance at all.
• Barbara Ellen is an Observer columnist
Bullingdon Club portrait of Cameron and Johnson in tails to
go on sale
This article is more
than 2 years old
Oil painting of 10 ‘confident’ Oxford students, including
former Tory pals, was commissioned to get around copyright
Mark Brown Arts correspondent
Thu 10 Nov 2016 12.27 GMT Last modified on Wed 10 Jul 2019
10.45 BST
A painting of posh, privileged members of the Bullingdon
Club, which was commissioned to get around copyright law, is to appear at
auction.
Rona Marsden’s “class of ‘87” image is a familiar one – 10
young and confident students, including David Cameron and Boris Johnson, lined
up in their tails and yellow waistcoats and posing on the steps of Christ
Church college, Oxford.
The original photograph was first published in the Mail on
Sunday in 2007 and, given the dining and drinking club’s reputation for
boisterous bad behaviour, it was clearly embarrassing to Cameron. Soon after
permission to republish the photograph was withdrawn by Gillman & Soame,
the Oxford portrait photographers who hold the copyright.
To get over that hurdle, the then BBC Newsnight journalist
Michael Crick had the idea of commissioning an artist to paint the photograph
instead.
Marsden, who mostly paints in black and white, was hired.
“It happened very quickly,” she said of the commission. “I didn’t really know
the full story, I wasn’t paying attention to politics at the time so I didn’t
realise the fuss. But I thought: ‘I can paint it.’”
“I happened to have a 3ft by 4ft canvas primed and ready to
use in my studio in Oxford so I began that night.”
By lunchtime the next day it was complete and the BBC filmed
her and the painting in her studio. Newsnight then decided it wanted the
portrait live in the studio.
“They said they would send a car but I said it’s not coming
without me because it was still so wet. I went down to the studio with the
painting in the back of the car, it was very funny.”
Marsden was paid a small fee for the painting, which she got
to keep. It has since been used by newspapers including the Observer and the
Independent and was even made into a tea towel by the artist. “I still have a
few left somewhere. I need to find them,” she said
Twelve prints of the painting have also been made, but being
offered for sale by Mallams auction house in Oxford is the original oil
painting, which is expected to attract bids in excess of £5,000.
Who might buy it remains to be seen. In a 2009 interview
Cameron admitted being embarrassed by the photograph. “We do things when we are
young that we deeply regret,” he told the BBC’s Andrew Marr.
Marsden said all the young men in the picture clearly exuded
a “confidence and entitlement … I don’t have a problem with that being David
Cameron’s history but the fact he tried to hide it was his mistake.”
The artist will retain the right to reproduce the image
after the painting is sold on 8 December, but added that after almost a decade
of the original being in her studio, the time was right to sell. “I thought
it’s almost 10 years, maybe it’s time. I probably should have sold it the day
David Cameron left,” she said.
Topics
'Toffishness and twittishness' - Boris Johnson spills beans
on Bullingdon Club and reveals childhood ambition to be 'world king'
In a BBC profile 'Boris Johnson: The Irresistible Rise'
London's mayor also reveals his ambition to be British Prime Minister
Adam Sherwin @adamsherwin10
Tuesday 19 March 2013 01:00
The Independent Culture
'Toffishness and twittishness' - Boris Johnson spills beans on
Bullingdon Club and reveals childhood ambition to be 'world king'
Boris Johnson still greets fellow members of the Bullingdon
Club, the notorious Oxford drinking society whose alumni include David Cameron
and George Osborne, with a cry of “Buller, Buller, Buller!”, the Mayor of
London has revealed.
Johnson breaks the strict code of “omerta” surrounding the
Club, which is dominated by Etonians and only open to the wealthy and
well-connected, in a new BBC profile, which explores his Prime Ministerial
ambitions.
Writing in Radio Times, Michael Cockerell, the veteran
political film-maker, reveals that the documentary includes a scene in which
Johnson examines a famous photograph of himself, Cameron and other members of
the “Buller” in their blue tailcoats with white silk facings, mustard
waistcoats and gold buttons.
“This is a truly shameful vignette of almost superhuman
undergraduate arrogance, toffishness and twittishness,” admits Johnson. “But at
the time you felt it was wonderful to be going round swanking it up. Or was it?
Actually I remember the dinners being incredibly drunken.”
He is reminded that one riotous Bullingdon dinner ended with
a restaurant being smashed up and Boris and other members spending a night in a
police cell. “Yes. And the abiding memory is of deep, deep self-loathing.”
Does Johnson, 46, still greet other Club members in public
with the traditional greeting: “Buller, Buller, Buller!” “It may be that I do –
in a satirical way,” he said.
During the film, Boris Johnson: The Irresistible Rise, its
subject adds to the elaborate verbal constructions he employs to downplay his
transparent desire to succeed David Cameron as Prime Minister.
“I think it’s a very tough job being Prime Minister,” he
said. “Obviously, if the ball came loose from the back of a scrum – which it
won’t – it would be a great, great thing to have a crack at. But it’s not going
to happen.”
Previously Johnson had said he had as much chance of
becoming Prime Minister as being decapitated by a Frisbee or reincarnated as an
olive, or Elvis Presley.
Johnson admits that during arguments with Cameron “a lot of
plaster comes off the ceiling” but this is all in the service of “trying to get
a better deal for London, and to make sure that the Government doesn’t make a
mistake.”
The film, broadcast next week, reveals that beneath his
blustering, comical persona, Johnson is concealing artistic skills. At the age
of 12 he painted a self-portrait resembling a Grecian demi-god.
His sister Rachel Johnson, the journalist and author,
discloses that Boris’ always harboured imperial ambitions. She said: “As Boris was
growing up whenever anyone asked him what he wanted to be, he would answer:
‘World King’.”
The roots of the competitive tension underlying the Johnson
/ Cameron relationship lie in their experience as Eton College contemporaries.
Johnson was Captain of the School and elected to Eton’s elite group, known as
Pop. David Cameron, two years younger, achieved neither distinction and is
teasingly reminded of this by his rival to this day. “It gives Boris a sense of
continuing superiority because he was Captain of the School,” Rachel Johnson
says.
“I do remember Dave,” said Boris. “Someone said to me once,
‘That’s Cameron mi (minor)’ and there was this tiny chap, I dimly remember.”
The Mayor discloses that his “bumbling” persona may not
always, as is often assumed, be a convenient disguise for a razor-sharp
political intellect.
Johnson says: “It is often useful to give the slight
impression that you are deliberately pretending not to know what’s going on –
because the reality may be that you don’t know what’s going on, but people
won’t be able to tell the difference.”
Boris Johnson: The Irresistible Rise - Monday 25 March, 9pm,
BBC Two
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