Review
Chums: How a Tiny Caste of Oxford Tories Took
Over the UK by Simon Kuper – review
A penetrating analysis of the connections that enabled
an incestuous university network to dominate Westminster and give birth to
Brexit is perceptive and full of surprises
Tim Adams
Tim Adams
@TimAdamsWrites
Sun 1 May
2022 02.00 EDT
At a “slave
auction” at the Oxford Union in 1987 – an “opportunity to buy your favourite
union person for the evening” – there was, according to the university
newspaper, frenzied bidding for the services of the kilt-wearing 19-year-old
Michael Gove. He went for £35. Gove was known at the time as one of the three
pre-eminent orators in the small world of the university debating chamber – the
others were Nick Robinson, future BBC political editor, and Simon Stevens,
until recently chief executive of NHS England.
The
previous year’s union president, Boris Johnson, failed to show up for the slave
auction and was sold in absentia. Johnson’s own rhetorical style differed from
the self-conscious rigour of his peers. He had learned, Simon Kuper writes, in
debates at Eton, “to defeat opponents whose arguments were better simply by
ignoring their arguments”. He offered instead “carefully timed jokes,
calculated lowerings of the voice, and ad hominem jibes”. In this manner, he
had won the election to union presidency with the help of various
self-described “votaries in the Boris cult”, including Gove and future Covid
sceptic Toby Young.
The Johnson
style was – Kuper notes in this short, sharp and often disturbing examination
of how our current politics was first played out at Oxford half a lifetime ago
– something new. For maybe 30 years at Oxford, Tories had been in defensive
retreat. The manner of Johnson’s immediate Conservative predecessors at the
union, Theresa Brasier, her husband-to-be Philip May and her best friend (and
future deputy prime minister) Damian Green, was notably halting and
circumspect. But by 1984, emboldened by the twin forces of Falklands-era
Thatcherism and Brideshead Revisited on the telly, archaic Tory voices –
carefully laced with ironies by Johnson – were raucous again. (David Cameron,
two years below Johnson at school and Oxford, was a different kind of throwback
– rich enough and connected enough to feel himself above the “hackery” of
student politics.)
It helped
this new breed, Kuper argues, that at the union, they were often joking among
themselves. The Oxford University Labour Club, high on Billy Bragg and miners’
solidarity marches, boycotted the debating chamber (one result, Kuper suggests,
was that they “never learned to speak”). The political big beasts on the left
in the second half of the 80s, in university terms, were the Miliband brothers,
Dave and Ted, and Eddie Balls and Yvette Cooper, organising rent protests at
their respective colleges. The young Keir Starmer, who did his undergraduate
degree at Leeds, arrived in 1985 and made a stand about supporting the print
workers at Wapping. Johnson could raise predictable guffaws in union debates
when characterising socialist students as “retreating into their miserable
dungareed caucuses”.
All of
which is to say: if you thought you knew the extent of the stubbornly
incestuous Oxford networks that currently sit at the top of our politics, this
book will still surprise you. Financial Times columnist Kuper himself arrived
at Oxford in 1988, just after Gove and Johnson had left. Kuper, from a north
London comprehensive school, mostly inhabited a different social world to the
subjects of his book but, like them, he acknowledges, he was trained by his
Oxford humanities degree primarily “to write and speak for a living without
much knowledge”.
Though the clique around Johnson believed they were
born to power, unlike the swashbucklers of empire they admired, they lacked a
cause to fight for
He is
scathing of those habits of tutorial teaching at the university, which too
frequently rewarded bluffing and charm over industry and doubt. Still, this is
not, he insists, “a personal revenge on Oxford”. It’s rather “an attempt to
write a group portrait of a set of Tory Brexiteers… who took an ancient route
through Oxford to power”.
As Johnson
himself remarked, if you wanted to know how influential the Oxford Union was in
British politics, you had only to look at all the photographs of past
presidents (and future prime ministers) on its walls. There was, however, one
distinct difference between those characters and their 1980s pretenders. As
Kuper observes, the politicians of Anthony Eden and Harold Macmillan’s vintage
had been shaped not only by Eton and Oxford but also by war. By 2007, Rory
Stewart – who had gone from Eton and Oxford to Iraq and Afghanistan – was
observing that in the upper echelons of the Tory party: “Churchill had been
replaced by Bertie Wooster.”
Kuper
argues that though the clique around Johnson believed they were born to power,
unlike the swashbucklers of empire they admired, they lacked a cause to fight
for. His book details how that “cause” was eventually drummed up by three other
near contemporaries at Oxford, all of whom fell under the sway of Norman Stone,
the polymathic history professor, alcoholic and sometime adviser to Margaret
Thatcher. The first of those was a young Scot, Patrick Robertson, introduced to
Stone by Gove at a Burns Night dinner, the second was Dan, now Lord, Hannan,
and the third was the most intense of undergraduates, Dominic Cummings.
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.)
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”.
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.
Chums: How
a Tiny Caste of Oxford Tories Took Over the UK by Simon Kuper is published by
Profile (£16.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at
guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
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