Boris and his chums: Brexit’s beginnings as a posh Oxford counter-revolution

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.

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’s Oxford experience was partly filtered through an outsider’s perspective. His family had lived in a variety of countries by the time he came to London when he was 16. One of the biggest culture shocks, he says, was British people’s obsession with class and where they were in the hierarchy. “I didn’t really have class anxieties.”

Most of Kuper’s friends in Oxford were middle-class people who went to state schools (Kuper went to a comprehensive). “People have said, ‘Oh, he’s just jealous of Johnson, he’s resentful. He had a bad time at Oxford.’ But I had a good time at Oxford… I wasn’t resentful of people like Johnson because I was barely aware of them.”

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Looking back at Oxford in the 1980s, knowing what he knows now, Kuper sees the beginning of a sort of posh counter-revolution. Between the end of the war and 1979, Britain had become an increasingly more equal place. In the 1980s, under Margaret Thatcher, that trend had reversed and the upper classes got their confidence back. In Oxford this was reflected in the antics of the Oxford Union (a debating society dominated by the Conservative party), the goonery of the Bullingdon Club (the obnoxious dining club that had both David Cameron and Boris Johnson as members), the popularity of the Brideshead Revisited TV adaptation and the prominence of affected fuddy-duddy types like Johnson and Rees-Mogg on campus.

“From 1964 to ‘94, neither major party in Britain had a public school leader,” says Kuper. “Then from the 80s Thatcher was saying to them, ‘No, it’s good that you went to private school. That’s where successful parents should be sending their children. And it’s good to be rich, it shows that they’re successful.’ And so they had regained that post-social democracy confidence.”

Many of the Oxford politicians he discusses were also Etonians and they felt an entitlement to power. “There have been five Eton and Oxford prime ministers since the war. Eton tells you, ‘This is the route to power. It’s going to the [Oxford] Union. It’s speaking well… Everyone in the British establishment 100 or 200 years ago looks like you. This is going to be you.’ Only one person I was at school with came up to Oxford the same year as me... Whereas, if you’re Boris Johnson, you arrive and there are 100 people from your year who are there. And then their sisters and their cousins and people they know from the boarding school caste are there. So they feel, ‘Everything here is familiar and Eton has told me what to expect.’ I didn’t really know what to expect. I’m not at all claiming I was disadvantaged, but coming from Eton is different… It gives you a roadmap.”

In the 1980s, Kuper explains, both the Oxford tutorial system and the debating style of the Tory-dominated Oxford Union favoured charm, fluency and wit over a grasp of facts and figures. Americans attending the Oxford Union made the mistake of thinking the latter mattered, he says. “They’d say, ‘97 per cent of’ or ‘there are 420,000 who...’ If you did that at the Union, it was ‘boring’ and ‘boring’ is a core upper-class insult word…Johnson is really the epitome of this. You went down better when you do a comedic performance.”

Why does he think that was the case? “Partly because Americans in my generation thought they were still ruling the world. If you think you’re ruling the world, you’ve got to be serious because you’re playing in the big leagues. British people of my generation felt, ‘Well, we’re not really playing in the big leagues anymore. We’re just vaudeville entertainers’… I think that’s what you get when a country’s feels it’s fallen off, that it’s no longer at the top table, you become a little bit decadent... There’s a lack of seriousness… You saw that last week when Starmer was pressing [Johnson] on partygate and Johnson came up with the ‘Sir Beer Korma’ jab at Starmer’s supposed curry. You change the subject. You make a joke. You ignore the other person’s argument. That’s very much the comedic Oxford Union style.”

In Chums, Kuper also discusses another notable difference between the Oxford Etonians who’ve held power recently and those who did so in the first half of the 20th century. Almost all of the latter had experience of war. “[Harold] Macmillan said he couldn’t go back to Oxford after the war, because everyone he knew was dead.”

He believes that those men returned from war with some sense of responsibility for the other classes who fought alongside them. In Chums, he calls Johnson, Rees Mogg, Cameron et al as a “generation without tragedy”. “These were people who’d experienced nothing. They’ve experienced journalism.”

Most of them became newspaper columnists initially because that was the best place for the fact-free bluster they’d perfected in tutorials and debates. “That’s what Oxford essays are. They’re newspaper columns. You don’t do all that much research and it’s a kind of quick fix [that] sounds convincing.”

Johnson was even fired for fabricating a quote when working with the Times. “[He] has never been an analytical or factual writer. He’s always been an entertainer. He’s a storyteller. His training has been in the Greek Classics.”

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.”

Anchoring most of these unserious Oxford politicians was a belief that it was their right to rule. They were Thatcherites but by the time they came to politics, Thatcherism had gone as far as it could go. There was simply nothing left to plausibly privatise. That generation of Tory rulers-in-waiting needed a grand project and Brexit gave them that. Kuper depicts Brexit, ultimately, as an upper-class revolution masquerading as a populist one. While some Oxford Brexiteers, like “the Karl Marx of Brexit” Daniel Hannan, were ideologues who wanted to turn Britain into a low-tax, lightly-regulated Singapore-on-Thames, for others, Brexit was simply a route to power. “Johnson doesn’t care about anything, but he does care about being re-elected.”

While Chums damningly examines a very specific cadre of Tories, it’s also an indictment of the whole notion of elite universities. Kuper depicts education at Oxford in the 1980s as loose and shambolic. “I’d like to strip away some of the mystique around Oxford. [Its graduates are] not so brilliant. They sound and write better than they are. And that includes me.”

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.”

This was obvious to Kuper as soon as he left university. He recalls a non-white friend being told by a superior she was not “of the right calibre”, and a gay non-British colleague who was mistakenly forwarded an email that said he was “not editor material”. The problem really, he says, was that they weren’t straight white Oxbridge males. “I joined the FT on the graduate scheme and all the graduate trainees were Oxbridge in those days... And then I went to interview the housing minister and he was Oxford and Harvard and the FT, like me... It was good for me, but I realised there was something wrong about this. He and I had been picked out at age 17 and given the fast-track without much checking of credentials. You can see that with Johnson. He feels, ‘I don’t really have to put in the work, because I already passed the test. And I passed the test when I was 17.’”

Things are changing, he says, but not dramatically enough. “Oxford had 68 per cent state school entrants last year, which is the highest on record, so there is a change. But it’s favouring all the upper middle classes, say people from backgrounds like mine, not so much people from the poorest schools in Britain.”

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.”

In his book, The Tyranny of Merit, the philosopher Michael Sandel argues that because all education systems will be gamed by the privileged, the only fair way to apportion university places is by random lottery. Kuper is sympathetic to that idea. He notes how countries such as Canada, Australia, Germany and the Netherlands forgo the notion of “elite” colleges, and students generally just go to the university that is nearest to them. This leads to people having to prove themselves in the workplace, not being given preferential treatment straight out of college. “I want Oxford and Cambridge to continue to exist, but not teaching privilege to public school boys.”

Has he had any feedback from those he wrote about? He’s been told that Michael Gove has read it. “Dan Hannan has written about it. Toby Young [another 1980s Oxford alumnus] has written about it. I mean, they certainly don’t buy everything I say, but they’ve been reasonably respectful and interested because it’s a book about them and people like to read books about them.”

He acknowledges that the ongoing partygate scandal is a useful backdrop for publication. “A friend of mine emailed me and said, ‘It’s completely unfair that you’ve got the prime minister to promote your book,’” he says. “It’s Johnson being Johnson. He’s entitled. He believes he can do what he wants. He believes that rules don’t apply to him. And that’s what we’re seeing now. It didn’t take a huge amount of brilliance to see that that’s who he is.”

Simon Kuper is appearing at the Dalkey Book Festival which runs from June 16th-19th