Bullingdon Club Britain: The Ransacking of a Nation

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VERSA, which discovered the photographs, commissioned sketches to reproduce the scenes depicted in them.

The Club President, known as the "General", presents the winner's cup, and the Club members meet at the race for a champagne breakfast.

Two hundred years later, it was infamous for its distinctive uniform of tailcoats with white silk facings, and its heavy drinking and wild behaviour. The living room has heavy armchairs and the Polo Times and Four Shires magazines decorate the table while a fire crackles in the background. All of these events are interrelated, and have been the consequence of economic and political choices. In 2004, landlord Ian Rodgers told BBC Radio 4 how a group of Oxford students, which included Princess Diana’s nephew Alexander Fellowes, had trashed his pub during a meal. In February, an alleged member of the club walked into The Bridge nightclub and, according to the police report, set off ‘large fireworks’.

The future King Edward VIII had to battle for his parents’ permission to join, and was later told to leave after word of a particularly rambunctious dinner party got back to his mother, Queen Mary.There are a number of reasons for this, says the magazine, chief among them being that the club “just couldn’t survive 11 years of bad headlines from 2005 to 2016”, referring to the time when Cameron, Osborne and Johnson were “the most powerful Conservatives in the country”. A membership roll from the 19th century survives and contains a number of individuals, who have not previously been named as members.

Pictured in the photograph are Michael Marks, Cassius Nicholas Green, Timothy Aldersly, Charles Clegg and George Farmer – the son of the former treasurer of the Conservative Party, Michael Farmer, Baron Farmer. The Bullingdon trash pubs, start fights, and drink themselves into a coma, before paying everyone off with wads of cash.During the Second World War, an extension of the club was founded at Colditz Castle for imprisoned officers who had been members of the club while at Oxford. Having read Classics at Oxford, the habit of adorning his language with arcane references has stayed with Johnson throughout his life and political career. A Cabinet Office spokesperson said: “Mr Fergusson applied through open and fair competition, following the governance code for public appointments. Seeking to replace the income lost in the wake of the expenses scandal of 2009, when it was revealed that parliamentarians were funding often lavish personal items from the public purse (in one case using taxpayer cash to clean their moat), MPs turned to second jobs.

Another student told Tatler that the extremely unflattering portrayal of a thinly disguised Bullingdon Club in Laura Wade’s play Posh– later turned into the 2014 film The Riot Club– was “almost single-handedly responsible” for the club’s poor image to current Oxford students. John Betjeman wrote in 1938 that "quite often the Club is suspended for some years after each meeting".Like an old story of some cursed fairy-tale kingdom, Bullingdon Club Britain went from being a state of mind to the mind of our state. Remembering how inspired she was, Pender says: “I wanted to go to Bristol University, and I wanted to be a lawyer, and it was all going to be great. The room is a good distance from the main dining hall so that the other guests won’t notice a commotion.