Chums: How a Tiny Caste of Oxford Tories Took Over the UK

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He says now: “My mother was so embarrassed because it made the New York Times. She said, ‘How dare you ask people those questions?’” But in fact, the sex was just a cover, says Luntz: “I knew it would be so controversial that no one would think, ‘Actually this was a poll done for a political campaign’.” He slipped in two questions about the union that were intended to identify which candidate Johnson should strike a deal with about trading second-preference votes. Interview, Oxstu Profile (5 June 2023). "In conversation with Simon Kuper". The Oxford Student . Retrieved 2 July 2023. He recalls: “Boris Mark 1 was a very conventional Tory, clearly on the right, and had what I would term an Old Etonian entitlement view: ‘I should get the top job because I’m standing for the top job.’ He didn’t have a good sense of what he was going to do with it.” Kuper’s unique approach to sports writing, particularly on football, has earned him several prestigious accolades, including the 1994 William Hill Sports Book of the Year. He writes about sports "from an anthropological perspective." [6] Time Magazine has called him “one of the world’s leading writers on soccer” [7] and The Economic Times labeled him “one of the world's most famous football writers.” [8]

Chums by Simon Kuper — the Oxford breed of political bluff

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. 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.” Cameron, like many of his colleagues, had honed his public speaking and debating skills in the Oxford Union, of which Boris Johnson was once president. At university, the latter “turned self-parody into a form of self-promotion… [He] merged three archetypes from British popular culture: Brideshead, Wooster and the boarding-school bounder. The bounder is the rogue of his school, who doesn’t do his ‘prep’, smokes behind the rugger field, breaks bounds, romances girls and is always getting into ‘scrapes’. In adulthood, bounders traditionally end up hiding from their creditors in Australia.”

SK: I’ve become very suspicious of meritocracy, even when meritocracy is constituted early in life and you need institutional zeal. Whether it’s a fair meritocracy, or an unfair one, even a fair meritocracy is very dangerous. I’d much prefer a kind of German, Scandinavian or Australian system where your life is made much more in your 20s and 30s. Because you’ve done well in your job, people think you’re good at what you’re doing. Not what’s the brand on your CV. 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.” Nearly all campaigning for votes was supposedly banned under the union’s own rule 33. There were occasional attempts to enforce the rule, through tribunals featuring London lawyers, but candidates almost always flouted it.

The born-to-rule Oxford Tories - New Statesman

Simon Kuper (6 March 2006). "All the time in the world". ESPNcricinfo . Retrieved 13 September 2011. Also in 2021, Kuper released The Happy Traitor, [30] an account of the life and motivations of George Blake, a British spy for the Soviet Union. The narrative, praised for its detailed exploration and understanding of Blake's complex character, sheds light on Blake's ideological shifts and personal struggles with identity and marks a significant addition to Kuper's body of work. [31] And that’s the overriding feeling of Chums - of people who have led protected lives, bringing about very painful and real consequences through their carelessness. He has also contributed for many years to the FT's Weekend Magazine, as a Life & Arts columnist, [24] often with long-form essays and interviews spanning themes such as current affairs, travel, history and politics. Kuper simply seethes that he wasn’t part of the inner group who landed in Oxford well connected from school and eased seamlessly into top positions in government. This bitter and twistedness detrimentally affects his judgement and the writing.

Chair

Kuper, Simon. "Becoming French is like winning the lottery". Archived from the original on 11 December 2022 . Retrieved 6 August 2022. I don’t know what I expected about a book called Chums, focused on the British political elite, their time at Oxbridge, and a look into how the establishment cemented - and continues to influence - the governmental structure we see today. This reminds us that there is little which is healthy or natural about boarding school either. It is a cold, pathogenic system which has little room for love, compassion or sensitivity. When you compare the pupils from such a system with those from grammar or state school, you see that normal education would see pupils maybe spend up to eight hours a day with peers, whereas public school boys are around each other closer to 24/7. So in essence over a period of many years most pupils are shaped chiefly by family, but those who went to such boarding houses, are defined by private school and all that it stands for. MH: How do you respond to the argument that while class socialisation begins at school, it is only fully realised at University?