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

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This is where the establishment operators of the 21st century were made: if public school doesn’t connect them, then the square mile of undergraduate Oxford will.

Hannan, among Kuper’s key witnesses here, had grown up in Peru, where his family had a poultry farm. The previous year’s union president, Boris Johnson, failed to show up for the slave auction and was sold in absentia. 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. A self-proclaimed “word guy”, Luntz invented the phrase “climate change” for the George W Bush administration so as to make “global warming” seem innocuous – something he now says he regrets.But did you know that Johnson’s page in Eton’s Leave Book of 1983 “featured a photograph of himself adorned with two scarves and a machine gun, and an inscription pledged to register ‘more notches on my phallocratic phallus’”? More than that, it adds a necessary coda to the life and work of this complex, driven, restless man. Many people voted for this “Biggest Man on Campus… the silverback gorilla, the alpha male”, remember? Johnson mobilised his public-school networks, but even the 150 or so Etonians up at Oxford at the time proved too small a political base in the new mass union. As with Rees-Mogg’s Lord Snooty brand, such people can initially be regarded with amused tolerance, as “the mad relatives you shut up in the attic”.

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. 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. Chums is not just about the smallness of Britain's privileged elite or the early advantages it enjoys.Mogg, who “adopted the persona of the institutions he attended”, was “known for loudly rehearsing his speeches in his room”. But how, he wonders in a central theme of the book, has a “Brahmin caste”, educated at the University of Oxford “captured the British machine?