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

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While there may be some truth in the argument being made about every problem in the UK being down to most politicians being educated in Oxford (and we don't get as far as 2022 so naturally the UK is the only country that has problems), it's also tortuously hyperbolic at times: A really interesting book review: thanks. I wonder how much of “Chums” relates to the popular (sic) representations of the Bullingdon Club and its members’ antics!? 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”. He has lived in Jamaica, Sweden, Palo Alto, California, Berlin and London. He studied History and German at Oxford University, and attended Harvard University as a Kennedy Scholar. [9] Career [ edit ]

In 2003 he published his book Ajax, The Dutch, the War: Football in Europe during the Second World War. He co-authored the 2009 book Soccernomics with Stefan Szymanski. The authors subsequently put forward a formula allowing Kuper to predict that Serbia and Brazil would play the 2010 FIFA World Cup Final. [27] In early 1983, as a diffident grammar school boy, I sat in a centuries old sitting room, beside a burbling open fire, enduring an interview for a place to study English at Oriel College, Oxford. I was muttering something about Shakespeare. Simon Kuper ( @KuperSimon) is an author and Financial Times journalist, born in Uganda and raised around the world. An Oxford graduate, he later attended Harvard as a Kennedy Scholar. He has written for the Observer, The Times and Guardian, and is also the author of The Happy Traitor and Chums: How a Tiny Caste of Oxford Tories Took Over the UK.DisobedientBodies explores society’s patriarchal and capitalist beauty standards and calls on us to rebel against them! This is a powerful and inspiring new way of looking at beauty.

Running the country or ruining the country? Tell me when it’s time to get out the knitting needles. Of course any English person with their finely tuned class antenna would know this instinctively. President Obama, would not be expected to, but with acute insight, he wrote in his memoirs on first meeting David Cameron, that he seemed to be a man at infinite ease with himself and the world around him as if disaster would not touch him. Cameron calculated that if the Leave cause were led by non-Oxbridge outsiders like Nigel Farage, Remain would win.’ In 2022 he published Chums - How a Tiny Caste of Oxford Tories Took Over the UK, [32] [33] [34] about the connections that enabled a university network to dominate Westminster. [35] Personal life [ edit ]Of course this toxic, maligned template then gets forced onto the public at large with devastating consequences, which is how you end up with what the UK has been enduring for well over a decade. A disastrous system which is run by the same kind of people for the same kind of people, which is designed at its very heart to extr Kuper, Simon (17 March 2022). "Becoming French is like winning the lottery". Financial Times . Retrieved 2 July 2023. 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.” A very interesting, short summing up of the origins of and the road to Brexit as well as a sad one, when all is said and done, as the sunny uplands for the masses seem nowhere in sight, it's there for our chums, the rest don't matter.

For cost savings, you can change your plan at any time online in the “Settings & Account” section. If you’d like to retain your premium access and save 20%, you can opt to pay annually at the end of the trial. Formula predicts who will win". Stuff. Archived from the original on 14 December 2014 . Retrieved 14 December 2014. Kuper is considered one of the most influential voices at the Financial Times. [17] Since joining the publication in 1994, he has held various roles, writing on a wide range of topics, from sports and popular culture to politics. [18] [19] When I arrived at Oxford in 1988 to study history and German, it was still a very British and quite amateurish university, shot through with sexual harassment, dilettantism and sherry. Michael Gove, Boris Johnson and the much less prominent David Cameron had graduated just before I arrived, but from my messy desk at the student newspaper Cherwell, I covered a new generation of future politicians. You couldn’t miss Jacob Rees-Mogg, the only undergraduate who went around in a double-breasted suit, or Dan Hannan who, at the age of 19, founded a popular Eurosceptic movement called the Oxford Campaign for an Independent Britain, which, with hindsight, looks like the intellectual genesis of Brexit. Cherwell was a poor imitation of Private Eye – inaccurate, gnomic and badly written in the trademark Oxford tone of relentless irony, with jokes incomprehensible to outsiders, but it turns out that we weren’t just lampooning inconsequential teenage blowhards. Though we didn’t realise it, we were witnessing British power in the making. In truth,” writes Kuper, with an even-handedness surely acquired during his early schooling in the Netherlands, “almost everyone who gets into Oxford is a mixture of privilege and merit in varying proportions.” Though mostly privilege. At the start of the 21st century, private schools (which at the time educated about 7 per cent of the population) supplied around half of Oxford’s domestic student intake. Kuper quotes the former Labour minister Andrew Adonis: “The place felt like one huge public school to which a few others of us had been smuggled in by mistake.”Simon Kuper: 'Ik ben beducht voor mensen die niet kunnen luisteren' ". NRC (in Dutch). 20 October 2021 . Retrieved 10 July 2023.

Opening in 1963 New York, to Renaissance Florence, to the birth of theatre in fifth-century Athens, and the Sex Pistols shattering Thatcherite Britain - take your seat for the history of performance. In retrospect, surveying the damage of his labours, a former Master of Balliol College questions the value of an Oxford education: “What had we done for Boris? Had we taught him truthfulness? No. Had we taught him wisdom? No.” Jacob Rees-Mogg speaks at the Oxford Union Society in 1991. Listening are Kenneth Clarke and John Patten. Photograph: Edward Webb/Alamy You talk of Anthony and Cleopatra in a detached manner, Mr Jones,” said the languid interviewer. “Tell me, would you die for love?”The name-dropping of some of these sources - like Sam Gyimah - is particularly jarring (Gyimah has, rightly, not been forgiven in many quarters for his crooked campaign against Emma Dent Coad). Similarly, making people like Theresa May, Michael Gove and Jacob Rees-Mogg the object of discussion without even mentioning the horrendous, often racist, policies they implemented, is a miserable and alienating experience. It helped me understand the way debates are conducted in the Commons and why outrageous lying (even to Parliament with regard to numerous violations of Covid rules) apparently does not kill political careers. 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.” Kuper, Simon (18 September 2019). "How Oxford University shaped Brexit — and Britain's next prime minister". Financial Times . Retrieved 1 July 2023. The sway Oxford has had and continues to have over the UK and beyond is grim as it is depressing. I think one of Kuper’s main advantages is that he is both an insider and outsider, an insider as he studied there for four years, and an outsider because he isn’t English and is a foreigner. So he gets both fresh perspective and first-hand experience, which brings an element of balance.