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Oxford University didn’t cause Brexit This drunken microcosm of British society isn't that powerful


April 29, 2022   5 mins

It happens every Thursday during term time. To the side of St Michael’s street, arched neo-gothic buildings. A dingy bar, a library which never has enough plugs, and a crenelated debating hall. That’s the Oxford Union. It is, apparently, the nursery of all the ailments that afflict the kingdom.

Every Thursday: eminent guests and student debaters meet in the hall. It has been a House of Commons for speechifying embryos since 1823. Points of order; references to honourable gentleman; rules-based pedantry; pomposity; ambition. “An incomparable school of politics”, Jan Morris called it.

The show is watched by the fish-cold marble faces of grown up to grandeur Union men: Gladstone, Asquith, Curzon, Macmillan, and Salisbury. To speak here is to join an exclusive club. To speak well here may be the first croaking syllables towards ultimate power. One day: you — yes, you boy! — can be a bust.

The Union is where Boris Johnson, Michael Gove, and Jacob Rees-Mogg began their political ascents. But, as you may have gathered, Oxford has launched more than contemporary Tories. The university’s yellow-grey colleges educated Dr Johnson and Sir Walter Raleigh, the only English Pope, Earl Hague and Shelley, ten Viceroys of India, VS Naipaul and Bill Clinton. Oh, and the Financial Times columnist Simon Kuper.

It was summer, 2019. People who read the FT were still unsure why Brexit happened, beyond knowing that whatever made it happen was not good. At that moment Kuper appeared, and wrote an article that was so delicious, and so put-all-the-dots-together, it immediately went viral. What machine spat out Brexit? Oxford. Which wackily irresponsible creche raised Boris Johnson? Oxford. The reason Kuper provided was not good. An old story (unearned privilege; naughty toffs) that has always chilled Britain’s fretful not quite upper-middle classes. It was just what Remainers wanted to read. Finally, an explanation that satisfied all their priors.

Now the viral article is a short and typical non-fiction book. Chums: How A Tiny Caste of Oxford Tories Took Over the UK. Kuper’s story is simple. One afternoon he flicked through some old Cherwells, where he had been a student journalist in the late Eighties, and realised that the names there were the same ones bothering the pages of the Times in the late 2010s. Gove, Cameron, and Johnson; Hunt, Hannan, and Rees-Mogg. He had covered them back then, and here they were again, running Britain into the ground by levering it out of the EU. “Though we didn’t realise it, we were witnessing British power in the making,” Kuper writes of his time at Oxford.

The Brexiteers were not just Brexiteers. They were Oxford Brexiteers. They belonged to a generation that faced no wars, no real poverty, no famines, and not a single earthquake. A generation “without tragedy” — if we ignore Edward St Aubyn, who drifted through Oxford in those years. Instead, la haute had Brideshead Revisited on ITV, champagne, strawberries, and the polished company of sloaney girls in floaty dresses. A dreamy epicurean garden world of velvet and lavender, where young men lofted Nigella Lawson through parties on a sedan chair, far from the Trade Unionists and Left-wing council officers who despised them all.

After Oxford they moved into opinion journalism, then to politics. Bored, nostalgic, and louche, they seized on Brexit as a Thing To Do, and for a game to play. Their dislike of Brussels was personal, not political. The EU might get in the way of their God-given, Oxford-inculcated right to rule. “Brexit was above all their generational grand project,” Kuper argues, “designed to protect the powers of their personal fiefdom of Westminster.”

Other than Dan Hannan, who is approvingly compared to the steely early Bolsheviks, Kuper does not think much of his Oxford Tory Brexiteers. Nevertheless, he is good on Boris. On the sad clown tensions; his “killer” cynicism; his studied Wooster-Waugh role-playing. Then again, no one left in London media should be in this game if they can’t file 1,000 classy words of Boris pop-psych at this point. As Kuper points out himself: “[Boris] possessed the political asset of being all too easy to write about.”

As for Boris, so for Brexit. So easy to write about, if your aim is to titillate rather than explain. Did Brexit happen because Michael Gove, David Cameron and Boris Johnson learned that “the rules didn’t apply to them” in Oxford in the Eighties, as Kuper suggests? Did Brexit happen, as Fintan O’Toole argued in Heroic Failure, because England’s toffs ‘n’ plebs still harbour a sickly yearning to hear the sound of trumpets on the plains of Omdurman? And did Brexit happen, as every half-drunk Etonian I’ve met since June 2016 has insisted to me, because Boris Johnson got into Pop, and David Cameron didn’t? In a century, these tropes may be of sociological interest to historians, but they will not have much explanatory power.

Admit it: we all like a conspiracy theory. History becomes simpler that way. We can ignore material conditions, and argue that change comes about in the small rooms where men manufacture opinions. Chums is this kind of history. Kuper, like fellow Oxford man Cecil Rhodes before him, believes that ideas, not circumstances, ruthlessly organised and disseminated, are what move things.

Oxford can fool anyone there into thinking this way. Walk around cobbled Radcliffe Square at night, when it gets spooky and hushed, and you may believe that this private place is the inner sanctum of Britain. The centre of the centre, the bullseye, and the only place that really matters. The fact that none of this is true — there is no experience quite as shattering as sneaking into a high-altitude, Nobel Prize-winner stuffed seminar at All Soul’s and realising that half the room is as stupid as you are — doesn’t stop Kuper. “To understand power in today’s Britain,” he writes, “requires travelling back in time to the streets of Oxford, somewhere between 1983 and 1993.”

Oxford always loved a romantic tale like Chums, though Kuper would hate to think he’s written one. The university delights in being the mover behind massive historical events. Romantics say Oxford was responsible for the discovery of America, based on the fact that a paragraph from Roger Bacon’s Opus Majus gave Columbus the idea of a westward passage to India. When Roger Boyle devised his law of gas expansion in his grubby High Street lodgings in 1662, wasn’t he launching the Age of Steam? When Edmund Cartwright — Fellow of Magdalen — invented the power-loom in 1785, didn’t he make the Industrial Revolution inevitable? To this list Kuper adds Brexit. Another Oxford fantasy, like Tolkien’s Middle-Earth, and Carroll’s Wonderland. Made at the Union, delivered in Westminster.

Kuper is far from romantic about Oxford though. As with the current Vice-Chancellor Louise Richardson, and many students there today, he seems embarrassed that it exists at all. Embarrassed — only after saying what a powerful and important and special place it is, even if it is powerful and important and special in negative ways.

Chums ends up baffled by Oxford. Kuper cannot see the point of the place in our supposed-to-be meritocratic age. Like Hooper walking through the Marchmain’s palatial house in Brideshead Revisited, Kuper is troubled. “It doesn’t seem to make any sense,” says Hooper, “one family in a place this size. What’s the use of it?”

Kuper doesn’t trust the house to clean itself up. Outside forces must intervene, before young over-valeted men with long faces — he raises the ominous spectre of Jacob Rees-Mogg’s nephew play-acting at the Union recently — get big ideas again. So make a use for it. Make it a postgraduate “Institute of Advanced Studies”, he says. Or go even more full FT: convert Oxford into a start-up hub, and make “even more money from corporate conferences and executive education”. He thinks this will make Britain a fairer place.

This is like cutting a man in half and telling him to dance. Kuper wants to maim Oxford — but why stop there? Once you have abolished the undergraduate system that has endured for eight centuries, you may as well bring it all down. Bulldoze it. Cull the Magdalen deer park. Pull down the Sheldonian, crater the Bodleian. Wouldn’t the Union make a wonderful bingo hall?

Don’t pretend Oxford can be fixed, or that it is more powerful than it actually is. Don’t pretend, as Kuper does, that countries can ever have justly selected ruling elites. Either shutter Oxford (and watch in horror as another elite arises from another elite forcing house) — or otherwise accept it for what it is, and always will be. A microcosm of British society: stratified, argumentative, semi-democratic, drunk. An artefact of cruel, cold beauty that will never be fair.


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Peter B
Peter B
2 years ago

What a load of nonsense. Kuper’s book, that is.
Anyone from a state school who got into Oxford or Cambridge knows just how tough that it. But it’s not “meritocratic” ?
This feels like an absurd over-generalisation. Only a very small minority of Oxford students will be like Boris Johnson. But hey, let’s forget about all the rest, studying maths, sciences, engineering, medicine … . No, let’s tar them all with the same brush.
The exclusive social bubble being discussed here (which may well have included Kuper) almost certainly amounts to no more than 5% of the Oxford student population.
This book of Kuper’s sounds as intellectually lazy as those it claims to despise.
Brexit happened because the majority of people voting wanted it. There is no conspiracy. “In your guts, you know its nuts”, to paraphrase LBJ. In their guts, the British people as a whole did not believe in the EU. The “why” and the “how” here can differ.

Paul Rogers
Paul Rogers
2 years ago
Reply to  Peter B

You are certainly right about this being only the 5%. Certainly it was thus in my day as an engineer, which did require a sharp mind, so I would say was meritocratic. The Union (and their little clubs) was just not somewhere ‘normal’ students went.
Kuper’s book does sound like a silly fantasy and one to avoid, as if that is going to be hard. It’s amazing how, with the magical gift of hindsight, intent or coordinated action can be traced back 30 years where there was no such thing at the time. It was just happenstance. People like their fantasies. Kuper certainly has his.

Peter B
Peter B
2 years ago
Reply to  Paul Rogers

I was a Cambridge engineer. It slightly pains me to be defending Oxford here, but sometimes you just have to swallow your pride and do the right thing !
There’s a massive difference between the work schedule, culture and lifestyle of – for example – engineering students and some of the humanities subjects.
Plenty of “normal” students went to the Cambridge Union (cheap films, interesting speakers, surprisingly good value). That was not exclusive. Getting on the committee probably was.
If you had enough self-confidence (and not all state school pupils do) and ability, I don’t think the public school cliques needed to bother you too much – they certainly wouldn’t waste any time socialising with you. It’s really down to you if you let this sort of thing upset you.

Eamonn Toland
Eamonn Toland
2 years ago
Reply to  Peter B

Speaking as an Oxford Humanities alumnus (History & Economics 88-91) I have to say my main interaction with the Union involved a Rocky Horror party and some vile-but-free Ginger Wine cocktails, although I was present when a teenage Jacob Rees-Mogg was sarcastically described as having the gravitas of a 55-year-old in one of his first speeches…..

Linda Hutchinson
Linda Hutchinson
2 years ago
Reply to  Paul Rogers

My husband won a scholarship to Cambridge to study natural sciences (physics in his case) and he told me that really the work load was so high that there wasn’t time to be involved in things like the Union or much else there.

Rhys Jaggar
Rhys Jaggar
2 years ago

Absolutely right. You had to decide which lectures to skive and cadge notes on if you actually wanted to play any sport at Cambridge doing NatSci. There was no timetable of ‘Wednesday afternoons and Saturdays allocated to sport’. And terms were two weeks shorter than all competitor institutions, so you had to complete a more rigorous syllabus in 20% less time.
The way terms were organised there was an absolute disgrace: all about Arts Dons wanting long holidays to b****r off for four months ‘doing research’.

Matt M
Matt M
2 years ago

Surely if Kuper is right and Oxford did cause Brexit then it is responsible for fulfilling the will of the people to leave the EU and ensuring parliamentary sovereignty rather than rule by unelected foreign bureaucrats.
So Oxford is actually a force for democracy.
I suspect what Kuper actually dislikes is the common man.

Last edited 2 years ago by Matt M
Ethniciodo Rodenydo
Ethniciodo Rodenydo
2 years ago
Reply to  Matt M

Ye it was people like Kuper who took us into the EU (or EEC) against the will of the British people because they knew better and it was their birth right

Last edited 2 years ago by Ethniciodo Rodenydo
Andrew Langridge
Andrew Langridge
2 years ago
Reply to  Matt M

Try telling the French and Germans that they don’t have any sovereignty and they’ll laugh in your face. Britain failed to make the most of being in the EU due to it’s inflated sense of entitlement.

J Bryant
J Bryant
2 years ago

I don’t know why but I barely registered Will Lloyd’s articles for my first year or so on Unherd. He seems to have come into his own in recent months. Clever, cutting writing. I assume he attended Oxford.
Don’t bother bulldozing all those pretty Oxford buildings with heavy machinery that generates greenhouse gases. Just give the CRT-mongers free reign to “deconstruct” science and all things useful, and soon all that will be left is a beautiful corpse.

Bill W
Bill W
2 years ago

I was at Oxford University in the 80s and the posh politically inclined people I met were anti Thatcher and pro SDP if not Labour. Very few members of my college were members of the Oxford Union, from memory mainly Etonians. Most of the undergrads seemed if not apolitical, not particularly fond of (student) party politics.

Last edited 2 years ago by Bill W
Jeff Carr
Jeff Carr
2 years ago

Simon Kuper is so self-centred that he believes some group in the Establishment must be responsible for Brexit.
If he climbed down from his ivory tower and spent some time on the doorsteps of towns lIke Wigan, Leigh and Wakefield he would realise that it is the self-employed artisans and semi-skilled working classes that voted across party lines for Brexit. Not the readers of the FT, Guardian or Times but readers of the Mirror, Sun, Mail and Express. The great unwashed not some small elite group at Oxford.

Dustshoe Richinrut
Dustshoe Richinrut
2 years ago

I like Laurel and Hardy’s 1939 feature length A Chump At Oxford. The two of them were completely fish out of water as soon as they arrived at their halls. Except when Stan got a bump to his head and rediscovered his old self: the world famous don Lord Paddington. It was quite clear, however, that Stan had more in common with Americans, like his pal Ollie, than with his fellow Englishmen harassing the living daylights out of him at Oxford.

Mark Gourley
Mark Gourley
2 years ago

Been there, done that, got the white tie. Curiously, I believe a contemporary of mine was one Anthony Blair of St John’s College who played no visible part In undergraduate political games. I wonder what happened to him?

Rhys Jaggar
Rhys Jaggar
2 years ago

Brexit was caused primarily by the London-Centric New Labour party betraying its core voters in the Midlands and the North.
That’s who voted in droves for Brexit.

ARNAUD ALMARIC
ARNAUD ALMARIC
2 years ago

What tragedy did Edward St Aubyn endure?

JR Stoker
JR Stoker
2 years ago
Reply to  ARNAUD ALMARIC

Read his (very well written) books!

ARNAUD ALMARIC
ARNAUD ALMARIC
2 years ago
Reply to  JR Stoker

Thanks.

17.06 BST.

Last edited 2 years ago by ARNAUD ALMARIC
ARNAUD ALMARIC
ARNAUD ALMARIC
2 years ago
Reply to  JR Stoker

I’ve taken a short cut via Amazon Reviews and consulted my Chief of Staff.
Frankly I don’t believe it! But it is very easy to slander the dead. I find the idea that he was sodomised by his father (a former Cavalry Officer) simply staggering.

22.15 BST.

Last edited 2 years ago by ARNAUD ALMARIC
Ethniciodo Rodenydo
Ethniciodo Rodenydo
2 years ago
Reply to  ARNAUD ALMARIC

Blair?

Russell Hamilton
Russell Hamilton
2 years ago

No, St Aubyn – very bleak, but also very witty books. You need to space them out with something a bit more light-hearted – the Flashman books would be perfect.

Things and thoughts. Things and thoughts.
Things and thoughts. Things and thoughts.
2 years ago

Other than Dan Hannan, who is approvingly compared to the steely early Bolsheviks, Kuper does not think much of his Oxford Tory Brexiteers.

Crikey,