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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.
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SubscribeWhat 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.
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.
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.
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…..
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.
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’.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
What tragedy did Edward St Aubyn endure?
Read his (very well written) books!
Thanks.
17.06 BST.
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.
Blair?
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.
“Other than Dan Hannan, who is approvingly compared to the steely early Bolsheviks, Kuper does not think much of his Oxford Tory Brexiteers.”
Crikey,