Chums: How a Tiny Caste of Oxford Tories Took
Over the UK Hardcover
– 28 April 2022
by Simon Kuper
'A searing
onslaught on the smirking Oxford insinuation that politics is all just a game.
It isn't. It matters' Matthew Parris
Boris
Johnson, Michael Gove, David Cameron, George Osborne, Theresa May, Dominic
Cummings, Daniel Hannan, Jacob Rees-Mogg: Whitehall is swarming with old
Oxonians. They debated each other in tutorials, ran against each other in
student elections, and attended the same balls and black tie dinners.
They aren't
just colleagues - they are peers, rivals, friends. And, when they walked out of
the world of student debates onto the national stage, they brought their
university politics with them.
Eleven of
the fifteen postwar British prime ministers went to Oxford. In Chums, Simon
Kuper traces how the rarefied and privileged atmosphere of this narrowest of
talent pools - and the friendships and worldviews it created - shaped modern
Britain.
A damning
look at the university clique-turned-Commons majority that will blow the doors
of Westminster wide open and change the way you look at our democracy forever.
The long read
‘A nursery of the Commons’: how the Oxford Union
created today’s ruling political class
At the Oxford university debating society in the 80s,
a generation of aspiring politicians honed the art of winning using jokes,
rather than facts
by Simon
Kuper
Tue 19 Apr
2022 06.00 BST
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.
Probably
the main reason Oxford has produced so many prime ministers is the Oxford Union
debating society. Founded in 1823, based in a courtyard behind the Cornmarket
shopping street, the union when I encountered it was a kind of children’s House
of Commons. Like its London model, it resembled a gentlemen’s club complete
with reading rooms, writing room and bar, and, across the garden, Europe’s
largest purpose-built debating chamber.
The union
was one of those Oxford institutions that can flatter middle-class teenagers
such as William Hague and Theresa May into feeling posh. Union officers wore
white tie, speakers black tie, and everyone called one another “honourable
member”. The walls were lined with busts of former prime ministers who had been
union men. Nineteen-year-olds debated visiting 60-year-old cabinet ministers,
and tried to loll on the frontbenches just like them. Christopher Hollis, in
his 1965 book on the union, called the place “a parody of the parliament of
1864 rather than that of 1964”.
It hadn’t
changed much by the 1980s. I never became a member, but I sometimes got press
tickets to debates, and I remember a young Benjamin Netanyahu dispatching
hecklers, and, on the 50th anniversary of Dunkirk, former prime minister Ted
Heath evoking Oxford in 1940 when German invasion loomed. Heath had been
elected union president in November 1938 after accusing Neville Chamberlain of
“turning all four cheeks to Hitler at once”.
Another
attraction of the union was the bar, which – almost miraculously in 80s Britain
– stayed open into the early morning after debates, until the deferential local
police finally intervened. By the mid 80s, the union also had a comedy club in
its Jazz Cellar, where an undergraduate comedian named Armando Iannucci was
learning the art of mocking politicians.
From the
beginning, the union chamber had functioned as a self-conscious nursery of the
Commons, dominated by Etonians. In 1831, William Gladstone had made such a
powerful anti-reform speech at the union that a friend from Eton alerted his
father, the Duke of Newcastle, who offered the 22-year-old prodigy one of the
parliamentary pocket boroughs in his gift. In 1853, Edward Bradley watched
“beardless gentlemen … juggle the same tricks of rhetoric as their fathers were
doing in certain other debates in a certain other House”.
The union’s
debating rules were modelled on those of the Commons. Opposing speakers sat
facing each other in adversarial formation, and there was the same “telling” of
ayes and noes. But unlike the Commons, the union had no real power. Almost the
only thing the union president could actually do was stage debates. Naturally,
then, it encouraged a focus on rhetoric over policy. The institution perfected
the articulacy that enabled aspiring politicians, barristers and columnists to
argue any case, whether they believed it or not. In the union, a speaker might
prepare one side of a debate, and then on the day suddenly have to switch to
the other side to replace an opponent who had dropped out. I suspect it was
this rhetorical tradition that prompted Louis MacNeice to write, in 1939:
… I hasten
to explain
That having
once been to the University of Oxford
You can
never really again
Believe
anything that anyone says and that of course is an asset
In a world
like ours
At
speakers’ dinners, 20-year-old union “hacks” – the name given to union
politicians – mingled with political power brokers up from London. On one of
Churchill’s visits to the union, he remarked to a student (who happened to be
the future Tory minister Quintin Hogg): “If you can speak in this country, you
can do anything.”
The union
was a reason for politically inclined students, especially Tory public
schoolboys, to choose Oxford over Cambridge. At Oxford, the union’s ceaseless
debates and election campaigns kept the university buzzing with politics. The
union elected a president, secretary, treasurer and librarian every eight-week
term. The anthropologist Fiona Graham, in her 2005 book Playing at Politics: An
Ethnography of the Oxford Union, described some students as “virtually
professional politicians, complete with support staff and intricate election
strategies and meetings”.
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.
Union
politicians – instantly recognisable because they were the only students who
wore suits – were forever traipsing around the colleges tapping up ordinary
students with the phrase, “May I count on your vote?” Typically, though, only a
few hundred people, many of them union insiders, bothered to cast theirs.
Allied
candidates organised themselves into “slates”, the union version of parties but
with the ideology usually left out. The slates were illegal, semi-secret,
mostly hidden from the electorate, and essential to the whole enterprise.
Entirely against the rules, candidates would campaign for their slates: “Vote
for me as treasurer, for him as secretary and for her as president.” In other
words, cheating was built into the system.
A union
career was good practice for Westminster. You learned when an ostensible ally
was lying to your face, or when you should be lying to his; when it was safe to
break a rule, and when it wasn’t. Michael Heseltine, who had occupied the
president’s chair – which sat on a raised dais like a throne – called it “the
first step to being prime minister”. Once you had ascended the union, Downing
Street felt within your grasp.
Like his
role model Churchill, Boris Johnson spent years mastering the ancient craft of
public speaking. Eton had offered unmatched opportunities to practise. Johnson
ran the school’s Debating Society, and by the time he left was so well-versed
in traditional speechmaking that he could perform it as parody. His sister
Rachel says: “Eton Debating Society, Polsoc [Eton’s Political Society] all
those places honed your oratorical abilities at a young age. They were given a
huge headstart, these guys. You’d get incredible heavy-hitters going to address
PolSoc and talking to the boys. It’s like playing tennis – you can’t pick up a
tennis racket and go and walk on Centre Court and expect to beat Roger Federer.
So much of all these things are practice. You learn what lands, and you learn
what doesn’t.”
Johnson
learned at school to defeat opponents whose arguments were better simply by
ignoring their arguments. He discovered how to win elections and debates not by
boring the audience with detail, but with carefully timed jokes, calculated
lowerings of voice, and ad hominem jibes.
He went up
to Oxford in 1983 as a vessel of focused ambition. Ironic about everything
else, he was serious about himself. Within his peer group of public schoolboys,
he felt like a poor man in a hurry. He started university with three aims,
writes Sonia Purnell in Just Boris: A Tale of Blond Ambition: to get a
first-class degree, to find a wife (his parents met at Oxford), and to become
union president. At university he was always “thinking two decades ahead”, says
his Oxford friend Lloyd Evans.
Whereas
most students arrived in Oxford barely knowing the union existed, Johnson
possessed the savvy of his class: his father had arrived at Oxford in 1959
intending to become union president. Stanley Johnson had failed, but his son
was a star. Eton encourages boys to develop their individuality, or at least
craft an individual brand, and nobody had done this more fully than Boris
Johnson. Simon Veksner, who followed him from their house at Eton to the union,
recalls: “Boris’s charisma even then was off the charts, you couldn’t measure
it: so funny, warm, charming, self-deprecating. You put on a funny act, based
on the Beano and PG Wodehouse. It works, and then that is who you are.”
Johnson
became the character he played. He turned self-parody into a form of
self-promotion. Like many British displays of eccentricity, his shambolic hair
and dress were class statements. Much like Sebastian Flyte’s teddy bear in
Brideshead Revisited, they said: my privileged status is so secure that I am
free to defy norms.
Johnson
became an “Oxford character”, one of the few undergraduates known beyond his
immediate circle. He already possessed the political asset of being all too
easy to write about. His girlfriend (later wife) Allegra Mostyn-Owen introduced
him to the journalist Tina Brown, who was visiting Oxford to write about the
death from a heroin overdose of the upper-class socialite Olivia Channon. Brown
reports being traduced by Johnson, who supposedly ghosted an inaccurate attack
on her in the Telegraph, under Mostyn-Owen’s byline. Brown claims to have
recorded in her contemporaneous diary: “Boris Johnson is an epic shit. I hope
he ends badly.”
Toby Young
remembers the first time he saw Johnson speak at the union, in October 1983:
“The motion was deadly serious – This House Would Reintroduce Capital
Punishment – yet almost everything that came out of his mouth provoked gales of
laughter. This was no ordinary undergraduate proposing a motion, but a music
hall veteran performing a well-rehearsed comic routine. His lack of
preparedness seemed less like evidence of his own shortcomings as a debater and
more a way of sending up all the other speakers, as well as the pomposity of
the proceedings.”
Young, who
had come up to Oxford with his head full of Brideshead Revisited (the TV
version), admits, “I was completely swept up by the Boris cult.” One young
debating hopeful of the day was Frank Luntz, the future American pollster who
has become known as a master of political language. (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.)
He recalls:
“Boris was brilliant. He bumbles through the details, but God does he know the
substance. I had never met anyone like him, and I still haven’t. Boris gave a
speech on the Middle East – it’s the best Middle East speech to this day I’ve
ever heard, because he talked about it in terms of a playground, and kids
attacking the little kid on the playground. Boris created a brilliant metaphor
and then made the argument around that.”
Johnson
also benefited from the quality of debating competition, says Luntz: “I’ve
never seen a class of more talented people than that class of 1984–86 at the
Oxford Union.” Luntz singles out Nick Robinson, Simon Stevens and Michael Gove.
He told me: “Any one of those three, when they rose [in a debate] to intervene,
the entire chamber shut up, there wasn’t a sound, because everyone knew that
when they were recognised, the [previous speaker] was dead, because they were
so incisive. Just bring in the ambulance and take out the body, because the
three of them could cut you up and show you your heart before you collapsed.”
Anthony
Gardner, another American contemporary of Johnson’s, later US ambassador to the
EU, was less impressed: “Boris was an accomplished performer in the Oxford
Union where a premium was placed on rapier wit rather than any fidelity to the
facts. It was a perfect training ground for those planning to be professional
amateurs. I recall how many poor American students were skewered during debates
when they rather ploddingly read out statistics; albeit accurate and often
relevant in their argumentation, they would be jeered by the crowds with cries
of ‘boring’ or ‘facts’!”
The
undergraduate Johnson quickly became king of all he surveyed. In 1984, a
sixth-former named Damian Furniss came to Johnson’s college, Balliol, for his
entrance interview. “I was a rural working-class kid with a stammer from a
state school which hadn’t prepared me for the experience,” Furniss would recall
in 2019.
“My session
with the dons was scheduled for first thing after breakfast, meaning I was
staying the night and had an evening to kill in the college bar. Johnson was
propping up the bar with his coterie of acolytes whose only apparent role in
life was to laugh at his jokes. Three years older than me … you’d have expected
him to play the ambassador role, welcoming an aspiring member of his college …
Instead, his piss-taking was brutal. In the course of the pint I felt obliged
to finish he mocked my speech impediment, my accent, my school, my dress sense,
my haircut, my background, my father’s work as farm worker and garage
proprietor, and my prospects in the scholarship interview I was there for. His
only motivation was to amuse his posh boy mates.”
At around
the time of this encounter, Johnson was running for union president against the
grammar-schoolboy Neil Sherlock. The election dramatised Oxford’s class
struggle: toff versus “stain”. Sherlock, later a partner at KPMG and PwC, and
briefly a special adviser to the Lib Dem deputy prime minister Nick Clegg, was
the first in his family to attend university.
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.”
Mostyn-Owens
invited Sherlock to tea and asked him not to stand against “my Boris”. Undeterred,
Sherlock campaigned on a platform of “meritocrat versus toff, competence versus
incompetence”. 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.
Johnson’s
candidacy suffered from his Toryism. Conservatives may have been the largest
faction within the union, but they were a minority in the university as a
whole. Most Oxford dons of the time were anti-Thatcher, too. Denying her an
honorary degree in 1985 to protest her cuts to education and research was the
university’s seminal political statement of the decade. “Why should we feed the
hand that bites us?” asked one don.
In the
union election, Sherlock beat Johnson, and came away underwhelmed by his opponent:
“The rhetoric, the personality, the wit were rather randomly deployed, beyond
getting a laugh.” Sherlock expected the Oxford University Conservative
Association’s president Nick Robinson to become the political star, and Johnson
to become a “rather good journalist”. Instead, Robinson went on to present the
BBC’s Today programme (where in October 2021 he told a verbose Johnson, “Prime
minister, stop talking)”.
Johnson’s
defeat to Sherlock wounded him, and he learned from it. “It was, quite likely,
the making of him as a politician,” writes Purnell. “It taught him the
unassailable truth that no one can truly succeed in politics if he relies
entirely on his own cadre.”
But
Etonians tend to get second chances, and a year after his humiliation, he ran
for president again. He had absorbed another truth: that personality could
trump politics. The second time around, he disguised his Toryism by presenting
himself as an unthreatening funny man – “centrist, social democrat, warm and
cuddly,” sums up Sherlock. He even managed to forge an alliance with a union
hack from Ruskin College, rallying its student body of mostly adult
working-class trade unionists behind his slate. Cherwell’s diarist mock-praised
“Balliol’s blond bombshell” as “the unstoppable force for socialist [sic] in
the Palace of the People debating society (the union to you) … Who can stop our
Old Etonian Leninist from stamping his personal hammer and sickle all over the
union?” Thrown in among leftists and liberals, Johnson flourished by spoofing
himself. “He got away with being a Tory by being funny,” says his sister
Rachel. And why not? Since the union president couldn’t make policy even about
students’ lives, and Johnson wasn’t very interested in policy anyway, it was
all just a power game. Johnson’s second presidential campaign was more
competent. Luntz – earning his first ever consulting fee, of £180 – conducted a
poll for Johnson in which, as Luntz recalls, almost all the questions were
about students’ sexual habits.
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.
In this
second campaign, Johnson also worked his charm beyond his base. Gove, a fresher
in 1985, told Johnson’s biographer Andrew Gimson: “The first time I saw him was
in the union bar … He seemed like a kindly, Oxford character, but he was really
there like a great basking shark waiting for freshers to swim towards him.”
Gove, who campaigned for him, admits: “I was Boris’s stooge.” And then, using
almost the same phrase as Toby Young: “I became a votary of the Boris cult.”
With the
votaries assuming their natural places around him, Johnson won the presidency.
His defeated opponent Mark Carnegie later reflected with the much-quoted: “Sure
he’s engaging, but this guy is an absolute fucking killer.”
Johnson’s
gift turned out to be for winning office, not doing anything with it. He didn’t
make much of his presidency, recalls Tim Hames, a union politician of the time:
“The thing was a shambles. He couldn’t organise a term card to save his life.
He didn’t have the sort of support mechanism that he realised in later life
that he required.”
Once
elected, Johnson also dropped his centrist disguise. When Balliol’s Master
Anthony Kenny was contacted by a Social Democratic party MP who needed an
intern, Kenny replied: “I’ve just the man for you. Bright and witty and with
suitable political views. He’s just finished being president of the union, and
his name is Boris Johnson.” But when Kenny told Johnson about the job, he
laughed: “Master, don’t you know I am a dyed-in-the-wool Tory?”
After
graduation, Johnson wrote a telling essay on Oxford politics for his sister’s
book The Oxford Myth. He starts, characteristically, by stating the case
against the union: “Nothing but a massage-parlour for the egos of the assorted
twits, twerps, toffs and misfits that inhabit it … To many undergraduates, the union
niffs of the purest, most naked politics, stripped of all issues except
personality and ambition … Ordinary punters are frequently discouraged from
voting by this thought: are they doing anything else but fattening the CVs of
those who get elected?”
His essay
tackles the great question: how to set about becoming the next prime minister?
Johnson advises student politicians to assemble “a disciplined and deluded
collection of stooges” to get out the vote. “Lonely girls from the women’s
colleges, very often scientists” were particularly useful. Johnson added: “The
tragedy of the stooge is that … he wants so much to believe that his
relationship with the candidate is special that he shuts out the truth. The
terrible art of the candidate is to coddle the self-deception of the stooge.”
Johnson
would display that art throughout his political career, much of which would be
accompanied by stooges he picked up at Oxford – or by his Eton-and-Oxford Union
successor Rees-Mogg. Scanning Cherwell’s diary of 15 November 1985, you find
much of Britain’s right wing of the 2020s already in place. Beside the story
about the “Old Etonian Leninist” Johnson, another item, headed Who Thinks
They’re Who, mocks Johnson’s girlfriend Mostyn-Owen and Young, “Oxford’s answer
to the gutter press”. Young has gone on to become a leading voice on the Tory
right, most recently campaigning against lockdowns. And the same page
introduces readers to an 18-year-old Aberdonian politico named Michael Gove,
already gaining fame at Oxford barely a month after his arrival. “Michael
conceals his rabidly reactionary political views under a Jane Austen
cleric-like exterior,” writes the diarist, who then swerves into
uncharacteristic generosity: “The worst thing about this precocious pin-up is
that he is, in fact, disgustingly unambitious and talented: watch this space
for stories of eventual corruption …”
Gove grew
into a recognisable Oxford character in outsized glasses, speaking with an
exaggerated oratorical air even in daily life. When the future Guardian journalist
Luke Harding arrived at Oxford in 1987, Gove led his freshers’ tour of the
union. “He was basically the same [as in 2021],” recalls Harding. “He had this
preternatural self-confidence, this faux-courtly manner. He seemed somewhat
parodic, someone who wasn’t going to flourish in the real world.” Yet he has
gone on to become the Jeeves to Johnson’s Wooster.
Rees-Mogg
wasn’t ancestrally posh. Instead, he “adopted the persona of the institutions
he attended”, diagnoses his contemporary Owen Matthews, who believes that this
began as a defence mechanism for a thin, bookish child. Arriving at Oxford in
1988, he instantly became an unmissable sight, a rail-thin teenager promenading
along Broad Street dressed like a Victorian vicar, in a double-breasted suit
with an umbrella. In that time and place, it was about the most unconventional
outfit imaginable.
Three-plus
decades later, Rees-Mogg is unchanged. Like Johnson and Gove, he has even kept
the hairstyle of his Oxford days. When I asked him about his student suit, he
said: “Funnily enough, I’m probably wearing exactly the same sort of suit
sitting here talking to you now.”
The Tory
public schoolboys arrived at Oxford almost fully formed. School had given them
the confidence, articulacy and knowhow to bestride the university. They had
already constructed cartoon personal brands for themselves, which gave them
instant recognition at Oxford.
They didn’t
spend university trying on new accents and personas; they already knew what
they wanted to be when they grew up. They were climbing the greasy pole before
most students had even located it.
This is an
edited extract from Chums: How a Tiny Caste of Oxford Tories Took Over the UK
by Simon Kuper, published by Profile on 28 April.
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