The magnificient FRENCH CHATEAU of the COUNTESS Barbara de Nicolaÿ. Excl...

Levi's Wokes - SNL / The sketch jokes that the pants can’t offend anyone because they “have no style” and fit every body because “they fit no body.”

The sketch jokes that the pants can’t offend anyone because they “have no style” and fit every body because “they fit no body.”

 

'SNL' Just Created the Pants the World's Been Waiting for - Sizeless, Identity-Free 'Woke' Jeans

 

By Colleen Kratofil  Published on October 2, 2017 12:28 PM

https://people.com/style/snl-levis-woke-jeans-sketch/

 

There’s been a lot of talk lately in the fashion industry about the influence of gender non-conforming clothing. Stars like Evan Rachel Wood and Jaden Smith are redefining conventional dressing on the red carpet. Designers are creating gender-less collections with men and women both modeling the season’s latest designs. And now there’s finally a pair of jeans that’s bending the gender norms to new heights all thanks to Saturday Night Live‘s new Levi’s parody, Woke Jeans.

 

In its new sketch, the show’s cast (with host Ryan Gosling) all model the sizeless, style-neutral, gender non-conforming denim made for a “generation that defies labels.”

 

The revolutionary pants have an exaggerated harem-style pant leg with a 180 degree full crotch zipper that comes in the undeniably neutral color, #greb.

 

The sketch jokes that the pants can’t offend anyone because they “have no style” and fit every body because “they fit no body.”

 

Gosling hosted the SNL season 43 opener episode with musical guest JAY-Z, where he reunited with La La Land costar Emma Stone during his monologue and couldn’t keep a straight face during a sketch with Kate McKinnon. He was accompanied by his wife Eva Mendes at the afterparty early Sunday morning.

 

If you have any doubt that Woke Jeans could ever become a reality, just take a look at SNL‘s other legendary denim sketch, Mom Jeans and all the celebs who are loving the look today.

Jacques Garcia: A Sicilian Dream: Villa Elena

 

Jacques Garcia: A Sicilian Dream: Villa Elena

Author Jacques Garcia, Text by Alain Stella, Photographs by Bruno Ehrs

https://www.rizzoliusa.com/book/9782081513518

 

On the outskirts of the spectacular baroque town of Noto, Sicily, Jacques Garcia has transformed an ancient monastery into an abode of earthly bliss.

 

Celebrated interior designer Jacques Garcia invites readers inside his private residence in Sicily for the first time. The former monastery, rebuilt in Noto’s characteristic golden limestone, boasts spectacular salons that have been restored with a profusion of noble materials and techniques: colored marbles, flamboyant stuccowork, majolica tiles, damask silks, and velvets. Time stops in the elegant music room, decorated with embroidered silks and rococo-style mirrors that reflect the decor to infinity; the gilded dining room is hung with silk damask wall coverings and an eighteenth-century Murano chandelier and furnished with Chantilly porcelain and antique Italian rococo chairs. The grand marble salon features baroque paintings and a stunning collection of sculpture and Sicilian furniture.

 

The exquisite villa—surrounded by shaded terraces planted with towering cacti and succulents—attests to Garcia’s love of ancient civilizations and his masterful blending of Arabian, Norman, Renaissance, and baroque influences that converge in Sicily’s colorful history. The domain, dotted with ancient sculptures and reflecting pools, is graced with splendid panoramic views revealing the sea near Syracuse, a distant folly, a restored villa nestled in an ancient olive grove, and the decaying grandeur of a classical temple reconstructed with ancient fragments.

 

About The Author

Alain Stella has written numerous books, including Jacques Garcia: Twenty Years of Passion, Château du Champ de Bataille; Historic Houses of Paris; and French Wine Châteaux: Distinctive Vintages and Their Estates. Bruno Ehrs is an award-winning Swedish photographer whose work has been published in Vaux-le-Vicomte: A Private Invitation, Château de Villette, Villa Balbiano, A Day at Château de Vaux-le-Vicomte, and Chaumet: Parisian Jeweler Since 1780.

 

 

Publish Date: November 01, 2022

 

How Jacques Garcia restored the magnificent baroque interiors of his house in Sicily

 

The renowned interior designer's renovation of this former monastery in Noto is the subject of a new book from Flammarion, Jacques Garcia: A Sicilian Dream: Villa Elena. In this extract the author Alain Stella takes a look at the restored Grande Galerie, and how Garcia painstakingly brought back its original baroque glory after the space had been destroyed in the earthquake of 1693

 

20 October 2022

https://www.houseandgarden.co.uk/article/jacques-garcia-villa-elena

 

It is amusing to read Dominique Vivant Denon’s account of Noto in his Travels through Sicily and Malta. The artist, diplomat, art historian, and future director of the Louvre Museum expresses what an aesthete enamored of classicism thought about the rebuilt town: “It is a matter of regret here, as well as at Catania, that so much expense, and such splendid materials as those to be found at Noto, should have been laid out with so little judgment; and that a city almost new should, to the disgrace of the arts, be erected in such a manner, in an age, when there are such efforts made to study and imitate the beautiful models of simple, elegant, and well planned architecture.” Simple, noble, et sage: a far cry indeed from what was beginning to be called “baroque” at the time. The word derives from the Portuguese barroco, designating a pearl of irregular shape. For the enlightened lovers of the classical style, this extravagant, “irregular” architecture with its profusion of contrasting decorations, was indeed the “disgrace of the arts.”

 

And yet, in the land of Michelangelo and of St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome, of the Counter-Reformation and the Council of Trent that advocated the worship of saints, icons, and relics, art necessarily went hand in hand with the essentially irrational exaltation of passion and emotion; and also with a grandeur conceived as an offering, or an attempt—not without a sense of pathos—to get closer to heaven. With extraordinary dramatic genius, Bernini executed the commissions of Pope Urban VIII, including the monumental canopy over the high altar of St. Peter’s. Numerous baroque churches were being built in Rome, as were spectacular princely palaces, not least those of popes Urban VIII (Palazzo Barberini, the work of Bernini and his future great rival Francesco Borromini) and Innocent X (Palazzo Pamphili, by Carlo Rainaldi).

 

In Sicily, it took the earthquake of 1693 and the ensuing reconstruction for Sicilian baroque to flourish, especially from 1730, in an even more passionate style rich in influences that distinguished it from continental baroque. While the island was under Austrian rule (1718–34), churches and palaces were initially influenced by Viennese architecture, as can be seen in the Villa Palagonia in Bagheria, near Palermo. But Sicilian architects soon broke free from Austrian and even Roman influences and began designing buildings with exuberant ornamentation, full of stairs, columns, balconies, stone carvings, and statues, often in a rollicking polychrome mixture of marbles and majolica, behind curved façades. The island’s black volcanic rock was also used to create striking contrasts and enhance effects of light and shade. Into this decorative kaleidoscope, Sicilian baroque sometimes introduced touches of Norman Gothic—and also a Spanish influence during the reign of Charles III, King of Sicily and Jerusalem from 1735 to 1759, visible in the cathedral of Catania.

 

Villa Elena naturally embraced the prolific imagination of Italian baroque, which can today be admired in the majestic Grande Galerie, large enough to serve as a ballroom, or a throne room. When Jacques Garcia acquired the site, barns occupied this space—probably once the monastery’s main hall. Once he had recovered the room’s original volume, he drew inspiration for its decoration from the splendid baroque interiors of the three great Roman palazzi that he loves above all: Pallavicini-Rospigliosi, Doria Pamphilj, and Colonna. Setting eyes on its painted ceiling, on the profusion of ancient busts and vases, bronzes, antique marble door frames, tapestries, consoles, and eighteenth-century Italian chairs, one is indeed instantly reminded of those palaces. Everything here is reminiscent of Rome and the lavish lifestyle of its princely families.

 

To reinvent this majestic décor, Garcia began by designing the ceiling structure, which was determined by the presence of spread eagles: seventeenth-century Italian sculptures, which he had re-cast to punctuate the highly baroque cornices and decorative spurs edging the ceiling. The eagles are flanked by overdoors with recessed Greco-Roman busts—as in the Casino dell’Aurora at the Palazzo Pallavicini-Rospigliosi, whose vaulted ceiling carries Guido Reni’s famous Aurora fresco. Other fundamental elements that determined the décor as a whole were the three large portraits of Saint Helena dating from the seventeenth century, by a painter in Rubens’s circle. Acquired several years ago and recently listed as historical monuments in Italy, they hang at each end of the room—and gave the villa its name. Why this choice? Garcia likes to imagine that when, in the fourth century, Helena brought back a relic from the True Cross in Jerusalem to Rome, she came through Sicily. The villa thus pays tribute to the long journey undertaken by the mother of Emperor Constantine.

 

A series of other portraits hang in the Grande Galerie: several of cardinals of the Brancaccio family, dating from about 1700. The first, who lived in the twelfth century, was sent by Rome to Sicily to evangelize the island that had fallen to the Normans after the period of Arab rule. Below these portraits hang four large seventeenth-century Flemish tapestries depicting the romance of Mark Antony and Cleopatra. Dotted around the Grande Galerie, and sometimes moved around on the whim of the master of the house, are a bronze Laocoön Group by Luigi Valadier (late eighteenth century), an imposing statue of Athena from the fifth century BCE, two magnificent seventeenth-century Sicilian altar frontals in marble, and three cardinal’s thrones, among other pieces.

 

The decoration of the fireplace is typical of the great Roman palaces, whose owners always had one or two popes in their family; a chair for the pope was placed before the fireplace, its back more lavishly embroidered than the front. On each side of the fireplace hung a cushion on which to kneel before the Holy Father, and the traditional ombrellino that was held over him. Garcia has recreated this décor with period pieces. In front of the fireplace, he placed a fine seventeenth-century fire screen in old silk and gilt wood, also from a Roman palazzo, and acquired from an antique dealer in Palermo.

Pitti Uomo 2023 - The people of Pitti 103

The exclusive forms of education and the myth about the elite of Oxford/ Cambridge/ Eton/ Harrow/ To understand the Zahawi story and Tory sleaze, look no further than Britain's posh cliques.

To understand the Zahawi story and Tory sleaze, look no further than Britain’s posh cliques

John Harris

From the disgraced former party chair to the Richard Sharp investigation, government failure stems from a network of private schools and elite universities

 

Illustration by Matt Kenyon

 Illustration: Matt Kenyon/The Guardian

Sun 29 Jan 2023 08.33 EST

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/jan/29/elitist-leadership-zahawi-schools-britain

 

A country in deep crisis ought to at least have a government capable of governing; it is post-Brexit Britain’s unlucky fate to be run by an administration in a similar state of breakdown. The Tory party chair, Nadhim Zahawi, has been found to have committed a serious breach of the ministerial code and finally sacked. The investigation into bullying accusations against Dominic Raab, the deputy prime minister, is yet to conclude. Meanwhile, the latest story centred on Boris Johnson grinds on.

 

If it was a play, it would sit awkwardly between thriller and farce, with characters that were well drawn, and well connected. Johnson, we know: the financially incontinent prime minister who desperately needed an £800,000 “credit facility”. Then there is Sam Blyth, a “distant cousin” of Johnson and founder of a chain of Canadian private schools, apparently persuaded to be the then prime minister’s loan guarantor. The cast is completed by Richard Sharp, the former banker and Tory donor who is now the chair of the BBC, and Simon Case, Britain’s most senior civil servant. Questions now swirl around Sharp’s alleged dealings with the other three, in the weeks and months before he was appointed to his role at the BBC. Last Monday, Johnson said that Sharp “knows absolutely nothing about my personal finances – I can tell you that for ding-dang sure”. Over the weekend, the Sunday Times published a leaked letter reportedly handed to Johnson by Case: “Given the imminent announcement of Richard Sharp as the new BBC chair,” it said, “it is important that you no longer ask his advice about your personal financial matters.” We now await enlightenment about how both these things could possibly be true.

 

By way of shining a bit more light on this particular story, consider the backgrounds of the actors in it. Johnson, of course, was educated at Eton College and Oxford University. Sharp, whose father was the chairman of Cable & Wireless plc and became Baron Sharp of Grimsdyke, was a sixth former at the private Merchant Taylors’ school in north-west London, and also went to Oxford; his twin sister is the president of the King’s Bench Division of the high court. Sunak – who worked for Sharp at the investment bank Goldman Sachs – is another Oxford alumnus, and an old boy of Winchester College; Case went to the independent Bristol Grammar School, and Trinity College, Cambridge.

 

And so it goes on. Sharp’s appointment as BBC chair is being reviewed by the commissioner for public appointments, William Shawcross – another Old Etonian and Oxford graduate, whose daughter Eleanor (St Paul’s School for Girls, then Oxford) is Sunak’s policy chief. On the Sunday that the story first broke, Johnson and Sharp were defended on BBC One by Johnson’s sister Rachel Johnson, another former pupil of St Paul’s who went on to Oxford.

 

Meanwhile, questions about dealings between HMRC and Nadhim Zahawi – a comparatively lowly graduate of University College London, although he also spent time at private schools and is very wealthy – were being investigated by the government’s ethics adviser, Laurie Magnus, a former financier and “3rd baronet”, who is – guess what? – an alumnus of both Oxford and Eton.

 

To some extent, I have seen how these absurdly narrow cliques cohere, and why Britain – or rather England – still looks more like a weird fortified city-state than a forward-looking country. In 1989, I went to Oxford, having made it there from a comprehensive school and a state-sector sixth-form college. Then, as now, it was an institution that supposedly recruited and schooled the ruling class, but I quickly got the impression that the latest elite generation had already come into being, long before the relevant people had entered higher education.

 

Somewhere outside my social circles were people who had arrived at Oxford secure in the knowledge that they would be both comfortable in such grand surroundings and in touch with lots of people they already counted as friends (like a lot of state-educated students, I arrived there knowing no one at all). In a book titled The Oxford Myth, put together in 1988 by Rachel Johnson, Boris Johnson described “a loosely knit [sic] confederation of middle-class undergraduates, invariably public school, who share the same accents and snobberies, and who meet each other at the same parties”. He went on: “If you are a member of the establishment, you will know it. You cannot be recruited.” I saw this in glimpses: Jacob Rees-Mogg walking down Oxford High Street, dressed in his customary double-breasted suit; his fellow high-ups at the famous Oxford Union Society, who seemed old before their time, superficial and impossibly confident.

 

Last year saw the publication of the Financial Times columnist Simon Kuper’s superb book Chums, which was about two connected stories: the hatching of the idea of Brexit at Oxford, and the tale of how the Conservative party eventually ended the unbroken run of state-educated leaders that had gone from Ted Heath to Michael Howard. “In the 1980s,” Kuper wrote, “the upper classes were regaining the confidence that had been beaten out of them during Britain’s social democratic 1945-to-1979 era.”

 

For all Margaret Thatcher’s patina of petit-bourgeois meritocracy, he said, “during her reign, privilege and the right accent became something to be celebrated again”. You see this vividly in the infamous Bullingdon Club photograph featuring Johnson and David Cameron, taken at Oxford in 1987; two decades later, when Cameron became Tory leader, the renaissance of poshness and entitlement was complete. Kuper describes Cameron as “a quasi aristocrat who ruled the UK with a posh clique of school chums”, a way of doing things at least partly adopted by his latest successor: Sunak’s new “political secretary” is the former Times and Spectator writer James Forsyth, a schoolfriend from Winchester.

 

There have been two recurring themes in recent political history. Johnson crystallised a sense of rich and powerful people acting with assumed impunity; Sunak, the weak prefect, seems so accustomed to such behaviour that he can’t figure out how to stop it. But this story blurs into something even bigger: a chain of people safely bound into absurd networks of privilege have taken endlessly stupid decisions, knowing that their wealth and connections mean they will never have to worry about the consequences. This is the essential story of how we were led out of the European Union by such privately educated chancers as Johnson, Rees-Mogg, Nigel Farage, Dominic Cummings and the former Tory MEP Daniel Hannan. It also applies to the years of austerity instigated by Cameron, George Osborne and Nick Clegg.

 

The context for these tragedies remains as brazen and appalling as ever: at the last count, two-thirds of senior judges were privately educated, along with 51% of what the Sutton Trust charity calls “leading journalists”, and 52% of foreign office diplomats. The figure for Sunak’s cabinet is 65%.

 

We may break the conveyor belt that leads from private schools to the commanding heights of power with a simple change: ensuring that the intake of Oxford, Cambridge and all Russell Group universities reflects the proportion of people in the UK who are state educated (93%). I also wonder if it would be an idea to do what Kuper suggests, and turn Oxford and Cambridge into postgraduate institutions, ending “elite” undergraduate education altogether.

 

But obviously, there is so much more to do: put crudely, a huge process of reform and positive discrimination that would finally open up our institutions, and belatedly begin their transformation. Even as Britain tumbles, this conversation has barely begun. It ought to start with a blunt acknowledgment: that there is no way out of this country’s morass of failure and sleaze until all those circles of power and entitlement are finally pushed aside.

 

John Harris is a Guardian columnist

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

 

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

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2022/apr/19/oxford-union-created-ruling-political-class-boris-johnson-michael-gove-theresa-may-rees-mogg

 

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.

Chums: How a Tiny Caste of Oxford Tories Took Over the UK by Simon Kuper – review

 

Review

Chums: How a Tiny Caste of Oxford Tories Took Over the UK by Simon Kuper – review

 

A penetrating analysis of the connections that enabled an incestuous university network to dominate Westminster and give birth to Brexit is perceptive and full of surprises

 

Tim Adams

Tim Adams

@TimAdamsWrites

Sun 1 May 2022 02.00 EDT

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2022/may/01/chums-how-a-tiny-caste-of-oxford-tories-took-over-the-uk-by-simon-kuper-review

 

At a “slave auction” at the Oxford Union in 1987 – an “opportunity to buy your favourite union person for the evening” – there was, according to the university newspaper, frenzied bidding for the services of the kilt-wearing 19-year-old Michael Gove. He went for £35. Gove was known at the time as one of the three pre-eminent orators in the small world of the university debating chamber – the others were Nick Robinson, future BBC political editor, and Simon Stevens, until recently chief executive of NHS England.

 

The previous year’s union president, Boris Johnson, failed to show up for the slave auction and was sold in absentia. Johnson’s own rhetorical style differed from the self-conscious rigour of his peers. He had learned, Simon Kuper writes, in debates at Eton, “to defeat opponents whose arguments were better simply by ignoring their arguments”. He offered instead “carefully timed jokes, calculated lowerings of the voice, and ad hominem jibes”. In this manner, he had won the election to union presidency with the help of various self-described “votaries in the Boris cult”, including Gove and future Covid sceptic Toby Young.

 

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. For maybe 30 years at Oxford, Tories had been in defensive retreat. The manner of Johnson’s immediate Conservative predecessors at the union, Theresa Brasier, her husband-to-be Philip May and her best friend (and future deputy prime minister) Damian Green, was notably halting and circumspect. But by 1984, emboldened by the twin forces of Falklands-era Thatcherism and Brideshead Revisited on the telly, archaic Tory voices – carefully laced with ironies by Johnson – were raucous again. (David Cameron, two years below Johnson at school and Oxford, was a different kind of throwback – rich enough and connected enough to feel himself above the “hackery” of student politics.)

 

It helped this new breed, Kuper argues, that at the union, they were often joking among themselves. The Oxford University Labour Club, high on Billy Bragg and miners’ solidarity marches, boycotted the debating chamber (one result, Kuper suggests, was that they “never learned to speak”). The political big beasts on the left in the second half of the 80s, in university terms, were the Miliband brothers, Dave and Ted, and Eddie Balls and Yvette Cooper, organising rent protests at their respective colleges. The young Keir Starmer, who did his undergraduate degree at Leeds, arrived in 1985 and made a stand about supporting the print workers at Wapping. Johnson could raise predictable guffaws in union debates when characterising socialist students as “retreating into their miserable dungareed caucuses”.

 

All of which is to say: if you thought you knew the extent of the stubbornly incestuous Oxford networks that currently sit at the top of our politics, this book will still surprise you. Financial Times columnist Kuper himself arrived at Oxford in 1988, just after Gove and Johnson had left. Kuper, from a north London comprehensive school, mostly inhabited a different social world to the subjects of his book but, like them, he acknowledges, he was trained by his Oxford humanities degree primarily “to write and speak for a living without much knowledge”.

 

Though the clique around Johnson believed they were born to power, unlike the swashbucklers of empire they admired, they lacked a cause to fight for

 

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”.

 

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. There was, however, one distinct difference between those characters and their 1980s pretenders. As Kuper observes, the politicians of Anthony Eden and Harold Macmillan’s vintage had been shaped not only by Eton and Oxford but also by war. By 2007, Rory Stewart – who had gone from Eton and Oxford to Iraq and Afghanistan – was observing that in the upper echelons of the Tory party: “Churchill had been replaced by Bertie Wooster.”

 

Kuper argues that though the clique around Johnson believed they were born to power, unlike the swashbucklers of empire they admired, they lacked a cause to fight for. His book details how that “cause” was eventually drummed up by three other near contemporaries at Oxford, all of whom fell under the sway of Norman Stone, the polymathic history professor, alcoholic and sometime adviser to Margaret Thatcher. The first of those was a young Scot, Patrick Robertson, introduced to Stone by Gove at a Burns Night dinner, the second was Dan, now Lord, Hannan, and the third was the most intense of undergraduates, Dominic Cummings.

 

It was Stone who personally nurtured Cummings’s public schoolboy anarchy and who persuaded him to head to Russia after his degree to get a feel for the post-cold war world. Robertson, meanwhile, partly inspired by the historian’s abhorrence of the EU, left Oxford after his second year to devote himself to the Bruges Group of Eurosceptics that he set up while at the university. (Robertson, Kuper points out, now lives in St Moritz, where he runs the public relations firm WorldPR, responsible for the post-Brexit “global Britain” campaign. He is also Kazakhstan’s honorary consul to the Bahamas.)

 

Hannan, among Kuper’s key witnesses here, had grown up in Peru, where his family had a poultry farm. After the collapse of communism, he sniffed – along with Stone – a new “enemy of liberty” in European bureaucracy and found an early acolyte in his absurd Oxford contemporary Jacob Rees-Mogg. On graduating, Hannan persuaded some marginal rightwing MPs to pay him a salary as sole employee of the European Research Group; two decades later he was persuading Johnson to head the leave campaign. And so, as Kuper writes, once again “the timeless paradise of Oxford inspired its inhabitants to produce timeless fantasies like Alice in Wonderland, The Hobbit, Narnia, and, incubating from the late 1980s, Brexit”.

 

It goes without saying, reading this history, that the overwhelming influence of a single kind of graduate from a single university (and often a single school, Eton) at the top of British public life has been profoundly damaging. Kuper offers some solutions – making Oxford exclusively a graduate research institute is one – but also hopes that the pandemic and all that has followed from it might finally mark an end to the British weakness for “the amateur ruler, lightly seasoned by Oxford tutorials”. If so, a suitable epitaph might come from Rees-Mogg, who when challenged in October 2021 as to why Tory MPs were not wearing face masks in parliament, answered: “We on this side know each other.” As if that were all that ever counted.

 

Chums: How a Tiny Caste of Oxford Tories Took Over the UK by Simon Kuper is published by Profile (£16.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply