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

Helena Bonham Carter Throws Major Shade At Harry: 'The Crown Shouldn't Continue After His Memoir'

‘I don’t think they should carry on’: Helena Bonham Carter says Netflix should have ended The Crown in 2020

 

‘I should be careful,’ show’s former star said while sharing controversial view

 

Jacob Stolworthy

https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/tv/news/helena-bonham-carter-the-crown-netflix-b2271418.html?utm_medium=Social&utm_source=Facebook&fbclid=IwAR2koY9DUdL7238XbxEmGXUXHZakzxUbHW155d6tqEIWPQog16V8XdX37Z8#Echobox=1674996983

 

Helena Bonham Carter has said she thinks Netflix should have ended The Crown before the latest season.

 

The actor made the claim despite starring in the show just two years ago.

 

Bonham Carter joined the cast for its third season, succeeding Vanessa Kirby as Princess Margaret.

 

Her time on the show came to an end when season four was released in November 2020, following which she was replaced by Lesley Manville.

 

However, the Harry Potter actor, who said she “should be careful” with how she words her opinion, believes the show should have ended with season four.

 

“I don’t think they should carry on, actually,” she told The Guardian.

 

“I’m in it and I loved my episodes, but it’s very different now.”

 

She continued: “When The Crown started, it was a historic drama, and now it’s crashed into the present. But that’s up to them.”

 

Bonham Carter has long been vocal about her belief that the show had a “moral responsibility” to add disclaimers to the start of each episode to indiciate it is a work of “dramatised” fiction.

 

“I do feel very strongly, because I think we have a moral responsibility to say, ‘Hang on guys, this is not … it’s not a drama-doc, we’re making a drama,’” she said while promoting the series in 2020.

 

Helena Bonham Carter doesn’t think ‘The Crown’ should still be on

 

However, she praised showrunner Peter Morgan for his extensive research, which she called “amazing”, adding: “That is the proper documentary. That is amazing and then Peter switches things up and juggles.”

 

The latest season of The Crown focuses on the breakdown of Charles and Diana’s marriage, and the sixth and final season will controversially feature scenes depicting Diana’s death.

 

Bonham Carter will next be seen playing TV star Noelle Gordon in Russell T Davies’ Nolly. it will be available to stream on iTVX from 2 February.

Everything you should know about King Charles's coronation

Dumfries House: Preserving Scotland's Heritage

Dumfries House was finally purchased as a whole after Charles, Prince of Wales (later Charles III) heard about the campaign from the writer and campaign member James Knox, who made "an impassioned impromptu speech" at one of the Prince's bi-annual conservation conferences at Holyrood House in Edinburgh. On 27 June 2007, it was announced that a consortium headed by the Prince, and including various heritage charities and the Scottish Government (who contributed £5m), had raised £45 million to purchase the house and contents (along with its roughly 2,000-acre (8.1 km2) estate) and endow a trust for maintaining it.

 

The trust was set up with the name "The Great Steward of Scotland's Dumfries House Trust", a reference to the title Great Steward of Scotland then held by Charles in his role as Scottish heir apparent. A major element of the financial package was a £20m loan backed by The Prince's Charities Foundation. It was reported that the contents of the house had already been removed, and were being transported to London when the sale was agreed.

 

The trust's intended model is to have the estate become a self-sufficient enterprise, in the process revitalising the local economy. The project was to be achieved through donation and sponsorship of various renovation projects around the estate, as well as through revenues from the construction of an 'eco-village' in the grounds, a planned community called Knockroon.

 

In 2008, the advent of the global financial crisis had a major impact on the project, affecting the prospects for the Knockroon development and thus the recouping of the £20m loan. The Prince faced much media criticism for putting the Foundation's other projects at risk for what was seen as a vanity project, prompting a response in 2010 describing the risk as "manageable and fully covered."After switching to a model of private and corporate fund raising, the £20m loan was repaid by 2012, with a further £15m backing having been raised for the various renovation projects and ongoing maintenance bill for the estate.

 

Following restoration, Dumfries House itself opened to the public for guided tours on 6 June 2008. From mid-2009, supermarket chain Morrisons began funding the restoration of the meat and dairy farm attached to the estate, both to become a research and education tool into sustainable farming methods, but also with the intention of its becoming profitable by 2014, part of the chain's vertically integrated supply chain. Renovation of the former coach house and associated stable block began in winter 2010. It reopened in 2011 as a catering facility, as both a visitor cafe and bistro dining facility. The first phase of the Knockroon village opened in May 2011.

 

In October 2011, work was started on clearing the area that used to be the Walled Garden, which had fallen into disuse and become overgrown. In April 2012, the six-bedroomed guest house Dumfries House Lodge opened, to provide guest accommodation for wedding parties and other events. It was created by renovating a derelict farm building on the estate. The estate's former water-powered sawmill has been renovated to full working order, and with the addition of a larger workshop building, has re-opened as the Sawmill Building Skills Centre, a traditional skills education facility.

 

King Charles, while Prince of Wales and known in Scotland as the Duke of Rothesay, continued to support Dumfries House. In September 2012, with Camilla, then the Duchess of Rothesay and known as the Duchess of Cornwall, and Alex Salmond, then the First Minister of Scotland, Charles attended Ladies' Day at Ayr Racecourse in aid of the Trust.

 

In 2017, the Prince of Wales celebrated 10 years of Dumfries house; he was quoted in Dumfries House Magazine  as saying, "We now have over 150 employees and thousands of individuals using the estate. My hope, therefore, is that this publication can help to involve a wider audience of supporters by providing an insight to all that happens on this estate and to its even more important outreach work."

 

In May 2018, "The Great Steward of Scotland's Dumfries House Trust" was renamed "The Prince's Foundation".

 

In October 2022, the King featured in a special edition of the BBC TV programme The Repair Shop filmed at Dumfries House, sharing objects from the collection in need of restoration.

Dumfries House brought back to life by the Prince of Wales

 Dumfries House is a Palladian country house in Ayrshire, Scotland. It is located within a large estate, around 3 kilometres (1.9 mi) west of Cumnock. Noted for being one of the few such houses with much of its original 18th-century furniture still present, including specially commissioned Thomas Chippendale pieces, the house and estate is now owned in charitable trust by the The Great Steward of Scotland's Dumfries House Trust, who maintain it as a visitor attraction and hospitality and wedding venue. Both the house and the gardens are listed as significant aspects of Scottish heritage.
The estate and an earlier house was originally called Lochnorris, owned by Craufords of Loudoun. The present house was built in the 1750s for William Dalrymple, 5th Earl of Dumfries, by John Adam and Robert Adam. Having been inherited by the 2nd Marquess of Bute in 1814, it remained in his family until 7th Marquess decided to sell it due to the cost of upkeep.
Due to its significance and the risk of the furniture collection being distributed and auctioned, after three years of uncertainty, in 2007 the estate and its entire contents was purchased for £45m for the country by a consortium headed by Charles, Prince of Wales, including a £20m loan from the Prince's charitable trust. The intention was to renovate the estate to become self-sufficient, both to preserve it and regenerate the local economy. As well as donors and sponsorship, funding is also intended to come from constructing the nearby housing development of Knockroon, a planned community along the lines of the Prince's similar venture, Poundbury in Devon.
The house duly re-opened in 2008, equipped for public tours. Since then various other parts of the estate have been re-opened for various uses, to provide both education and employment, as well as funding the trust's running costs.

The estate was finally purchased as a whole after Charles, Prince of Wales heard of the campaign after the writer and campaign member James Knox made an impassioned impromptu speech at one of the Prince's bi-annual conservation conferences at Holyrood House in Edinburgh. On 27 June 2007 it was announced that a consortium headed by the Prince and including various heritage charities and the Scottish Government (contributing £5m) had raised £45 million to purchase the house and contents (along with its roughly 2,000-acre (8.1 km2) estate) and to endow a trust for maintaining it. The trust is called "The Great Steward of Scotland's Dumfries House Trust" — a reference to the title Great Steward of Scotland held by Charles in his role as Scottish heir apparent. A major element of the financial package was a £20m loan backed by The Prince's Charities Foundation. It was reported that the contents of the house had already been removed, and were being transported to London when the sale was agreed.
The trust's intended model is to have the estate become a self-sufficient enterprise, in the process revitalising the local economy. The project was to be achieved through donation and sponsorship of various renovation projects around the estate, as well as through revenues from the construction of an 'eco-village' in the grounds, a planned community called Knockroon.
The breaking in 2008 of the global financial crisis had a major impact on the project, affecting the prospects for the Knockroon development and thus the recouping of the £20m loan, for which the Prince faced much media criticism for putting the charities other projects at risk for what was seen as a vanity project, prompting a response in 2010 describing the risk as manageable and fully covered. After switching to a model of private and corporate fund raising, the £20m loan was repaid by 2012, with a further £15m backing having been raised for the various renovation projects and ongoing maintenance bill for the estate.
Following restoration, Dumfries House itself opened to the public for guided tours on 6 June 2008. From mid-2009, supermarket chain Morrisons began funding the restoration of the meat and dairy farm attached to the estate, both to become a research and education tool into sustainable farming methods, but also with the intention of it becoming profitable by 2014, part of the chain's vertically integrated supply chain. Renovation of the former coach house and associated stable block began in winter 2010. It reopened in 2011 as a catering facility, as both a visitor cafe and bistro dining facility. The first phase of the Knockroon village opened in May 2011. In October 2011 work started to clear the area that used to be the Walled Garden, which had fallen into disuse and become overgrown. In April 2012, the six bedroomed luxury guest house Dumfries House Lodge opened, to provide guest accommodation for wedding parties and other events. It was created by renovating a derelict farm building on the estate. The estate's former water powered sawmill has been renovated to full working order, and with the addition of a larger workshop building, has re-opened as the Sawmill Building Skills Centre, a traditional skills education facility.
The Prince of Wales continues to support Dumfries House. In September 2012, with the Duchess of Cornwall and Alex Salmond, he attended Ladies' Day at Ayr Racecourse in aid of the Trust.

 Dumfries House: a Sleeping Beauty brought back to life by the Prince of Wales
Saved by Prince Charles from the auctioneer's hammer, Dumfries House - a time capsule of 18th-century furnishing - has been restored to its former glory

By Annabel Freyberg 27 May 2011 in The Telegraph / http://www.telegraph.co.uk/property/8533968/Dumfries-House-a-Sleeping-Beauty-brought-back-to-life-by-the-Prince-of-Wales.html

Dumfries House has been portrayed as an 18th-century Sleeping Beauty. Adam-designed and Chippendale-furnished, it remained untouched for 250 years, so the story goes, before being kissed by a prince and startled into trembling new life. Astoundingly, this fairy tale is largely true.
Until this gem of an estate was 'saved for the nation’ in June 2007, few people even knew of its existence. Yet its contents, dating from the mid-1750s, when it was built by the 5th Earl of Dumfries, include at least 50 pieces by the great British furniture maker Thomas Chippendale – some specially made for the house – along with the finest surviving collection of carved Scottish rococo furniture.
It took a last-minute pledge of £20 million from the Prince of Wales, allied to £25 million raised from other sources, to prevent its contents being dispersed around the world. In fact, less than two weeks before the threatened sale at auction by its owner, the 7th Marquess of Bute, much of the furniture had been packed up, ready to be taken to London. It was a close call.
No time has been wasted since then to make best use of the house’s riches. Its infrastructure has been improved at a cost of £1.5 million, rooms re-presented and gentle conservation embarked on (also to the tune of £1.5 million – much of it donated by individuals keen to see particular works restored, with a further £1.5-2 million spent on outbuildings for imminent use).
The scale of work is a curator’s dream,’ Charlotte Rostek, Dumfries House’s curator since April 2008, says. 'And we have been able to carry out a level of conservation work of which most other museums and stately homes can only dream.’
Indeed, there has never been a historic house project like it. A crucial element is the desire to kick-start regeneration in this impoverished part of east Ayrshire – a version of the Guggenheim effect, perhaps, whereby dramatically designed museums have drawn millions into previously depressed towns such as Bilbao in Spain.
'It’s not solely about Adam and Chippendale, it’s about jobs,’ confirms the writer James Knox, an Ayrshire neighbour who was involved in the campaign to save the house. 'And giving people a sense of belief in themselves locally, and being heard.’ This is not merely talk. When, shortly after the fate of Dumfries House was announced, the Prince of Wales visited the nearby former mining town of Cumnock, he was mobbed in the street by ecstatic long-term unemployed people.
Today, in sunny late April, visitors to Dumfries House are welcomed by clouds of pink blossom from two magnificent cherry trees on the drive. The shorthorn cattle grazing in front of the house are part of the 900-acre farm partnership between Dumfries House and Morrisons supermarket.
The Prince – or the Duke of Rothesay, to give him his Scottish title – has just dropped in to mark the new season’s opening to the public. (He had never been here when he contributed millions to saving the estate, but has made up for it since by visiting every couple of months, and even has a bedroom in the house.)
There has been a major winter overhaul over five breakneck (and freezing) months while the house was closed to the public: 1930s and even some Edwardian electrics have been replaced, the building replumbed from top to bottom, and a vast biomass boiler installed, which will control temperature and humidity levels and be self-sustaining. 'Furniture is susceptible more to humidity levels than temperature,’ Rostek says.
In the grounds, builders are putting the final touches to the new cafe in the converted Coach House. In the 600-acre woods, a team from the East Ayrshire Woodland Group has been working on a programme of replanting for the past 18 months, financed by the Government’s Future Jobs Fund. Fuel for the biomass boiler will come from the estate’s trees; it needs to be dried for a year first, then chipped.
Near Cumnock, a new model eco community – in some respects a Scottish Poundbury – is taking shape on Dumfries estate land. Knockroon, 'a walkable neighbourhood encouraging social interaction and a strong sense of community’, has been designed by the architects Lachlan Stewart and Ben Pentreath for the Princes Foundation for the Built Environment, and is 'inspired by local architecture that was built between the late 17th and mid-19th centuries’.
It is being overseen by Andrew Hamilton, who for the past 20 years has coordinated the Poundbury project, and was in the Prince’s mind from the beginning of his negotiations over Dumfries House. Planning permission for 600 homes was granted in January.
There is much more in the pipeline: traditional building skills workshops in the old saw mill; an educational food centre for children; a conference centre in the stable block; the restoration of the walled garden; even a hotel in the grounds. Yet the atmosphere of the 2,000-acre park is peaceful, as are the revitalised but not over-primped interiors.
Rostek acknowledges that though the house’s treasures are only one aspect of the whole picture, they have inevitably been the focus. It is a rich seam for scholars and restorers alike.
Most exotically, the flamboyant Chippendale four-poster is back from London where it was newly redressed in its original style of blue silk finery, thanks to a feat of archival detective work. While Christie’s insisted that the hangings were originally green, Rostek pored over 18th-century invoices to discover that they were actually blue. The textile historian Annabel Westman then oversaw about 20 craftsmen in three different specialist workshops as they restored the intricately carved cornice and covered it skin-tight in blue silk damask.
A tour of the formal ground-floor rooms reveals the extent of carefully researched housekeeping achieved over the past four years. In the Blue Drawing Room, the first Adam room the paying public come to, a suite of Chippendale elbow chairs and sofas has been reupholstered in a specially woven startling blue damask by Humphries Weaving, and the ruched curtains have been resplendently remade in the same fabric by the expert curtain maker Janette Read (who has redone the curtains throughout the house).
The surprisingly modest padauk Chippendale bookcase – the most valuable piece of furniture in the house (bought for £47 5s in 1759 and valued at £4 million in 2007) – was restored in situ over three weeks by the Edinburgh furniture restorer James Hardie.
The bold Axminster carpet covering the entire drawing-room floor dates from 1759, and is one of the first the company ever produced. Between the windows hang a pair of joyous and intricate pier glasses by William Mathie of Edinburgh (he, Francis Brodie and Alexander Peter are the three great Scottish cabinetmakers, all represented here). On the wall opposite is a pair of full-length Raeburn portraits of members of the family who lived here in the second half of the 18th century.
When Rostek is asked to give talks about the furniture of Dumfries House, she always declares that she can’t do it without reference to the people who lived here. These portraits are a good starting point. They depict the strikingly kind-looking Patrick McDouall-Crichton, 6th Earl of Dumfries, with his ward Flora, Countess of Loudon, and Margaret, his wife, with their daughter, Lady Elizabeth Penelope Crichton. Both Flora and Elizabeth are relevant to the story.
In 1768 Patrick inherited Dumfries House from his uncle, the 5th Earl (his portrait hangs in the Pink Dining Room), who had built and furnished it in 1754-9, commissioning the architects Robert and John Adam, and using pink sandstone quarried on the estate.
Elizabeth married the eldest son of the 1st Marquess of Bute in 1792 and had two sons. Soon afterwards, her husband was killed in a riding accident, aged 27, and she died three years later. (The story of the Butes is littered with early deaths.) For the next few years the boys were raised by their maternal grandparents, alongside Flora.
The eldest boy, John, was nine when his grand­father died in 1803, and 20 when his other grandfather died, and he became the 2nd Marquess of Bute. From that point on, Dumfries House became the family’s secondary home, with Mount Stuart on the Isle of Bute their main residence.
This is one of the astonishing facts about Dumfries House and one of the reasons its original interiors are so well preserved – and remained a secret for so long. For 250 years the family who owned the estate took good care of it, constantly upgrading, modernising and making it more comfortable, but only rarely living there. There were certainly changes over the years (the Axminster was 'cleaned and shaved’ in 1846, for example; the Chippendale bed refurbished in 1869), but the original scheme remained intact.
It was the 2nd Marquess who made the family fortune by turning the fishing village of Cardiff into a major port. (This wealth meant that the family never needed to sell Dumfries House.) His first marriage was childless, but by his second wife, Sophia Hastings – the daughter of Flora, his childhood companion – he fathered a son at the age of 52, then died when the child was six months old. Dumfries House fell into another slumber.
The 3rd Marquess continued to develop Cardiff, but is best known as a spectacular patron of the arts, responsible for recreating Cardiff Castle and Castell Coch to the north of Cardiff. He made substantial additions to Dumfries House too, installing a Turkish bath (now the Billiard Room) and a Byzantine chapel (he was a devout Catholic convert). In 1877 Mount Stuart burnt down, and while it was being built anew as a gothic-revival fantasy, the 3rd Marquess and his family spent more time at Dumfries House. In the 1890s he hired the leading Scottish Arts and Crafts architect Robert Weir Schultz to build a pair of large wings at the back – doubling the house in size without making this apparent from the symmetrical Palladian front. He described Dumfries House as the 'homeliest’ of his many homes.
While the 4th Marquess finished the extensions started by his father, the last person to call Dumfries House home was Lady Eileen Bute. The wife of the 5th Marquess, she came here as a young bride in 1932.
The family moved out during the Second World War when the house was requisitioned by the Army, but she returned after her husband died in 1956 (aged 49), and was popular with locals until her death in 1993.
'She had a group of friends known as the Ayrshire widows,’ James Knox says. 'They were all very good-looking women and had a lovely time chain-smoking, drinking whisky and playing poker in those wonderful rooms. They were mad on racing and Lady Eileen would have huge house parties for the Ayr races.’
After her death, Dumfries House went back to sleep. A few months later her son, the 6th Marquess of Bute, died, and his son, the racing driver Johnny Dumfries, now the 7th Marquess (and known as Johnny Bute), was hit with double death duties. The sale of Dumfries House looked inevitable.
In 1994 he approached the National Trust for Scotland. They weren’t enthusiastic – partly, it appears, because Paxton House, another Scottish Adam house also with Chippendale furniture, had recently opened to the public. By now Johnny Bute was fully occupied with opening Mount Stuart to the public for the first time (in 1995), and for nearly a decade nothing happened. Bute even put a new roof on Dumfries House, for which the current custodians are extremely grateful.
The National Trust for Scotland was offered the chance to acquire Dumfries House again in 2004, and negotiations dragged on, with Sotheby’s brought in to value the contents for the trust, and Christie’s for the Marquess (later, Bonhams arrived on behalf of the council). Such was the scale of the task that Christie’s experts spent 18 months cataloguing the collection. When negotiations with the trust failed, an exasperated Johnny Bute was forced to look at alternatives, and in April 2007 he instructed Savills to sell the house and Christie’s its contents.
For several years, a number of art lovers had been monitoring the situation at Dumfries House. As soon as its sale was announced they launched a public appeal to preserve it as an independent charitable trust under the auspices of Save Britain’s Heritage. Generous funding was lined up from charitable bodies such as the Monument Trust, the Art Fund and the Garfield Weston Foundation. But it still wasn’t enough.
The turning point came in May 2007, when Historic Scotland (the Scottish equivalent of English Heritage) declined to support the campaign financially and declared that Dumfries House could not be saved. Every two years, the Prince of Wales convenes a conference at Holyrood House in Edinburgh for the great and the good of the conservation world in Scotland.
James Knox used the opportunity to make an impassioned impromptu speech about the importance to the region of preserving Dumfries House. It was not a popular move. 'Nobody really wanted to talk about Dumfries House,’ Knox says. 'They thought it was too big, too expensive, too impossible, too controversial. I sat down to stony silence.’
But the campaign had caught the attention of the Prince, who wanted to know what he could do to help. With only weeks before the sale of house and contents, the Prince took a huge risk and arranged a loan of £20 million secured against the Prince’s Charities Foundation.
The Scottish government came on board to the tune of £5 million, and the estate was handed over to the newly formed Great Steward of Scotland’s Dumfries House Trust (after one of the Prince’s other Scottish titles). The Prince likes to quote the 5th Earl of Dumfries, who declared of his decision to build the house, '’Tis certainly a great undertaking, perhaps more bold than wise, but necessity has no law’, adding, 'I felt rather the same some 250 years later.’
The Prince’s involvement is hands-on. Last month he met the first couple planning to marry at Dumfries House – a new moneyspinner – and his watercolours line what will be the groom’s room. He was involved in the design of a new sunken garden, and the Pink Dining Room is likely to stay that hue for the moment (it was painted pink in about 1955) because it is his favourite room.
Dumfries House opened to the public in June 2008, and is beginning to establish itself on the tourist trail (it is 15 miles away from the popular Culzean Castle), and new events are springing up locally too – last weekend saw the first Boswell Book Festival at neighbouring Auchinleck House.
'We have a five-year plan, and we aim to be self-sustaining,’ Rostek says. 'We’re not cash rich, and we don’t have an endowment, but the Prince makes it work through his leadership. It’s a journey from an idea to reality – it has to work and pay its way.’
dumfries-house.org.uk

Gieves & Hawkes back in British ownership / Gieves & Hawkes №1 Savile Row, London

NEWS, SUITS

18TH JANUARY 2023

Gieves & Hawkes back in British ownership

https://savilerow-style.com/news/gieves-hawkes-back-in-british-ownership/

 

Gieves & Hawkes, one of the most famous names in tailoring, is back in British hands after being bought by Mike Ashley’s Frasers Group. The iconic business, with its main store at No 1 Savile Row, was sold to Ashley last November by the Hong Kong-based owner Trinity Group after it fell into administration at the beginning of last year. All five of Gieves & Hawkes’s UK stores will be part of the deal. Frasers Group, which already owns Sports Direct and House of Fraser, emerged as a potential buyer last September and sealed the deal for an undisclosed sum in November. Hong Kong conglomerate Trinity Ltd took over Gieves & Hawkes in 2012 but Trinity was subject to a winding-up petition for debt in September 2021. Michael Murray, chief executive of Frasers, said: “We are delighted to have acquired Gieves & Hawkes, securing a long-term future for an iconic 250-year-old brand. This acquisition further adds to our portfolio of strategic investments in luxury and premium brands.”

 

Gieves & Hawkes, which has held Royal Warrants since 1809, has made clothes for King Charles III, George VI and George V, as well as the princes William and Harry. It also dressed Lord Nelson, the Duke of Wellington and Winston Churchill. The firm moved to the Georgian townhouse at 1 Savile Row after Gieves acquired the Hawkes brand in 1974. Gieves was founded in 1785 and Hawkes in 1771.