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. Kuper convincingly sets out the cause and effect connection between Oxford student politics and Brexit: “An anti-elitist revolt led by an elite: a coup by one set of Oxford public schoolboys against another, backed by an Australian Oxford public schoolboy media magnate masquerading as an anti-elitist.

Chums: How A Tiny Caste of Oxford Tories Took Over The UK

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”.

Kuper’s unique approach to sports writing, particularly on football, has earned him several prestigious accolades, including the 1994 William Hill Sports Book of the Year. Simon Kuper’s book Chums tells the story of how one university taught the core of today’s Brexit government how to achieve power – but not how to use it. His infamous book ‘Chums’ was published in 2022 and detailed the Oxford of the ‘80s through a group of Tories who were shaped by their experiences in the Oxford Union. He has written on cricket occasionally, with articles on cricket in the Netherlands [22] and cricket in apartheid South Africa.

chums: Brexit’s beginnings as a posh Oxford Boris and his chums: Brexit’s beginnings as a posh Oxford

It’s very hard, because whatever you do, can be misrepresented but I think, certainly having more local reporters, which the BBC is now working on as well in places like Norwich or Halifax. For anyone who’d missed out at school on arrogance, entitlement, debating skills, exceptionalism, bullshit and Latin, Oxford would do what it could. MH: Which do you think should be the greater priority of British society: ensuring more kids from backgrounds like mine, for instance, a state school background, get into Oxford, or reducing the reliance that we have on Oxford graduates in top jobs?It was an elaborate game focused on hot-air debates where anyone well-informed risked the derisory heckle of: “Facts! The Oxford networks in the eighties go deep: on the right, Jacob Rees-Mogg and Daniel Hannan were also forging relationships and interests, while on the left there were the Miliband brothers, Yvette Cooper, Ed Balls and Keir Starmer. But by the end, Kuper exposes himself as a snooty Oxford elitist by writing out the millions who voted to leave the EU from their own story. I don’t know them for the most part, but I understand that they’re products of where they came from.

Simon Kuper - Wikipedia Simon Kuper - Wikipedia

In Kuper’s time, among the “largely southern English student body”, the university had six Afro-Caribbean undergraduates.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. 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. LSE has now introduced wireless for guests and visitors in association with 'The Cloud', also in use at many other locations across the UK. A father of a child at the school said that what I may not understand is that Eton is itself a charity.