MyHome.ie (Opens in new window) • Top 1000 • The Gloss (Opens in new window) • Recruit Ireland (Opens in new window) • Irish Times Training (Opens in new window) Deng, Yii-Jeng (21 May 2022). "Book Review: Chums by Simon Kuper". The Oxford Student (Oxford's University's Student Newspaper). Simon Kuper (6 March 2006). "All the time in the world". ESPNcricinfo . Retrieved 13 September 2011. Interview, Oxstu Profile (5 June 2023). "In conversation with Simon Kuper". The Oxford Student . Retrieved 2 July 2023.

We aim to make all LSE events available as a podcast subject to receiving permission from the speaker/s to do this, and subject to no technical problems with the recording of the event. Podcasts are normally available 1-2 working days after the event. Podcasts and videosof past events can be found online. 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. A video of this event is available to watch at Power, Privilege, Parties: the shaping of modern Britain.

Chums has its inevitable chapter on the antics of Boris Johnson and David Cameron at the “Buller”, a cosplay England of mustard-coloured waistcoats and social condescension. Those were the days. Beyond the panelled debating chambers and honey-stoned colleges, modernity and change could feel like decline. Progress could feel like decline. Little wonder, then, that Kuper identifies Oxford as the incubator of Brexit. Some sobering statistics in his quietly devastating critique of the shallow pool the Westminster establishment fishes from to recruit for its political elite. Chumsis a snapshot of a time gone by, bringing alive 1980s Oxford in vivid detail. It acts as a warning about a future without social mobility, showing the disproportionate influence closed networks can play. Simon Kuper’s writing makes the book a gripping read from start to finish, taking you step-by-step from university days and the Oxford Union right to Coronavirusand the heart of government. The book’s thesis, that Oxford (and specifically the Oxford Union) played a formative role in the rise of politicians like Johnson and the idea of Brexit, is thought-provoking; however, I feel we need to consider the counterfactual to judge the extent to which this is true. Ultimately, if Oxford was cut out of the story, would Johnson still be PM? I think the answer is most probably.

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”. If your life passage has taken you from medieval rural home to medieval boarding school to medieval Oxford college and finally to medieval parliament, you inevitably end up thinking: ‘What could possibly go wrong?’.”

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.) Lipman, Maria (20 April 2021). "The Happy Traitor: Spies, Lies, and Exile in Russia; The Extraordinary Story of George Blake". Foreign Affairs. No.May/June 2021. ISSN 0015-7120 . Retrieved 2 July 2023. After all, “If your life passage has taken you from medieval rural home to medieval boarding school to medieval Oxford college, and finally to medieval parliament, you inevitably end up thinking: ‘What could possibly go wrong?’ If Brexit didn’t work out, the Oxford Tories could always just set up new investment vehicles inside the EU, like Rees-Mogg, or apply for European passports, like Stanley Johnson.” His main argument is that Brexit wouldn’t have happened without the nostalgic, guardians-of-Empire viewpoint of “the Oxocracy”. Isn’t it funny how so many of those obsessed with power and wealth, and who will do or say almost anything to keep it, inevitably wash down into the dark sewer of politics. Politics like sales, law, finance et al, has always been a perennial haven for all sorts of undesirables. It over rewards some of the darkest and damaging traits of human behaviour, such as lying, stealing, cheating, bullying and greed and yet whilst engaging in these habits you actually get held in tremendously high-esteem and become almost immune to the laws of the land.

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.Simon Kuper ( @KuperSimon) is an author and Financial Times journalist, born in Uganda and raised around the world. An Oxford graduate, he later attended Harvard as a Kennedy Scholar. He has written for the Observer, The Times and Guardian, and is also the author of The Happy Traitor and Chums: How a Tiny Caste of Oxford Tories Took Over the UK. What does he think will happen to the class of public school educated folk that currently dominate the Tory party? “I think it’s possible that the Johnson, Cameron, Rees-Mogg generation will prove to be a last hurrah. But I think that class is very tenacious. Eton exists to educate the ruling class and if the ruling class has to do Stem degrees or have MBAs or the ruling class has to talk about diversity, they’ll produce boys who can do that.” Neil Lee ( @ndrlee) is Professor of Economic Geography at the Department of Geography and Environment at LSE and leads the Cities, Jobs and Economic Change Research Theme at the International Inequalities Institute. 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.” 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. He writes about sports "from an anthropological perspective." [6] Time Magazine has called him “one of the world’s leading writers on soccer” [7] and The Economic Times labeled him “one of the world's most famous football writers.” [8]