This review was written by Daniel Dipper. Daniel is going into his third year of studying History and Politics at Magdalen College, University ofOxford, and is the current Oxford Union Librarian as well as Magdalen’s undergraduate president. Daniel was educated in a state comprehensive school and is the first in his immediate family to go to university.

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

But how, he wonders in a central theme of the book, has a “Brahmin caste”, educated at the University of Oxford “captured the British machine? And with what consequences?” SK: Politicians are a microcosm and an exaggeration of the system, but in journalism, in finance, it’s always like that. And the same principle that the acceptance letter you get at age 17 determines to a very large degree the future career you’ll have is a very cruel and absurd system, whether it’s for politicians or journalists. The difference in Politics is that other elite jobs in the UK are competed for internationally. So even in journalism, my colleagues really come from all over now, including, for example, Germans and Scandinavians and Indians. And that’s true in finance and in tech as well. The trouble is, this short book is exactly the sort of lazy, provocative essay that he criticises as being at the heart of Oxford thinking. No one else but an Oxford grad could have tried to write a serious book based on a handful or written sources, a docu-drama, some personal reflections, and chats with people he already knew. 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. In the 1980s, Kuper explains, both the Oxford tutorial system and the debating style of the Tory-dominated Oxford Union favoured charm, fluency and wit over a grasp of facts and figures. Americans attending the Oxford Union made the mistake of thinking the latter mattered, he says. “They’d say, ‘97 per cent of’ or ‘there are 420,000 who...’ If you did that at the Union, it was ‘boring’ and ‘boring’ is a core upper-class insult word…Johnson is really the epitome of this. You went down better when you do a comedic performance.”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.” Kuper wrote for Oxford’s independent student paper Cherwell where they would sometimes cover campus eccentrics like Rees-Mogg but he had no conception of what any of it meant at the time. “When I was writing the book, I spoke to a guy who was at Cherwell with me... He said, ‘I thought these people were the past that, they were just going to disappear as Britain moved on into modernity.’ And I thought, Wow, he had a view in the 80s. I didn’t have a view. I didn’t really have any understanding of where people sat or where they were going.”

Power, Privilege, Parties: the shaping of modern Britain

Chums is not just about the smallness of Britain's privileged elite or the early advantages it enjoys. Simon Kuper goes further ... to critique a system that attaches more importance to winning debates than shaping policy'

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.”

Chums by Simon Kuper – Review. How Oxford Tories Took Over Chums by Simon Kuper – Review. How Oxford Tories Took Over

How can you tell a man attended Oxford?” Victor Lewis Smith once joked. “Because he’ll tell you in the first sentence.” For most of us, the subject is irrelevant, boring and self-absorbed. Oxford is barely worth a day trip; the centre of the city looks pretty in summer, but most of it’s a dump, and a cup of tea won’t get you much change out of a fiver. I taught history at the University of Sussex, in Brighton, and much preferred it. Oxford doesn’t have a pier. Rhetorically engaging, fantastically written, and well researched. This book has all the hot gossip from Oxford in the 1980s, exploring how that generation of graduates was shaped, and how they are now shaping Britain. Cherwell Magazine serves as the diary for the Tories who now dominate British politics, and the Oxford debating club as a kind of lyceum for our current era. It is here we see the making of modern Britain in the post-Thatcher era. 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”. In truth,” writes Kuper, with an even-handedness surely acquired during his early schooling in the Netherlands, “almost everyone who gets into Oxford is a mixture of privilege and merit in varying proportions.” Though mostly privilege. At the start of the 21st century, private schools (which at the time educated about 7 per cent of the population) supplied around half of Oxford’s domestic student intake. Kuper quotes the former Labour minister Andrew Adonis: “The place felt like one huge public school to which a few others of us had been smuggled in by mistake.”A penetrating analysis of the connections that enabled an incestuous university network to dominate Westminster and give birth to Brexit ... perceptive and full of surprises' Deng, Yii-Jeng (21 May 2022). "Book Review: Chums by Simon Kuper". The Oxford Student (Oxford's University's Student Newspaper). Other universities, of course, could argue that they are also centres of excellence, in both different subjects and similar ones. “Alternatively,” Kuper concludes, “we could preserve Oxford unchanged, and just accept elite self-perpetuation as the intended outcome of British life.” Simon Kuper". Expert Keynote and Motivational Speakers | Chartwell Speakers . Retrieved 2 July 2023. 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.

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

Kuper, Simon. "Becoming French is like winning the lottery". Archived from the original on 11 December 2022 . Retrieved 6 August 2022. 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. This captivating A-Z compendium by #KateSummerscale explores the world in 99 obsessions - from spiders to clowns to all that will make your skin crawl.Jacob Rees-Mogg speaks at the Oxford Union Society in 1991. Listening are Kenneth Clarke and John Patten. Photograph: Edward Webb/Alamy A searing onslaught on the smirking Oxford insinuation that politics is all just a game. It isn't. It matters' Matthew Parris