Bullingdon Club Britain: The Ransacking of a Nation

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There are a number of reasons for this, says the magazine, chief among them being that the club “just couldn’t survive 11 years of bad headlines from 2005 to 2016”, referring to the time when Cameron, Osborne and Johnson were “the most powerful Conservatives in the country”. Despite their fearsome reputation, they seemed unsure about what to do when people didn’t scurry out of their way at a second’s notice.

In November 2021, this second scandal detonated, when the public learned of the lucrative consultancy positions enjoyed by their MPs. Cameron claims the stories of excessive drunkenness and restaurant trashing are exaggerated, but he says “it is true that the election ritual was being woken up in the middle of the night by a group of extremely rowdy men turning your rooms upside down”.David Cameron's and Boris Johnson's period in the Bullingdon Club was examined in the UK Channel 4 docu-drama When Boris Met Dave, broadcast on 7 October 2009 on More 4.

Radek Sikorski, an Oxford classmate of Johnson in the ’80s, and later foreign minister of Poland, told Gimson how he endured the ritual. She told them that the club formed a negative aspect of Oxford’s social scene ‘but you can live life here without ever coming into contact with them’. If I had known at the time the grief I would get for that picture, of course I would never have joined. She said this included “Labour, the Lib Dems, the SNP, the militant unions, the vested interests dressed up as think tanks, the Brexit deniers, and Extinction Rebellion.

He says he remembers “walking from my bedroom into my sitting room to find a group of people making a terrible racket, with one of them standing on the legs of an upended table, using a golf club to smash bottles as they were thrown at him”. The room is a good distance from the main dining hall so that the other guests won’t notice a commotion. James tells me about a culture of “institutionalized bad behavior where you are rewarded for getting drunk and doing as much damage as possible.