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AUTHOR INTERVIEW
from The Chap Issue 112
by thechap
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Author Interview
SIMON KUPER
Ed Needham meets the author of Chums: How a Tiny Caste of Oxford Tories Took Over the UK (Profile, £16.99) www.strong-words.co.uk
“At Oxford, it is very realistic to aspire to be prime minister from the age of 14. And then you get a statue, because the prime minister of Britain in their minds is a glorious figure that bestrides the world stage. They think of past figures like Palmerston, Gladstone, Churchill. When Johnson was asked why he left journalism for politics, he said it was because they don’t put up statues to journalists”
Ed Needham is the editor of Strong Words, a magazine launched in 2018 all about new books, full of loquacious reviews, author interviews and stories behind the great novels of history. In this issue, Ed meets the author of a new tome that sets out to expose the troubling amounts of political power wielded by a very small and privileged Oxford elite, many of whom were members of the notorious Bullingdon Club.
CHAP: What has been the initial reaction to the book?
KUPER: It is basically divisive, where some people say, “Oh, he’s saying that Brexit wasn’t actually the will of the people who voted for it, that it’s just some little group of Oxford toffs who made it happen.” So the Brexiteers are very sensitive about it, and the Remainers like it. I was hoping it would not be divisive in that way, because what I did not
Simon Kuper being interviewed by someone other than The Chap
want the book to be was a very sterile argument about “is Brexit a good thing”, which is the argument the country has been having for the last six years. It is much more looking at the roots of this ruling class and of Brexit, but of course, if you write a book about UK politics in our very partisan times, it will be received in a partisan way.
CHAP: You write, “I didn’t know any of the future powerbrokers personally, because we were separated by the great Oxford class divide,” but what was your opinion of this clique (Johnson, Osborne, Gove, Rees-Mogg et al) when you were studying alongside them?
KUPER: I didn’t really have a strong view of them. I had lived in various countries until I was sixteen, so I was just kind of getting to know and understand it all. Some people have said, “Oh, you hated them, you were jealous of them, you were rejected by them,” but it wasn’t like that at all. To a large degree they passed me by, except Jacob ReesMogg who was just immensely visible because he dressed like a Victorian vicar, much as he does now, but it was even more extraordinary for an eighteenyear-old. I just wasn’t that aware of them.
CHAP: Were you aware of the Bullingdon Club and other such social options exclusive to the chum class?
KUPER: They were very much off my radar. I had read Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall, and he parodies the Bullingdon, but I didn’t even realise he was doing that. It was only some years after leaving university that I found out what the Bullingdon Club was.
CHAP: One of the things that surprised me was that George Osborne “became chancellor with no formal post-school
education in economics or business beyond whatever he had picked up in his Oxford history degree.” Did it shock you that people like that could achieve such high office with such scant preparation?
KUPER: That’s the way the British system works: the idea of the gentleman dilettante. And the gentleman dilettante is so clever – in this theory – that he can pick up all these things very quickly. The idea in the ruling class is that, once you’d got your Oxford degree aged 21, you were done. You’d had this magnificent education and there was really nothing more to add. You were ready for adult life.
CHAP: You argue that in some ways, Oxford is excellent preparation for a political career – the business of winning elections, appealing to voters beyond your circle, getting yourself noticed. Once Boris had won the Union presidency though, his subsequent term was chaotic, foreshadowing somewhat his time as prime minister. It’s as though he (and others like him, eg Cameron) desire the posts enough to make the effort to gain them, but then are not really bothered with the exercise of power once they have it. So what is their motivation?
KUPER: They are all different and Johnson is the least ideological person, as we know. He is very cynical about everything except himself, then he is very ambitious and serious. As that kind of public-school male, you feel the higher posts in the UK are sort of made for you and your class. It has always been Eton and Oxford types who have had those jobs, and it is very realistic to aspire to be prime minister from the age of 14. And then you get a statue, because the prime minister of Britain in their minds is a glorious figure that bestrides the world stage. They think of past figures like Palmerston, Gladstone, Churchill. When Johnson was asked why he left journalism – or his sort of comedic writing, to which he was very well suited – for politics, he said it was because they don’t put up statues to journalists. So the statue, and stepping into the glorious footsteps of great toffs of the past, is a big part of it.
“Breaking the rules is the prerogative of people who don’t have to prove themselves. Among the upper classes if you can break the rules that kind of proves your status. I remember once playing cricket in a team with a number of public schoolboys and one bloke, he was somebody’s friend, came along in red trousers, and played the match in them. What he was saying was, well, I can do that”
CHAP: Why do you think Boris Johnson’s signature inability to dress himself didn’t apply to his Bullingdon costume or when he was photographed wearing black tie at Oxford? He seemed to be able to dress himself then.
KUPER: Johnson’s dress makes a statement. And the statement that his shambolic look, going jogging wearing a kind of sports jacket and never brushing his hair, makes is a very common one among the upper class, which is: I am so secure in my class status that I can break the rules. Breaking the rules is the prerogative of people who don’t have to prove themselves. Among the upper classes, if you can break the rules that kind of proves your status. I remember once playing cricket in a team with a number of public schoolboys and one bloke, he was somebody’s friend, came along in red trousers, and played the match in them. What he was saying was, well, I can do that.
CHAP: You write, “one continental European prime minister, a man of ordinary origins, invited to Chequers by Cameron, realised in an evening that the colleague he had got to know from European summits as an informal, cheery, pragmatic chap like himself was in fact a quasi-aristocrat who ruled the UK with a posh clique of school chums.” What do politicians from overseas make of this current political clique?
KUPER: A different European prime minister who was asked about Johnson said you can’t really have a discussion with him because he hasn’t read the brief, so he doesn’t know the issue he wants to discuss in any kind of detail and just makes kind of funny and vague ripostes when he wavers. I usually live in France, and Macron has a sort of contempt for Johnson. Macron is a very serious person who wants and tries to solve serious issues and thinks hard about them, and when he encounters Johnson he recognises him as just a verbal performer. Macron sees himself as trying to win Wimbledon and is confronted with just an extremely over-confident club player.
CHAP: Is there anything in the Oxford method of preparing privileged youths for cabinet positions that other countries admire or that are advantageous, from your perspective?
No whangee handle, Mr. Rees-Mogg?
“They don’t put up statues to journalists”
KUPER: I think there was an admiration for the wit of Prime Minister’s Questions and the kind of rhetorical punch of the Commons, because in Germany or Canada they just don’t have politicians like that, and so they think, ‘they are so suave and well spoken!’ When the Iraq war was being sold by Blair and George W. Bush, Blair sold it much better and was a much better-spoken figure than Bush, and Americans would admire that. I think that admiration has diminished, and I don’t think foreigners hugely look to Britain now as a kind of political example.
I think one advantage of this whole Oxford thing is the lack of curiousness – mostly it is quite damaging; there is a contempt for serious ideas, and anything that sounds boring can easily be laughed out of court – but that is one reason why the British elite never fell for communism and very few of them fell for fascism. PG Wodehouse mocking Spode the fascist leader and the black shorts is a very funny rejection of fascism. Fascism was just too humourless to catch on with the British elite, and communism sounded a bit too boring. So in some way it worked quite well as a defence mechanism against the most extreme ideas. n
