BOOKBUSTER REVIEW: Chums
By Simon Kuper
Published by Profile Books, 2023 rrp £9.99
REVIEW BY TIM BARTON
Simon Kuper has a close relationship with his subject, as a former Oxford graduate, albeit, a ‘stain’ as the aristocratic toffs call middle-class or upper-middle students. Our class system is more finely graded at the top, though you may not notice when the political class divide in the media pits natural allies in the working and lower middle classes against each other by promoting the fiction that the latter are merely an untrustworthy part of a broad and unanalysed ‘middle-class’. Such misperceptions are one element that encourages a system of governance that allows a tiny elite to have an overweening influence in our politics, media, and financial institutions, indeed, throughout the establishment. Kuper’s aim is to show, as the book’s subtitle has it, ‘how a tiny caste of Oxford Tories took over the UK’.
The book’s focus is on a clique that went through university in the mid-1980s, though he illustrates how Oxford has dominated Westminster for much longer. Despite a vanishingly small number of each student cohort attending Oxford, about 3000 per year, ‘the UK is an Oxocracy. Of seventeen prime ministers from 1940 through Rishi Sunak, thirteen went to Oxford … Five consecutive Oxford- educated Tory prime ministers have ruled the UK since 2010’. A large proportion of these were also educated at private schools, predominantly Eton. The last run of PMs were chums at Oxford and in a few cases chums at school too. They were a clique dominated, at least at the Oxford Union, a mini-Parliament-alike wherein those elected are overtly grooming themselves for power, and grooming their peers as a support network. This network, more often than not, connects money and influence through family connections to ancient aristocracy. And power they get.
THE ‘BEST’ SPEAKERS ARE THOSE THAT CAN ARGUE TOTALLY OPPOSING CASES
At the Union, those vying for top dog gather their stooges around them, and, like say Gove & Johnson, usually keep these lapdogs for life. The concept of stooge is cosy and symbiotic, but with the boss always apparent. In Boris’s words, ‘the tragedy of the stooge is that … he so wants to believe that his relationship with the candidate is special that he shuts out the truth. The terrible art of the candidate is to coddle the self-deception of the stooge’. The lower layers of stoogedom are the Tory-voting electorate. The media, primarily owned and run by those connected to our elite via the age-old class and capital networks, gaslights everyone, and too many become its victims.
Brexit is a tragic example of this tiny caste’s power to manipulate events, reflecting the cynical Union debating practise, whereby the ‘best’ speakers are those that can with equal passion and conviction argue totally opposing cases. Whilst some, such as David Cameron, seemed to prefer a renegotiation of our membership of the EU, a very influential part of his mid-80s cohort supported ‘out’. In the cases of Daniel Hannon, Michael Gove, and Dominic Cummings (all chums, and chums with Boris too, of course), we find the leaders of the long campaign to extract us from the EU, far predating UKIP and the last years leading to the referendum (for which they recruited classless car salesman and sometime Dulwich College Nazi rally organiser, Nigel Farage).
Kuper investigates the tendrils of power leading this epic gaslighting of a nation in some detail. A key point, relating to the cynicism of the adversarial ‘skills’ that propelled Johnson to the top, and finely honed from his Union days, is that Johnson had in the past argued with equal passion both ‘stay’ and ‘leave’ positions. Most who look at his career cannot fail to see that his final stance was designed as part of his ambition to fill the top seat, and become our new Churchillian saviour. As with Winston, his opportunistic sociopathic gaslighting won enough of the public over to propel him to PM. These skills, learnt in his crib, and honed at the debating society, are emblematic of his classes’ accession to power. They also serve to disguise his supreme lack of fitness to govern.
THE ONLY WAY TO FIX THIS IS PROBABLY MASSIVE AND DEEP REFORM
For Boris, his ego and corrupt graft outweighed concerns about his regime’s abuses of law and democracy, and he was more than happy, in fact eager, to push yet more power into the executive, and to the PM’s chair, and to further cripple our ‘democratic rights’. He obviously wants to sit in it again, so he can use and abuse these powers. As will others of his Oxford cohort, such as Rees-Mogg and current PM Sunak, though in their cases it may be globalised financial and class-war concerns that will motivate further abuses.
This barely exposes the tip of the Chums iceberg. Read Kuper’s book for many more gems and great anecdotes, researched with access only a fellow old-boy may dream of.
Whilst the younger cohorts of chums juggling for power may come from a more technocratic generation, it is clear that, once Johnson’s generation has passed, Oxford will retain a strong grip on power in the UK. And the Eton-Oxford caste is hardly the only nexus of elite dominance in the now global anti-democratic networks of power, far from it. The only way to fix this is probably massive and deep reform, which won’t likely come without extra-Parliamentary activism on a large scale, especially when supposed ‘opposition’ parties are so dominated by members of a narrow Establishment elite. ‘Sir’ Keir Starmer, ex-Director of Public Prosecutions seems no better, and just as prone to ‘debating society’ gaslighting to grasp power, side-lining supposed allies and chasing the gammon vote. Mark my words.
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