CHUMS: How A Tiny Caste of Oxford Tories Took Over The UK by Simon Kuper
Simon Kuper has set out to write “a group portrait of a set of Tory Brexiteers – overwhelmingly men – from the traditional ruling caste who took an ancient route through Oxford to power”.
He goes on to suggest that “as well-spoken Oxonians, they were the perfect front-men for what throughout most of modern history has been a unified British ruling caste”.
And he contends that in September 1988, the month before Jacob Rees-Mogg and indeed Kuper started at Oxford, Margaret Thatcher’s Bruges speech
“spooked the Oxford Tories. Ruling Britain was the prerogative of their caste. They didn’t want outsiders in Brussels muscling in. Tory ‘Euroscepticism’ began in part as a jobs protection scheme, much like taxi drivers fighting back against Uber.”
The word “caste”, used in the title of this book and in all three of the passages just quoted from it, is defined by Chambers Dictionary as “a social class in India” or “an exclusive social class”.
Kuper uses it in the latter sense. But the Brexiteers were not an exclusive social class. Anyone who wanted to do so could join in; long before the 1980s Enoch Powell (not an Oxford man) had made the case for national sovereignty; and in 2016 17.4 million people accepted that case.
Maybe Rees-Mogg is like a taxi driver fighting back against Uber. Perhaps Daniel Hannan, Patrick Robertson, Dominic Cummings, Michael Gove, Boris Johnson and various other Oxford undergraduates of this period mentioned in this book were all like so many trainee black cab drivers setting out to preserve the privileges which would be theirs once they showed they had mastered the knowledge.
It is an arresting thought, and possibly not without all merit. One may love the House of Commons, and defend its privileges, long before one ever becomes or even tries to become an MP.
But what about Theresa May, Philip Hammond, David Cameron, George Osborne and Rachel Johnson? Here is another set of Oxford Tories, spread over a somewhat longer period, but all of them coming out for Remain in 2016.
Kuper admits this: “Terrifyingly for Cameron, the referendum had split the ruling class.”
But this was not, as Kuper implies, an exceptional state of affairs. He supposes (see the second quotation above) that throughout most of modern history there has been “a unified British ruling caste”.
This is an odd reading of British history. What was the break with Rome about? The English Civil War? One may posit, if one wishes, a Whig interpretation of history, in which the virtuous side always wins, but heaven knows it is still an argumentative history, full of party strife, battles about religion, royal power, slavery, Ireland, free trade, the widening of the franchise, the creation of the welfare state, trade union power and many other issues which at the time seemed, and usually were, at least as significant and divisive as Brexit.
What Kuper calls the ruling caste has always been split into opposing sides (see the layout of the Commons), and has always been open to newcomers. It is not, in fact, a caste into which one has to be born, but an elite which from a prudent sense of self-preservation admits new, energetic, rising members of society to its ranks, while the torpid sons and daughters of the great pass into obscurity.
Kuper’s essay is engagingly brief, only 196 pages of text, and contains some delightful details about the Oxford of those days. He has spoken to Frank Luntz, an American who studied at Oxford in the 1980s, has since attained eminence as a Republican pollster, and told him:
“I’ve never seen a class of more talented people than that class of 1984-86 at the Oxford Union. I was 22 when I got there and I looked up to people who were 18 or 19 years old, because of their talent.”
Luntz mentions the brilliance of Johnson:
“Boris gave a speech on the Middle East – it’s the best Middle East speech to this day I’ve ever heard, because he talked about it in terms of a playground, and kids attacking the little kid on the playground. Boris created a brilliant metaphor and then made the argument around that.”
Gove, Nick Robinson, now of the BBC, and Simon Stevens, who went on to run the NHS, are also praised as debaters by Luntz:
“Any one of those three, when they rose to intervene, the entire chamber shut up, there wasn’t a sound, because everyone knew that when they were recognised, the [previous speaker] was dead, because they were so incisive. Just bring in the ambulance and take out the body, because the three of them could cut you up and show you your heart before you collapsed. We can’t do that in America, nobody can.”
The art of debating is not the whole of life, may tempt a speaker into deplorable frivolity, but has its uses in a parliamentary system. In the Commons, Gove mounted brilliant if unavailing defences of the May administration.
A skilled debater can turn the tables on an opponent who relies on the conventional wisdom expressed in a platitudinous manner. This is what happened during Brexit: the Remainers were conventional, platitudinous, dull, and ended up speaking only to other Remainers.
Kuper’s book is not about a caste but shows us the early formation of a gang of rebels. Johnson, Gove and the rest delighted in disrupting things. Brexit was to offer them opportunities for disruption on a grand scale.
Hannan and Rees-Mogg started to work out what the argument would be about, but would be the first to say they were inspired by the study of history. Brexit was not a bright idea thought up by a few students in the 1980s. It has in various forms been around for centuries.
Luntz reminds Kuper that Oxford considered Thatcher, who had studied Chemistry there, “the most evil living person on the face of the earth”. More recently, during Brexit, Oxford thought the same of Johnson.
When Johnson was at Balliol, it was an astonishingly left-wing college. Not for nothing did Matthew Arnold call Oxford the “Home of lost causes, and forsaken beliefs, and unpopular names, and impossible loyalties!”
While Johnson was at the university, followed some years later by Hannan and Rees-Mogg, anti-Thatcherism was the lost cause to which Oxford remained loyal in defiance of whatever was going on in the outside world.
Johnson has said he was “conscious of right-wing feelings” and “realised he had Tory tendencies” when he saw students at Oxford collecting money during the miners’ strike, which lasted from March 1984 to early 1985:
“I was appalled by the way middle-class kids were going around supporting Arthur Scargill when it was quite obvious he was leading the poor miners to utter perdition and doing them no bloody good at all.”
It is characteristic of Oxford, and of other elite institutions, that they attempt with almost manic enthusiasm to dissociate themselves from any opinion which might be regarded as reactionary, and to recruit from the widest possible range of backgrounds. As Jonathan Barnes, one of Johnson’s tutors and afterwards Professor of Ancient Philosophy at the Sorbonne, told me when I was researching my first book about Johnson, it was no advantage in the 1980s to have been to Eton if you wanted a place at Balliol:
“On the contrary, there was a pretty strong prejudice against public schools. I should say it was the college’s policy – powerfully urged by some tutors and implicitly accepted by most – that, other things being equal, a candidate from an ‘unfavoured background’ should be preferred to one from a favoured background (anglice: prefer the rotten schools to the good).”
How attached we British journalists are to our stereotypes. Oxford’s conscientious efforts to educate Britons from unfavoured backgrounds are treated as quite insufficient by Kuper, a columnist for the Financial Times. At the end of his book, he says it would be best to stop Oxford and Cambridge teaching undergraduates: “That would remove Oxbridge’s biggest distortion of British life.”
How unfair this is on an Oxford renowned throughout the globe as a place of light, liberty and learning; distinguished in many different disciplines, including vaccines; possessed of a thousand unassuming merits which have nothing to do with the Union or the Bullingdon.
Kuper is alert to the deficiencies of the Oxford Union style, the tendency to substitute some glib debating point for hard-headed analysis, but here displays the very weakness he condemns in others.
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