Eton and Oxford’s mission is to ‘produce Britain’s ruling class’
AUTHOR EXPLAINS HOW HISTORY OF EMPIRE AND BREXIT ARE LINKED TO ELITE INSTITUTIONS
ASIANS, Hindus especially, know all about the pernicious influence of caste, and so are likely to find Simon Kuper’s new book fascinating, provocative and richly entertaining.
But Kuper is writing about a different kind of caste – basically, a subset of people who went to Eton and Oxford. The clue is in the title – Chums: How a tiny caste of Oxford Tories took over the UK.
He claims: “Brexit was hatched at Oxford in the late 1980s.”
Of course, not everything in the book has to be taken seriously, but like a good Oxford man himself, Kuper has found enough evidence to back up his thesis.
He begins by telling readers what his book is not. It is not his “personal revenge on Oxford” as he was happy at university where he read history and German. He probably wouldn’t have got his job as a Financial Times columnist based in Paris nor a contract to write Chums for Profile Books without his Oxford degree.
He is also not the first to disparage his own alma mater. Plenty of Etonians have done that.
Nor is his book a name-dropping exercise. And he says: “It’s not another biography of Boris Johnson.”
It’s a pity for him in a sense that Boris is gone, for he is the central villain in the book, surrounded by his Eton and Oxford chums. To adapt US president Richard Nixon, what do you do when “you don’t have Boris to kick around any more?”
Kuper’s radical solution is to remove undergraduates from Oxford and Cambridge and turn them into institutions solely for postgraduates by copying some examples from France.
“Britain could do something like that with Oxbridge. The ideal would be to keep what’s best about these universities, but stop them teaching undergraduates. That would remove Oxbridge’s biggest distortion of British life.”
He acknowledges the proportion of state school pupils has gone up, both at Cambridge and at Oxford. But Kuper, who himself went to a comprehensive, has got it in for Oxford: “Despite the recent advances, I don’t trust Oxford to reform itself. It has served for centuries to funnel privately educated boys from school to the ruling elite. It’s an unquestioned component of British power.”
He warns: “Alternatively, we could preserve Oxford unchanged, and just accept elite self-perpetuation as the intended outcome of British life.”
Actually, Oxbridge has also had an influence on the politics of India and of Pakistan. Independent India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, was at Trinity College, Cambridge, as was his grandson, Rajiv Gandhi, and his great-grandson, Rahul Gandhi (who did an MPhil). Nehru’s daughter, Indira Gandhi, was briefly at Somerville College, Oxford. And Imran Khan and Benazir Bhutto were contemporaries at Oxford. In fact, Benazir introduced Theresa May (née Brasier) to her husband, Philip May, at Oxford. Benazir’s father, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, and her son, Bilawal Bhutto Zardari, both went to Christ Church, Oxford.
But Kuper’s focus is on how Brexit is the devil child of Oxford.
The author was born in Uganda of South African parents in 1969 and moved to the Netherlands as a child. After Oxford, he attended Harvard University as a Kennedy Scholar. He admits he has become “a corresponding member of the British establishment.”
Incidentally, what British Asians will find particularly interesting is his explanation for why the right-wing establishment in Britain is so opposed to any “rewriting” of the history of empire. That provides an explanation for someone like Kemi Badenoch and possibly even Suella Braverman being seen as the future of the Tory party because of their “antiwoke” views. Anti-woke could be taken to mean pro-empire, a category that might include the historian Zareer Masani.
Kuper writes: “The history of empire, too, was personal to the toffs. After all, the public schools and Oxbridge had educated the men who, in the Catholic writer Ronald Knox’s phrase, ‘when they have finished playing here … can go out like good little boys and govern the Empire’. Ten out of 20 viceroys of India went to Oxford, as did Cecil Rhodes, who called the university ‘the energising source of Empire’.
“In public-school history classes in the 1970s and 1980s, empire was often presented as a manly romp.
“Perhaps no other country has as happy a relationship with its own history. And the self-appointed guardian of this relationship is the Conservative party. The Tory public schoolboys grew up as ancestor worshippers, and understandably so: for anyone able to gloss over the brutality of Empire, the achievements of their tiny caste were breathtaking. Between about 1860 and 1960, British men who had attended either independent schools or Oxbridge or both had invented, ruled and written much of the modern world. They had governed a quarter of the planet, and overseen victory in two world wars.
“Many 1980s public schoolboys transmuted these feelings into a camp nostalgia for greatness. When Johnson as foreign secretary visited the golden pagoda in Yangon, Myanmar, he began reciting Kipling’s poem Mandalay: ‘Come you back, you British soldier.’ The British ambassador had to warn him quietly that this was ‘not appropriate’”.
It is worth pointing out that both Rishi Sunak
and Liz Truss, a Remainer turned Brexiteer, read PPE at Oxford.
However, Kuper’s main gripe is with Boris and his chums. He says his book is “an attempt 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. This caste is just a small subset of Oxford. But it matters because it’s omnipresent in modern British political history.
“The Tory Brexiteers were a minority even among Oxford politicos in the 1980s. Their fellow students included most of the clique that would surround [former prime minister David] Cameron’s premiership and his Remain campaign, as well as several future senior Labour figures. Johnson and the graduate law student Keir Starmer left Oxford in the same summer of 1987; Cameron graduated a year later.
“But the Tory Brexiteer subgroup dominates this story, because it won. It has ended up making Brexit and remaking the UK. “That’s true even of Etonians. Eton’s mission isn’t simply to produce posh gentlemen. It’s to produce the ruling class. In the 1920s, an Etonian like Alec Douglas-Home could be admitted to Oxford practically as his birthright, get a third-class degree and still go on to become prime minister, the third consecutive Etonian in the job. From 1900 to 1979, nearly a quarter of all cabinet ministers had been to Eton.”
He argues: “The Oxford Tories – and especially the Etonians among them – were made by many forces besides Oxford. They had been groomed for power since childhood. One classics tutor at Oxford compares Johnson to the ghastly upper-class Athenians in Plato’s Dialogues: they had been corrupted long before they came to study with Socrates. It’s impossible, when discussing the Oxford Tories, to disentangle the overlapping influences of caste, school and university.
“But Oxford matters, as an independent variable. Evidence of this is that it’s possible to tell the story of British politics in the last 25 years almost without reference to any other university.
“I will argue in this book that if Johnson, [Michael] Gove, [Daniel] Hannan, Dominic Cummings and [Jacob] ReesMogg had received rejection letters from Oxford aged 17, we would probably never have had Brexit.”
Today, there is more than a sprinkling of British Asians at Eton. And, at Oxbridge, they are well represented – and are there on merit.
■ Chums: How a tiny caste of Oxford Tories took over the UK by Simon Kuper is published by Profile Books; £16.99