INSIDE ‘PIG-GATE’ AND ITS CLUBS
As a student, British PM David Cameron was in well-connected clubs. Their misdeeds — and power — remain legendary,
LONDON— To understand England’s elite, it helps to go back in time, to the summer of 1987. A pack of bowtied young men dressed in midnight blue tails with brass buttons and cream-coloured silk lapels are stumbling through the streets of Oxford after one of their dinners, tipsy on champagne and in a boisterous mood. None of them is older than 24. One hits upon the idea of visiting a fellow student — and a short time later, a flowerpot flies through a restaurant window and a police car arrives. It is a night that the entire country will be talking about decades later.
Four members of the group flee to the nearby Botanical Garden and hide behind a hedge. They lie on the ground for several minutes, says one of the men who was there. Once again, they have managed to escape unscathed.
The episode says a lot about the thin layer of the chosen few who would be running the country one day. They are members of the Bullingdon Club in Oxford, a gathering place for the country’s young elites, people who know that they are destined to make it to the very top. One of the four men in the grass is Boris Johnson, who will later become the mayor of London. Another is David Cameron, currently residing at No. 10 Downing Street. The two others are sons of prominent members of the financial world and now part of London’s moneyed aristocracy.
Cameron would later deny that he was involved in the escapade, even though two of his friends insist he was there. Johnson, on the other hand, boasted that he spent several hours in prison that night.
The truth about the Bullingdon Club is probably somewhere in the middle, between exaggeration and denial. Rarely have so many former members of the club held key positions in British society as they do today. Its members inhabit the top floors of banks, government ministries, law firms and newspaper publishers. Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne was also a member.
Unchanged for centuries
The Bullingdon and other dinner clubs are seeds of power in the United Kingdom, and not just because membership provides influence. Members also gain access to a group of like-minded individuals who will later assume leading roles — allies for life.
If there is a stable core of British society that has remained unchanged for centuries, it is the upper class. Unlike the elites on the European continent, the leadership clique in Britain was largely spared from revolutions and uprisings. For generations, the children of the country’s powerful families have attended boarding schools like Eton, Winchester and Harrow, followed by the universities of Oxford and Cambridge.
Not everyone has fond memories of those colourful student days. Cameron was not only a member of the Bullingdon Club, but also of the Piers Gaveston Society, a club for younger students well known for its excesses. If a new biography about the prime minister is to be believed, Cameron, during one Gaveston party, placed his private parts into the mouth of a dead pig as part of an initiation ritual. The affair was lampooned in the press as “Pig-gate,” and had the entire country laughing. Cameron initially kept mum about the incident before explicitly denying it.
The most amazing part isn’t the story as such, but the fact that most in Britain think it could be true. Few in the United Kingdom are surprised anymore by the excesses and affairs of the powerful at Westminster, a place that has long been viewed as sleazy and tainted. In the summer, to name just one recent example, the Sun published photos of Baron Sewel, a member of the House of Lords, half-naked, snorting cocaine with prostitutes.
There is a direct relationship between the excesses of these men and their lives as university students. One of the traditions at the Bullingdon Club was to invite prostitutes to a group breakfast. Excesses are part of the careers of these men rather than excep- tions; they are part of the British elite’s DNA. The Bullingdon Club was founded around 1780 and was first mentioned in a written document in 1795, as a cricket club. Membership is by invitation only. There are no fixed rules of admission, but it does help if daddy owns a castle, a small newspaper empire or a diamond mine. The number of members ranges from 10 to two or three dozen. Members are often sons of barons, lords and governors, with past members including King Frederik IX of Denmark, the father of Winston Churchill and the crown prince of Jodhpur. Evelyn Waugh wrote about the club in his 1928 book Decline and Fall, and last year the film The Riot Club depicted the Bullingdon as a club of the arrogant, rich and violent.
There are no club premises and members tend not to respond to messages. The only way to approach the legend of the Bullingdon Club is to speak with former members. After a few emails and telephone calls, I meet with a grey-haired gentleman at a café in London’s St. James’s neighbourhood. We’ll call him Julian. A former student at Eton and a graduate of Oxford, he is clean-shaven, clad in a perfectly tailored suit and extremely well-connected in the city’s political circles. He is on a first-name basis with the prime minister.
Julian appears in a black-and-white photo with Cameron and Boris Johnson, which depicts the Bullingdon Club in 1987. The photo shows 10 young men wearing tails, light-coloured vests and bow ties on a stone staircase in an inner courtyard at Christ Church, one of the most prestigious of the 38 colleges that are part of the University of Oxford. None of the men in the photo is smiling, which only enhances the look of absolute superiority in their faces. Cameron looks as if he were cast in bronze.
“For God’s sake, put it away,” says Julian, looking as if he had just been unmasked as a Russian spy. The photo was meant ironically, he says, and the arrogant pose was just that: a pose. Before the photographer took the picture, the then-president of the club, Jonathan Ford, said: “OK, friends, don’t smile. This is the Bullingdon!” Julian insists that the photo needs to be seen and understood in the neo-Romantic tradition of the late 1980s.
One can spend half of one’s life running away from questions about the club. One former Bullingdon member says that he wished he had never joined. At the time, he says, he was the first member in 20 years who had not attended a private school. An overt claim to leadership had prevailed in the club, he says. “We all do stupid things when we are younger that we regret,” says the man. “But the Bullingdon was different. You were actively and openly encouraged, even rewarded for getting drunk and causing as much damage as possible.”
The Bullingdon men destroyed pubs, became involved in brawls and drank themselves unconscious. The damage was usually paid for in cash. This spring, Bullingdon Club members met for a dinner at the Manor, a luxury hotel in Oxfordshire. They were taken there in a minibus, 15 young men in formal dress, including Vere Harmsworth, son of the owner of the Daily Mail, and George Farmer, whose father is a member of the House of Lords and treasurer of the Conservative party. Two other members of the group were Tom Gibbs, grandson of the 3rd Baron Wraxall, and Ali Daggash, who says that his uncle is the richest man in Africa.
The Manor is a country hotel in a 16thcentury manor, with a swimming pool and tennis courts. For their dinner, the Bullingdon Club had reserved the Tudor Room, with its heavy oak floor and a mahogany table in the middle. Waiters served about 50 bottles of wine and champagne.
“They turned up here all dressed up, acting like the royal family,” says John, one of the waiters. “And then, after dinner, half of them passed out, while the other half were smashing the glasses.”
When Boris Johnson and David Cameron were members, the club was much more raucous. The initiation ceremony consisted of dismantling the candidate’s dormitory room. Members would storm the room, deface the walls, tear up pictures and shred mattresses. Radoslaw Sikorski, a student at Oxford with Johnson in the 1980s who later served as Polish defence minister and as foreign minister, also submitted to the ritual. When it was over, Johnson shook his hand and said: “Congratulations, man. You have been elected.”
‘Sometimes we hired strippers’
Mark Baring was a member of the Bullingdon Club, the scion of a banking family and the second child of Baron Ashburton, who was chairman of oil giant BP. After spending a few years in banking, Baring now manages his family’s property in Hampshire, which includes large estates, a vineyard and an opera house.
Baring is one of the few former members who talk openly about the club. He told a historian with the British Library that the members sometimes behaved like vandals. “I suppose you could say it’s very unattractive, particularly by people who, you know, had every advantage in their life. In my experience, it didn’t really get horrendously out of hand. Yes, we would sometimes break plates or furniture or whatever, but we tried to be as polite as we could be to the people whose establishments we were in.”
The dinners were “riotous,” says Baring. He appears in a 1980 group photograph with Philip Dunne, the current minister of state for defence procurement, and Jonathan Cavendish, the producer of the Bridget Jones comedies. Spending one’s evenings in this way was not unusual in Oxford, he explains. “Sometimes we hired strippers.” He sees nothing wrong with the club’s activities and points out that there are probably similar clubs “on the other side of the social divide.”
For those who play their cards right, Oxford can be a stairway to paradise, to the City of London, to Westminster, to Singapore or Wall Street. The student clubs and societies are indispensable rungs on the ladder to the top, networks that help graduates obtain internships and first jobs. Someone’s father always has a job for a recent graduate in his bank.
Ambition and delusions of grandeur are close cousins, especially at the Bullingdon Club. But the Facebook profiles of the latest graduating class, the photos from parties and vacations, depict a cheerful, weightless upper class, and there is no sign of fear and concerns about the future in their faces. Only of determination and power.
They occasionally get together at the Bridge, a club in Oxford. The entrance is up a flight of stairs, and only those with a golden wristband are allowed into the club. The lion’s throne, surrounded by a cord, is at the back.
“Why is our table occupied?” asks Ali Daggash, the student with the rich uncle. There is a tense conversation, and then someone says: “We’re the Bullingdon, man.” The table empties within a few minutes.