Did Boris really plot Brexit with his Oxford pals?
Chums Simon Kuper
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The plot that led to Brexit was hatched in Oxford in the 1980s by a cabal of entitled public schoolboys. Nostalgic for British greatness, they resolved to reverse Britain’s decline into European mediocrity. In the Oxford Union Society, chums including Boris Johnson, Michael Gove and Jacob Rees-Mogg (addressing the Society in 1991, right) learned debating and campaigning skills that have helped 11 British Prime Ministers since 1945 climb the greasy pole.
Groomed for power since early childhood by ancient and beautiful schools, they fitted in seamlessly amid Oxford’s dreaming spires. Their university turbocharged their lust for power. Oxford opened horizons first glimpsed at Eton and Winchester and gave the chums claws with which to ascend the heights.
This is Simon Kuper’s thesis, and he writes it elegantly. Chums is a tremendous romp jam-packed with delicious indiscretions and bitchy asides. A female observer who met the Prime Minister as an undergraduate concluded he was ‘an epic s***’ who exploited admirers during his campaign to lead the society. Here, he perfected rhetorical skills that would serve him well as an editor and politician.
Sadly, Johnson and his friends learned little more. Kuper describes an Oxford in which ability to concoct an entertaining argument was cherished above understanding and analysis. Johnson (speaking to Greek culture minister Melina Mercouri at Oxford in 1986, right) and his chums learned to be gentleman amateurs, not brilliant technocrats. They are products of Oxford’s distinctive tutorial system, always confident in their ability to improvise but rarely fully briefed.
They followed a path recognisable to predecessors such as Harold Macmillan and Anthony Eden. The difference, explains Kuper, is that this ‘chumocracy’ of public school and Oxford Conservatives had not experienced tragedy. Macmillan and Eden grew up amid the horrors of the Western Front in the First World War. Any sense of entitlement was wiped away by their experience as officers leading soldiers they learned to respect.
For Johnson’s generation, politics was not entirely serious. As at Oxford, so in the House of Commons, they treated it more as a game in which no trick was too dastardly and grudges should not last. Above all, political life should never be boring.
Kuper traces the origins of Brexit to a group of Oxford graduates determined to reclaim their caste’s right to decide Britain’s destiny without interference. Bored by the laborious discussions through which the EU regulates by imperfect consensus, they yearned for the brisk decisive politics of the Oxford Union Society. Brussels was dull. A sovereign House of Commons and a liberated Downing Street would be fun and they would control them. Lesser human beings could deal with the technicalities. Thus were issues such as the Northern Ireland border dismissed as boring irrelevancies.
I enjoyed Kuper’s argument. It is, however, an example of a clever Oxford graduate fitting facts to theory while ignoring his own prejudices. Kuper was born in Uganda and schooled in the Netherlands. He lives in France. Gaining admission from a state school, he studied history and German at Oxford, and as a postgraduate in the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. He is now a columnist for the Financial Times.
He appears to have felt excluded when he arrived in Oxford and has taken his revenge in impressive style. Chums is immensely entertaining, but in dismissing a democratic decision taken by the British people as a conspiracy concocted on the playing fields of Eton and Oxford it is luminously misguided.