2023-12-11 01:26:27
Confident, defiant, believing that the world is at their feet. The most famous photograph from Oxford in 1987 shows ten students dressed in frock coats, blue bow ties and mustard waistcoats, the uniform of “the ruling class”, the Bullingdon uniform. In the image are two of the last prime ministers of the United Kingdom, David Cameron and Boris Johnson, and perhaps they and their attitude at the head of the Government, with frivolous decisions such as ‘Brexit’, which will have consequences for decades, explain better than anyone the decline of the British elites.
Bullingdon was (formally it still exists, although far from its vandalistic ‘splendor’) the most exclusive club at the University of Oxford and also the least exemplary. It was characterized by its anti-meritocratic character and its members, all men, were chosen based on their social origins.
Once inside, they moved in packs, destroying restaurants, bursting bottles in the streets, humiliating sex workers or pulling down the pants of their colleagues who belonged to the lower class. «And they degraded their victims further with financial compensation. The message? “The rules don’t apply to our class.” The phrase is from the South African-British journalist Simon Kuper, who has made a devastating portrait of the British conservative caste in the book ‘Amigocracy’ (Captain Swing).
Escape from the police
The most unfortunate episode of Bullingdon occurred in 1987, when several members of the club were arrested after someone threw a pot through the window of a restaurant. “The party ended with a few boys crawling through hedges trying to escape the police dogs,” said Boris Johnson. He, Cameron and Sebastian Grigg, now the 4th Baron Altrincham, were the only three participants in the spree to escape the police. “Even in the middle of a drunken night, this trio was able to think about their resumes,” Kuper writes. Spending a night behind bars would have been a stain on their aspirations that they could not afford.
Years later, both Cameron and Johnson repudiated their years at Bullingdon. “Every time I see the famous photograph of the little group of arrogant ‘children of privilege’, I am ashamed,” Cameron acknowledged. “If I regret anything, it’s spending so much time fooling around and wasting my time at Oxford when I should have focused more on serious things,” Johnson elaborated.
Because beyond its academic prestige, the University of Oxford hides many miseries. Alcohol runs through the classrooms (among students and teachers) and not all students, but the puppies of the British elite, learn without having to make an effort the tricks to successfully navigate the world (rhetoric, plugging), although without values neither ethics nor commitment to society.
#shameful #binges #prime #ministers