The Tory elite that has ruled since 2010

Nadhim Zahawi, the Tory minister and ex-chancellor now disgraced for tax evasion, atypically did not go to Oxford University. He went to University College London instead. But his entry to high-level Tory politics was through the entourage of Jeffrey Archer, who did go to Oxford.

A small group of Tory men (and a few women here) educated at Oxford and also often at Eton are the base of the current ruling elite in the UK: deeply undemocratic, unaccountable, elitist, corrupt, repulsive, and many of them quite stupid.

Simon Kuper’s book Chums: How a Tiny Caste of Oxford Tories Took Over the UK shows, in the words of Tim Adams of the Observer, “the extent of the stubbornly incestuous Oxford networks that currently sit at the top of our politics…” It features Boris Johnson, Michael Gove, Jacob Rees-Mogg, David Cameron, George Osborne, Matt Hancock, Rory Stewart, Rishi Sunak, Liz Truss, Dominic Cummings plus lesser known asteroids such as Rachel Johnson (Boris’s sister), Dido Harding, and journalists such as Emma Tucker (one-time editor of the Sunday Times), Toby Young, Julia Hartley-Brewer and James Delingpole. Many of them studied Oxford’s “Politics, Philosophy, and Economics” course, established in the 1920s expressly as a preparation for future rulers.

Before any smugness sets in about “Tory toffs”, let’s not forget that Yvette Cooper, Keir Starmer (after first graduating from Leeds University), Ed Balls, Tony Blair, David and Ed Miliband, Tony Benn and Clement Attlee also attended Oxford. Those Labour politicians are a bit different, though: none of them are or were old Etonians, and they have not created or manipulated a “chumocracy” in quite the same way as the Tories. For all their faults, too numerous to mention here, the Labourites came from a different world.

Eleven of the fifteen post-war British prime Ministers went to Oxford. (Churchill, John Major and Jim Callaghan didn’t attend university, while Gordon Brown studied at Edinburgh.) Cabinets have likewise been stuffed with former Oxford students, but the “chumocracy” described by Kuper has been most potent since 2010.

Kuper highlights two areas where the chumocracy of mostly-1980s Oxford students has played a crucial role in shaping national policy, with bad effects for the rest of us. According to Kuper, the role played by the Oxford caste was essential in what happened in the European Referendum in June 2016. For once the Chums did not unite. David Cameron, then Prime Minister, thought he could “wing it” by calling a referendum without proper preparation or planning.

Dan Hannan, also an Oxford student, a few years later than Cameron, had long been a campaigner from getting Britain out of the EU. He persuaded Michael Gove and others to get on the band wagon, including Dominic Cummings, who had been Gove’s special adviser while at the Department of Education. They formed a rather uneasy alliance with Nigel Farage (whom they all despised) and finally succeeded in recruiting Boris Johnson, which they saw as a major coup.

All the rest is well-known. Cameron’s resignation left a vacuum in Downing Street that Johnson was, of course, eager to fill. He lost out to Theresa May and had to wait until she too resigned. One feature of all these Oxford musical chairs was that hardly anyone in a prominent position had much clue about what Brexit might mean. As Kuper notes: “Brexit was above all their generational grand project designed to protect the powers of their personal fiefdom of Westminster. The rest was just detail — boring issues of governance best left to swotty civil servants”.

And then the “swotty” were another wing of the same crowd. Jeremy Heywood, at Oxford from 1980-83, was the head of the civil service at the time, described by Kuper as “the junior executive wing of Britain’s Oxocracy”.

Kuper’s description of “The Chumocracy Pandemic” shows how, when the chumocracy are confronted by something about which they know even less than usual, they can still muddle along by getting on their phones to enlist old cronies.

“Much of Britain’s pandemic response was routed through people who had been at university with Johnson et al., then gone into business rather than the soul-corrupting civil service, had married Tories or business moguls and ended up on the London Tory dinner-party circuit or in the paddock at Cheltenham…” People like Dido Harding, who, despite having no qualifications or appropriate experience, was put in charge of the NHS’s Test and Trace programme. She is, in fact, a prominent figure in the world of horse-racing, just the sort of person you would want to lead a major programme in the fight against a pandemic.

Unsurprisingly, the pandemic became an opportunity for companies such as Serco to make obscene profits out of the misery of millions. Serco’s Chairman is Rupert Soames, a former Oxford Union President and member of the notorious Bullingdon Club. He was paid £4.9 million in 2020.

Equally unsurprisingly, the chums didn’t bother too much about lockdown rules. Those were for the plebs and oiks. Hence parties at Ten Downing Street when everyone else was stuck at home. Boris Johnson’s response (other than lying) was to appoint a new communications director, Guto Harri, yet another Oxford University contemporary.

At the end of his always interesting and revealing book, Simon Kuper ends with a chapter describing what he sees as the recent decline of the chumocracy. In his opinion Oxford admissions are now more open, democratic and accountable. There is much to quibble about here and I suspect that, like me, many people will take some convincing.

His main suggested reform is to transform Oxford and Cambridge into post-graduate universities, but it is difficult to see how that is going to make much difference.

My other observation is that Kuper doesn’t offer an analysis that links neo-liberal, monetarist, free-market ideology to the chumocracy, yet there are surely links and this should be brought out. All of them are free-marketeers in one way or another, and that isn’t all about Eton and the Oxford Union.