A penetrating analysis of the connections that enabled an incestuous university network to dominate Westminster and give birth to Brexit is perceptive and full of surprises
” at the Oxford Union in 1987 – an “opportunity to buy your favourite union person for the evening” – there was, according to the university newspaper, frenzied bidding for the services of the kilt-wearing 19-year-old Michael Gove. He went for £35.
It helped this new breed, Kuper argues, that at the union, they were often joking among themselves. The Oxford University Labour Club, high on Billy Bragg and miners’ solidarity marches, boycotted the debating chamber . The political big beasts on the left in the second half of the 80s, in university terms, were the Miliband brothers, Dave and Ted, and Eddie Balls and Yvette Cooper, organising rent protests at their respective colleges.
Though the clique around Johnson believed they were born to power, unlike the swashbucklers of empire they admired, they lacked a cause to fight for As Johnson himself remarked, if you wanted to know how influential the Oxford Union was in British politics, you had only to look at all the photographs of past presidents on its walls. There was, however, one distinct difference between those characters and their 1980s pretenders. As Kuper observes, the politicians of Anthony Eden and Harold Macmillan’s vintage had been shaped not only by Eton and Oxford but also by war.