One young debating hopeful of the day was Frank Luntz, the future American pollster who has become known as a master of political language. If you thought you knew the extent of the stubbornly incestuous Oxford networks that currently sit at the top of our politics, this book will still surprise you,” said The Guardian’s Tim Adams.

It would be wrong to deny that there is not a political element to the Society; however, I do feel there has been a marked tone shift since the 1980s.They carried their Arcadian personalities and politics into the rest of their lives – and Kuper, a fellow alumnus, loathes them for it.

Looking back at Oxford in the 1980s, knowing what he knows now, Kuper sees the beginning of a sort of posh counter-revolution. Premium Digital includes access to our premier business column, Lex, as well as 15 curated newsletters covering key business themes with original, in-depth reporting.

Also in 2021, Kuper released The Happy Traitor, [30] an account of the life and motivations of George Blake, a British spy for the Soviet Union. Clearly, a lot of work for “de-radicalising” certain institutions of education from such ideological manifestations (I’m trying to be polite! But how, he wonders in a central theme of the book, has a “Brahmin caste”, educated at the University of Oxford “captured the British machine?

But Oxford, Kuper argues, especially when combined with posh public schools, has traditionally created an impregnable elite.

It was Stone who personally nurtured Cummings’s public schoolboy anarchy and who persuaded him to head to Russia after his degree to get a feel for the post-cold war world. Pages describing the ‘essay crisis’, where students stay up until the early hours of the morning to complete academic work, are definitely a feature of student life for many, with traditional three-hour closed-book exams still being a staple of many courses. He discovered how to win elections and debates not by boring the audience with detail, but with carefully timed jokes, calculated lowerings of voice, and ad hominem jibes. Johnson would display that art throughout his political career, much of which would be accompanied by stooges he picked up at Oxford – or by his Eton-and-Oxford Union successor Rees-Mogg.

If anything’s going to stir up revolution and turn me into an 18th Century French tricoteuse, it’s not the Platinum Jubilee celebrations, it’s the thought of the privilege, sense of entitlement and elitism exhibited by the likes of Boris Johnson, Jacob Rees-Mogg, even the aggressively anarchic Dominic Cummings. TheBookOfPhobiaaAndManias traces the rich and thought-provoking history in which our fixations have taken shape.While Chums damningly examines a very specific cadre of Tories, it’s also an indictment of the whole notion of elite universities. Simon Kuper’s writing makes the book a gripping read from start to finish, taking you step-by-step from university days and the Oxford Union right to Coronavirusand the heart of government. Chums, which tracks the well-connected Oxford posse who go on to govern Britain, was only released at the end of April but has already received a tonne of rave reviews.