Chums: How a Tiny Caste of Oxford Tories Took Over the UK

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Kuper, Simon (17 March 2022). "Becoming French is like winning the lottery". Financial Times . Retrieved 2 July 2023. Simon Kuper (6 March 2006). "All the time in the world". ESPNcricinfo . Retrieved 13 September 2011. In his book, The Tyranny of Merit, the philosopher Michael Sandel argues that because all education systems will be gamed by the privileged, the only fair way to apportion university places is by random lottery. Kuper is sympathetic to that idea. He notes how countries such as Canada, Australia, Germany and the Netherlands forgo the notion of “elite” colleges, and students generally just go to the university that is nearest to them. This leads to people having to prove themselves in the workplace, not being given preferential treatment straight out of college. “I want Oxford and Cambridge to continue to exist, but not teaching privilege to public school boys.” In early 1983, as a diffident grammar school boy, I sat in a centuries old sitting room, beside a burbling open fire, enduring an interview for a place to study English at Oriel College, Oxford. I was muttering something about Shakespeare.

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. Robertson, meanwhile, partly inspired by the historian’s abhorrence of the EU, left Oxford after his second year to devote himself to the Bruges Group of Eurosceptics that he set up while at the university. (Robertson, Kuper points out, now lives in St Moritz, where he runs the public relations firm WorldPR, responsible for the post-Brexit “global Britain” campaign. He is also Kazakhstan’s honorary consul to the Bahamas.) Clearly, a lot of work for “de-radicalising” certain institutions of education from such ideological manifestations (I’m trying to be polite!) of societal inequality and destruction. In addition, I do feel academia is taken far more seriously than Kuper’s descriptions of the 1980s – tutors are constantly pushing me to delve further into the topics at hand and to achieve the next grade. Oxford is not just seen as three or four years of fun, but particularly for working-class students like me as a beacon of social mobility and a way to progress onto the next stage of their lives. Maybe national and international league tables alongside an increasing focus on research funding can be held partly responsible for that, alongside a more competitive jobs market. In 2022 he published Chums - How a Tiny Caste of Oxford Tories Took Over the UK, [32] [33] [34] about the connections that enabled a university network to dominate Westminster. [35] Personal life [ edit ]Johnson’s candidacy suffered from his Toryism. Conservatives may have been the largest faction within the union, but they were a minority in the university as a whole. Most Oxford dons of the time were anti-Thatcher, too. Denying her an honorary degree in 1985 to protest her cuts to education and research was the university’s seminal political statement of the decade. “Why should we feed the hand that bites us?” asked one don. The other point we should briefly reflect on is whether Johnson would be in power, and whether Brexitwould have happened without Oxford’s involvement – I personally believe they likely would still be in power today due to the networks formed at an earlier age. We need to think earlier down the educational journey when reflecting on social mobility; to expect universities to change the entire playing field places too much burden on institutions that already do so much good.

Kuper wrote for Oxford’s independent student paper Cherwell where they would sometimes cover campus eccentrics like Rees-Mogg but he had no conception of what any of it meant at the time. “When I was writing the book, I spoke to a guy who was at Cherwell with me... He said, ‘I thought these people were the past that, they were just going to disappear as Britain moved on into modernity.’ And I thought, Wow, he had a view in the 80s. I didn’t have a view. I didn’t really have any understanding of where people sat or where they were going.” His book The Football Men, which was published in 2011, offered a collection of articles about the world of football over a span of 13 years, along with new pieces written specifically for this book. The Independent wrote that "Simon Kuper is a refreshing antidote to the current media obsession with 'getting the nannies [nanny goats = quotes]', however banal, from players. He doesn't mince his words: talking of past greats, he dismisses Bobby Charlton as "a dullard", Michel Platini "a weak character" and Pele "a talking puppet." [28] Of course this toxic, maligned template then gets forced onto the public at large with devastating consequences, which is how you end up with what the UK has been enduring for well over a decade. A disastrous system which is run by the same kind of people for the same kind of people, which is designed at its very heart to extr Kuper’s unique approach to sports writing, particularly on football, has earned him several prestigious accolades, including the 1994 William Hill Sports Book of the Year. He writes about sports "from an anthropological perspective." [6] Time Magazine has called him “one of the world’s leading writers on soccer” [7] and The Economic Times labeled him “one of the world's most famous football writers.” [8]

Simon Kuper is a British, and naturalized French, author and journalist, best known for his work at the Financial Times and as a football writer. After studies at Oxford, Harvard University and the Technische Universität Berlin, Kuper started his career in journalism at the FT in 1994, where he today writes about a wide range of topics, such as politics, society, culture, sports and urban planning. [2] A union career was good practice for Westminster. You learned when an ostensible ally was lying to your face, or when you should be lying to his; when it was safe to break a rule, and when it wasn’t. Michael Heseltine, who had occupied the president’s chair – which sat on a raised dais like a throne – called it “the first step to being prime minister”. Once you had ascended the union, Downing Street felt within your grasp. The picture portrayed is not a pretty one. In many ways what happened to those youngsters during the 1980s haunts us now in the 2020s. Kuper has twice been awarded the British Society of Magazine Editors' prize for Columnist of the Year, in 2016 [3] and 2020. [4] Books [ edit ]