
- English
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About this book
Now with a new chapter on the end of the chumocracy era - and Oxford's upcoming elite for 2050.
THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER AND TIMES BEST BOOK OF 2022
A TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT BEST BOOK OF 2023
Power. Privilege. Parties.
It's a very small world at the top.
'Brilliant ... traces Brexit back to the debating chambers of the Oxford Union in the 1980s' James O'Brien
'A searing onslaught on the smirking Oxford insinuation that politics is all just a game. It isn't. It matters' Matthew Parris
'A sparkling firework of a book' Lynn Barber, Spectator
'Exquisite and depressing in equal measure' Matthew Syed, Sunday Times
Boris Johnson, Michael Gove, David Cameron, George Osborne, Theresa May, Dominic Cummings, Daniel Hannan, Jacob Rees-Mogg: Whitehall is swarming with old Oxonians. They debated each other in tutorials, ran against each other in student elections, and attended the same balls and black tie dinners.
They aren't just colleagues - they are peers, rivals, friends. And, when they walked out of the world of student debates onto the national stage, they brought their university politics with them.
Thirteen of the seventeen postwar British prime ministers went to Oxford University. In Chums, Simon Kuper traces how the rarefied and privileged atmosphere of this narrowest of talent pools - and the friendships and worldviews it created - shaped modern Britain.
A damning look at the university clique-turned-Commons majority that will blow the doors of Westminster wide open and change the way you look at our democracy forever.
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Information
Table of contents
- Praise
- Title Page
- Epigraph
- Contents
- Introduction: Oxocracy
- 1: An Elite of Sorts
- 2: Class War
- 3: A Little Learning
- 4: Buller Rules
- 5: The Children’s Parliament
- 6: The Bounder Speaks
- 7: Stooges, Votaries and Victims
- 8: Union and Non-Union
- 9: Birth of Brexit
- 10: A Generation without Tragedy
- 11: Adults Now
- 12: Our House
- 13: No Fighting in This Establishment
- 14: Brexit and the Oxford Union
- 15: May I Count on Your Vote?
- 16: The Chumocracy Pandemic
- 17: Oxocracy without Toffs
- 18: What Is To Be Done?
- Acknowledgements
- Select Bibliography
- Index
- About the Author
- Also by Simon Kuper
- Copyright