The impulse towards good involves choice and is complicated, and the impulse towards bad is hideously simple and easy. —Maeve Brennan
Thirty-seven years ago, a group of young men I didn’t know entered my University of Oxford college room, violently knocked over my meager furniture, sprayed champagne over my bed, and bundled me, in a semi-dressed state, to a waiting car outside.
I don’t remember the rest of the evening clearly: I ended up at someone’s house, drank more champagne, and was deposited back at my college alongside another equally dazed victim.
That, in case you’ve ever wondered, is how you “join” the Bullingdon Club, the infamous Oxford dining society known for its dedication to gluttony and mindless vandalism, and, more recently, for offering a temporary berth to two prime ministers (David Cameron and Boris Johnson) and a chancellor (George Osborne).
I wish I could tell you I was appalled and reported my intruders immediately to the college authorities, but I wasn’t and I didn’t. I joined up and went the whole hog, even getting measured up for the elegant dark-blue tailcoat, with its ivory silk lapels and “BC”-monogrammed buttons.
My flirtation with “the Buller” ended several months later with my fiancé and I being asked to leave a wine bar after a fellow member of the club had emptied a jug of port, re-filled it with his own piss, and sent it back to the waitress, saying it was “off.” That was enough for me. I moved on and buried the memories of my poor choices as deeply as I could. —former Bullingdon Club member John Mitchinson
Omnipresent Omertà
It has been alleged that Bullingdon Club newcomers are asked to burn a £50 note in front of a homeless person as an initiation ritual—a claim that, due to the secrecy of the group, hasn’t been widely corroborated, but also wouldn’t be surprising. Indeed, a former Bullingdon membership “scout” once told The Observer that “every time someone was elected, they had to have their room smashed to pieces,” saying that Bullingdon members “had an air of entitlement and superiority.”
The walls of privilege surrounding the Bullingdon Club, which was founded more than 200 years ago, in 1780, are high, closely guarding the intimate details of this depraved syndicate.
In a profile of Johnson by the BBC in 2013, it was noted how “members of the Buller feel bound by strict vows of omertà—and normally refuse to speak publicly about the club.” Johnson even mutters, “Omertà, omertà,” according to the journalist Sebastian Shakespeare, whenever he is asked about his youthful transgressions in the Bullingdon.
It has been alleged that Bullingdon Club newcomers are asked to burn a £50 note in front of a homeless person as an initiation ritual.
Those recruited to the club are typically heirs to fame and fortune—(exclusively male) members of rich dynasties who attended the most prestigious private schools in Britain.
The journalist Tom Mutch managed to find a set of club rules from 1850, which describes the penguin costumes—the “Blue Coat, Brass Buttons, Buff Waistcoat [and] Blue Trousers”—worn by its members to this day. Mutch also notes that the Bullingdon was “ordered not to hold any meetings within 15 miles of central Oxford in 1894 after smashing all 534 windows in Peckwater, a quad in Christ Church, the grandest of Oxford’s colleges.”
As reported by The New York Times in 1913, Queen Mary demanded that her son—the future King Edward VIII—relinquish his membership of the Bullingdon, due to its raucous reputation. Mutch says that, over a 50-year period during the 20th century, the club’s alumni included a prime minister, a chancellor of the Exchequer, three foreign secretaries, five first lords of the admiralty, some 50 members of Parliament, and more than 100 peers of the realm.
The Bullingdon Club’s influence is so pronounced that its former members managed to erase one of its annual photos from the Internet, featuring two lofty-looking future prime ministers (Johnson and Cameron). Two heads have also been scrubbed from another one of these yearbook portraits.
“It is a truly shameful vignette of almost superhuman undergraduate arrogance and toffishness and twittishness,” Johnson once said about the club—apparently failing to acknowledge or appreciate how he had become the political embodiment of the infamous society.
The Bullingdon Way
Oxford is the pulsating nerve center of the British establishment, and its status imbues the college and its creations with a sense of exceptionalism—a belief that the institutions of power exist to serve their interests rather than vice versa.
This is echoed in Chums, Simon Kuper’s book on the Oxford “chums” who now run the U.K. “This generation had ambition without a cause,” Kuper writes, about Johnson and his peers. Kuper notes that, essentially, these Oxford graduates accepted society as it is currently formed—with all its hierarchies and inequalities—and that the offer of their education was that “maybe someday you will be on top of the heap yourself.”
Yet, there is another institution that also defined Johnson’s journey: Eton, the expensive, elitist private school on the outskirts of London that he attended as a boy. As Musa Okwonga writes in his Eton memoir, One of Them, “I look at the school’s motto, ‘May Eton Flourish’ [Floreat Etona], and I think, it is not right that you flourish, and will continue to flourish, at the expense of so many others.”
In 1982, Martin Hammond, one of Johnson’s masters at Eton, wrote to his father to explain that “Boris seems affronted when confronted with what amounts to a gross failure of responsibility…. I think he honestly believes that it is churlish of us not to regard him as an exception, one who should be free of the network of obligation that binds everyone else.”
The upper reaches of academia, journalism, politics, and business in Britain are all dominated by white, privately educated men from the southeast of England. The vast majority of people outside this system, who are unfamiliar with the gowns of Eton and the spires of Oxford, are effectively pre-canceled. Their opinions can’t be shut down, because they are simply not heard in the first place.
“This generation had ambition without a cause.”
Twenty-nine percent of M.P.’s were educated at private school, compared to 7 percent in the population as a whole; 74 percent of Liz Truss’s Cabinet were privately educated, as were 64 percent of Johnson’s first Cabinet; 50 percent of Johnson’s 2020 Cabinet went to either Oxford or Cambridge; 65 percent of senior U.K. judges went to a fee-paying school; 33 percent of newspaper columnists attended both an independent school and Oxbridge.
At the turn of the century, only 18 percent of M.P.’s were women; less than 10 percent of M.P.’s are from an ethnic-minority background; in February 2019, it was reported there are more F.T.S.E. 100 C.E.O.’s called Steve than there are from ethnic-minority backgrounds.
Britain’s elite is a tightly knit cabal of former private-school kids and heirs to wealth, knowledge, and influence. These elites pontificate over “cancel culture” while monopolizing the airwaves and shutting out those not belonging to their own privileged tribe.
The Conservatives won in 2019 because Johnson’s personality was larger than the party—he was a Vote Leave Conservative prime minister. Now that the clown has been unmasked—today it’s widely known that, before selecting his camp for the referendum, Johnson wrote two columns for The Telegraph, one in favor of Remain and one in favor of Leave—the Bullingdon Club elite appears to be losing.
Funded as it is by the spoils of neoliberalism, the true consequences of this nepotism, arrogance, and free-market fervor are currently unavoidable. And not before time.
This is the real makeup of the Bullingdon Club elite—not the quaint, benevolent leadership of Jeeves and Wooster aristocrats, but a calculated alliance, dedicated ruthlessly toward extending its own life opportunities.
Sam Bright is an investigative journalist and the author of Fortress London: Why We Need to Save the Country from Its Capital and the upcoming Bullingdon Club Britain: The Ransacking of a Nation