YOU CAN TAKE THE MAN OUT OF BULLINGDON
I am never impressed when
told that someone has been privately educated, that they have been to Eton , Harrow , Westminster or Cheltenham Ladies College . Such institutions rarely produce rounded
individuals but are very adept at turning out the emotionally retarded and
sexually delinquent. It took George Orwell fifteen years to undo the damage
done by Eton , a period he later described as ‘five years in a
lukewarm bath of snobbery.’
It was once my misfortune
to manage someone educated in this way, probably one of the most unpleasant
people I have ever worked with. He made no secret of the fact that he thought
it inappropriate that I should be his senior and managed to combine an innate
sense of entitlement with extremely large dosages of self pity. He once sought
to have me disciplined by going behind my back and misreporting something I had
done to a senior manager of the charity for which we worked.[1]
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Boris Johnson and The Bullingdon Club |
The prime example of the
kind of privileged inadequates produced by such an educational system can be
found in the Oxford Bullingdon club. David Cameron, George Osborne and Boris
Johnson were all members.[2]
Activities of the club involve wrecking restaurants,
smashing windows and assaulting other students with such amusing stunts as
pulling their trousers down. It has also been alleged that one activity
involved burning fifty pound notes in front of a homeless man. As I say all
very droll.
Watching David Cameron at
Prime Minister’s Question time this week certainly felt like watching the years
roll back. No bread rolls to hand, he contented himself by hurling smears and
insults wildly around the chamber and generally behaving like the bad tempered unprincipled
lout that at heart he still is; all those years of carefully choreographed PR,
the hug a Husky, man of compassion and empathy, gone in just thirty minutes. It
seems you can take the man out of the Bullingdon but can’t take Bullingdon out
of the man.
[1] This story had a comic denouement
since the manager he spoke to immediately saw through him and, being even more
ruthless, had said to me, “if you want to get rid of him get rid him.”
I declined but the knowledge that he had been exposed afforded me some
satisfaction.
[2] Attempts have been made,
in an extraordinary Stalinist way to airbrush their membership out of history,
see http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/riddle-of-the-airbrushed-bullingdon-boys-picture-352224
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