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.’

Boris Johnson and The Bullingdon Club
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]

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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