If we have empirically agreed that a straight line is the shortest distance between two points, after reading Amigocracy it is inevitable to assume its main thesis with a similar maxim: Oxford is the quickest way to access power in England. Or should we say that “it has been so” until reaching a present point of collapse?
This is what an insider tells us, Simon Kuper (Kampala, 1969), a former student of this university who never considered himself part of the dominant caste in that ecosystem, among other things because he was noticed just by stepping on campus in the nineties. , to him and to the rest of the students who did not come from private and elite schools. The distances were marked, the result of “the spontaneous superiority” that those who did respond to that pattern breathed. Among others, future prime ministers such as Boris Johnson or David Cameron.
They had contracted from the cradle the premium package of the Tory puppies “born to govern”, which consisted of receiving a basic education at Eton, graduating from Oxford and there becoming part of the Oxford Union debating society. Hence, Kuper defines the United Kingdom as an oxocracy, something he does without acrimony, since that feeling is not really evident in his writing, despite being relentless in his criticism of his posh ruling class.
The book is a seductive journey to an England that was, that is no longer, but that has wanted to pretend that it did not know it, until its final consequences. Will Brexit have been that last consequence? The author believes that it is, without a doubt, the most calamitous and the zenith of a system of power that for decades has encouraged and educated individuals who came to believe themselves to be the protagonists of Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited, which in 1981 took the form of a successful television series. That series, more than the book, gave an aura of camp glamor to the Oxford gentlemen who studied there in the eighties and nineties. And Johnson would be a part of this group (more than Cameron) along with other cronies who, with him, would end up forming the pro-Brexit Tory core.
Their bubble of privilege turned them into a caricature of young people accustomed to being rewarded with congratulations, good grades and social success, for the simple fact of enjoying their natural charm and empty but effective rhetoric, which would be what, Over the years, they would involve the campaign in favor of Brexit. They had grown up in an environment that ensured they never suffered the negative consequences of almost anything, that promoted the most brilliant orators (as a simple rhetorical exercise), and that made them long for the epic of imperial glory that their ancestors had won in the fields. of battle.
Thus, when they came to power, the management of daily affairs bored them, the debates in Westminster were too small for them and they lacked their own Waterloo to be able to score an epic victory like that of the Duke of Wellington over Napoleon.
Thus, they decided to stop governing (little and badly) to enthusiastically launch into haranguing a troop that they unleashed against the polls, without fearing the consequences. Among other things, because they knew that they would not suffer them. The virtual walls of their Oxford continued to protect them. Until then? Kuper argues why he believes so, in this fine and enervating book at the same time, like its protagonists.
