When Charles Ryder rented a ground-floor room at his Oxford college, he was warned that he was making a mistake. One night Sebastian Flyte looked out the window and vomited in Ryder's quarters. That vomit marked the beginning of a great friendship between the two men and was also the beginning of one of the most celebrated novels in British literature, Brideshead Revisited (Evelyn Waugh, 1945).
Charles and Sebastian's university life was spent between glasses of champagne, excursions to the countryside and exclusive parties. For readers in the 80s, coinciding with the television adaptation of the book on the BBC, everything seemed like a story from the longed for and mythologized 20s. But when in 1988 Simon Kuper (Kampala, Uganda, 1969) entered Oxford from The Netherlands, he realized that things had not changed that much or that, perhaps, the students of the eighties wanted to be like Ryder and Flyte.
“In Oxford in the 1980s, the cult of work was frowned upon,” says Kuper in Amigocracia (Captain Swing, with translation by Carolina Santano Fernández), a book in which the author – who now lives in Paris and writes for the Financial Times – remembers his stay at the famous university in which an upper-class caste predominated that, over the years, gained power in the United Kingdom.
Margaret Thatcher, Tony Blair, David Cameron, Theresa May, Boris Johnson and Liz Truss studied at Oxford, which is “a prime minister factory,” according to Kuper in an interview with La Vanguardia. The well-known university was also the factory where Brexit was created.
Kuper is very clear that this process materialized due to two circumstances: the type of students and the education that was provided at Oxford. “It was a place for upper-class white men from elite schools like Eton. In those times there were already women, some foreigners and children of workers, but they were the fewest and they often suffered the ridicule and humiliation of the caste of which Cameron or Johnson were part,” recalls the writer and journalist.
Today it may seem strange, but in the Oxford of the eighties studying literature was much more prestigious than dedicating oneself to science, because the caste "thought that it would be the lower classes who would dedicate themselves to working, they focused on learning to speak, speak and speak..." The art of dialectic was perfected in debating societies such as the Union or the Ouca, both conservative in nature, where "how things were said was much more important than the things that were said."
Since working was not well regarded, the tutors only required that the students write “some works about, for example, the Second World War, for which it was enough to read two or three pages of a manual, the important thing was to know how to argue, since "I considered it to be an exercise for life, the content remained in the background."
In those humanities classes they talked about the times when England was a great empire and that “contributed to creating a rejection towards the continent and towards Brussels and its bureaucrats and caused students like Jacob Rees-Mogg to begin to think about leaving the United Kingdom of the European Union. Only Johnson, whose grandmother was French and who speaks a little Italian, had sympathy for Europe.”
The seed was already planted and took root many years later in 2016 coinciding with an economic crisis. “The Brexit campaign was launched with Oxford techniques, a well-structured speech in which the content did not matter. Brexit was created with lies and fantasies. "It was promised that it would limit immigration and make the UK richer, but it wasn't true."
Seven years later, the British have woken up from that dream that has turned into a nightmare: “Brexit was a mistake. People know this and if there were a referendum, they would vote to return to Europe. "You can't talk about a disaster, but the United Kingdom outside Europe is weaker." That's something you didn't learn at Oxford.
