Americans consumed just as much Arab oil during the 1973 OPEC “embargo” as they did before it. By some accounts, they consumed more.
Which is a reminder that if you’re producing, you’re trading with the world. And vice versa. So-called “Arab oil” that the Arab members of OPEC weren’t selling directly into the U.S. was still reaching the U.S. via those the Arab producers were selling to. As Saudi Oil Sheikh Yahmani ultimately acknowledged, the embargo was “symbolic.”
The truth about global trade came to mind quite a bit while reading Financial Times columnist Simon Kuper’s 2022 book, Chums: How a Tiny Caste of Oxford Tories Took Over the UK. On his way to making a not-so-veiled swipe against Brexit that he claims he’s not making, Kuper has interesting anecdotes about some of the most famous names in modern British politics. But plainly eager to tie those anecdotes to a broader narrative about class, inequality, elite education and how it allegedly led to Brexit and coronavirus errors in the UK, Kuper comes up short.
Kuper’s book would have been quite a bit more interesting if he’d simply written about Boris Johnson, Michael Gove, Toby Young, Daniel Hannan, Theresa May, Jacob Rees-Mogg, and many others. That would have been fun and educational, as these are entertaining and interesting people. The view here is that Kuper stumbled in trying to turn their class, education and “effortless” demeanor into a bigger indictment of British politics more broadly.
Early on, Kuper writes that of the “fifteen prime ministers since the war [WWII], eleven went to Oxford.” Of the three who did not, it could be said that Winston Churchill was as “Oxford” in bloodline as they came, while James Callaghan and John Major “didn’t go to university, and Gordon Brown was at Edinburgh.” The numbers bring Kuper to the question of whether Oxford has “captured the British political machine?” The view here is that he’s asking the wrong question, all based on a simplistic contention that the “Oxford Tories” had been “groomed for power since childhood.” It’s nonsense.
All it takes to see why is for Kuper to take a similarly sized student body at a lesser British university, only to transfer them to Oxford. And for the latter to take place while the Oxford crowd is transported to the lesser university. Does anyone seriously think those dropped into Oxford would, for simply being there and attending classes, morph into the UK’s future ruling class? And would the Oxford types required to “slum” at lesser universities suddenly lose their political ambitions? Hopefully the questions answer themselves.
They recall an anecdote from a Goldman Sachs colleague of mine who had attended Yale undergrad. He joked that everyone at Yale thinks they’ll be president someday. Which is the point, but it’s one that Kuper doesn’t spend enough time contemplating. To focus on Eton (the famous boarding school that has historically supplied so much of the Oxford student body), Oxford, and elite clubs like Bullingdon while at Oxford is to frequently miss the point. None of the three molds future PMs as much as those who see a future PM in the mirror frequently attend those schools and are sometimes tapped for those clubs.
Kuper routinely references Oxford’s debating society (Oxford Union) as the source of an endless supply of Tory political talent (including Johnson and most of the other names mentioned), but isn’t that kind of obvious? As in, political ambitions tend to associate with an interest in policy and the debating of same. To contemplate whether Oxford Union is a cause or effect reads as a bit of a waste of time.
In Kuper’s case, though he didn’t attend Eton, he did attend at least part of high school at the same one as Toby Young did (Young’s rather is Baron Young of Dartington) "at the end of Hampstead Heath," followed by Oxford, Harvard's Kennedy School, etc. About his time Oxford, Kuper (who largely grew up outside the UK) is clear that he was not part of the political inner circle populated by his subjects, but that he eventually became “a corresponding member of the British establishment” via his FT column. Which means he had access to the people readers of his book will be reading about.
About his book, Kuper writes that it’s not “a personal revenge” on Oxford, not a “name-dropping memoir,” nor “an attempt to re-litigate the Brexit referendum.” Which may raise an eyebrow, particularly toward the end as readers of this review will see if they get to the end of the review, or better yet, read the book. About it, it’s still very interesting despite the presumed demerits that have so far been described, and will be described.
More statistics are arguably the best way to resume a discussion of Chums. Kuper writes that as of 1980, “only 13 per cent of young Britons went into full-time higher education at all.” Which is arguably telling with Oxford in mind. That a high percentage of the politically ambitious would make their way to Oxford isn’t surprising in consideration of how few were taking the university route to begin with.
Just the same, and by Kuper’s own admission, not all of the student body (including Kuper) made its way there through the traditional feeder schools. Kuper writes that Oxford “is a mixture of privilege and merit in varying proportions.” Which makes it not much different than Harvard, Yale, Princeton and Stanford, along with ENA and other high-end sources of French political talent that Kuper writes about so entertainingly in The Impossible City (review here).
Inequality particularly seems to bother Kuper. It’s with undisguised disdain that he writes of how Margaret Thatcher “restored inequality” while at No. 10 Downing Street, during which time he suggests “privilege and the right accent became something to be celebrated again.” Except that what troubles Kuper is arguably American as Apple Pie. It’s about the ability to strive, to reinvent oneself. New York City isn’t just a city of foreign immigrants. Probably NYC’s most immigrant-like arrivals are Americans from the outer boroughs and states across the country who come to New York to start anew. How snooty for someone who likely took on some affectations of his own at Oxford to disdain a similar, broader ambition to look and sound prosperous.
Kuper adds with evident contempt that while a columnist at the Daily Telegraph, Boris Johnson wrote in defense of “’sickeningly rich people’ on the grounds that ‘if British history had not allowed outrageous financial rewards for a few top people, there would be no Chatworth, no Longleat.” Well, yes. Johnson is right. David Geffen grew up around failure in Brooklyn, and the “big houses” in California were a lure. Soaring inequality and “sickeningly rich people” don’t just generally get that way by democratizing access to the former baubles of the rich, their achievements power ambition within those not yet rich, along with the capital (see the investing prowess of Amazon’s Jeff Bezos et al) that the ambitious require to vivify their goals. Yes, the orginal funds that created what became Silicon Valley had family origins of the Rockefeller, Vanderbilt, and Phipps variety. Kuper writes about Thatcher’s reign in pejorative fashion, but the inequality he disdains was and is but another word for hope.
At which point the analysis is contradictory. Kuper writes that “Britain does have world-class scientists, engineers and quants, but they are stuck in the engine room while the rhetoricians [yes, the Oxford types] drive the train.” Except that politicians exist to suck up all the attention, thus raising a question related to what’s unique about the UK and Oxford. As for the contradiction, Kuper writes at book’s end that Oxford “has got much richer,” that in 1998 it launched a L220 million capital campaign that was “the biggest such campaign ever attempted by an educational institution outside North America,” and that from 2004 to 2019, “the Oxford Thinking Campaign raised L3.3 billion.” Sorry, but the unequal whom Kuper seemingly disdains are not in the proverbial “engine room” as evidenced by the money raised from them, and that by Kuper’s own admission is transforming the Oxford that he continues to visit. Which is just a comment that he can’t have it both ways. Is inequality “dreadful” as he writes, or is it what’s making it possible for Oxford to recruit “star academics” over the “alcoholics without PhDs” that Oxford apparently used to recruit?
The answer here is that none of this matters simply because education is vastly overrated. Evidence supporting this claim is all the money flowing into Oxford either from individuals formerly educated by alcoholics, or non-Oxford educated types who achieved at high levels despite. Which means the UK is quite the meritocracy opposite Kuper’s claims about a lucky few wellborn types being “groomed” for the good life, and who are being molded for political life while resting on their ancestral laurels at Oxford. It’s just not that simple, plus it will be repeated yet again that Kuper is mistaking cause and effect.
Which brings us to Brexit, and the Arab OPEC member anecdote that begins this review. It's worth mentioning as a reminder that a lack of production is the only true barrier to trade. Nothing else works, including frequently tariffs. In other words, the U.S. could be 100% bereft of oil while at war with or embargoed by every oil producing nation and corporation in the world, but it would still consume the same amount of the world’s oil as it does now, and as though it had been sourced in West Texas.
This is important as a way of making the point that the frustration of Kuper and others with the Brexiteers was and is way overdone. Exiting the EU with an eye on escaping another layer of rules or regulations wasn’t going to harm the UK economically. Production yet again begets imports precisely because to produce is to produce for the world. Memory says that in the 19th century, and when a few wise British liberals fought for the end of the mindless Corn Laws, part of their debate was informed by the crucial truth that while Britain had been at war at various times in the 18th century with a wide variety of European countries, their exports were still making their way to the UK. Which is a long way of saying the “Remain” crowd was creating much ado about not so much.
Despite this, Kuper continued undeterred in his analysis. Brexit was a class concept created by wellborn Brits who knew “their own class would be ok whatever happened.” That “if your life passage has taken you from medieval rural home to medieval boarding school to medieval Oxford college and finally to medieval parliament, you inevitably end up thinking ‘what could possibly go wrong?’” It’s all makes so much sense in the most surface of ways, except for the stubborn truth reported closer to book’s beginning by Kuper that “Remain” voters included Oxford types (and surely Eton and Bullingdon in some instances too – it’s hard to keep track) David Cameron (all three), Jeremy Hunt, Rory Stewart, Peter Mandelson, and many others.
Which reduces the value of Kuper’s broader thesis. No doubt Boris Johnson, Jacob Rees-Mogg, Michael Gove, and Dominic Cummings came out in favor of Brexit, but for Kuper to reduce their stance to their elite upbringings (Nigel Farage, the leader of Brexit, can’t claim their backgrounds per Kuper) and chosen area of study (Kuper writes that “all the leading Oxford Tory Brexiteers studied backward-looking subjects”) is not only contradicted by the many Oxford Tories who voted “remain,” but it contradicts Kuper’s beat the reader over the head analysis of Johnson in particular; that the Eton/Oxford/Bullingdon trifecta of an individual couldn’t be bothered to study while at Oxford, and when he wasn’t studying, he was so busy working the proverbial room with his immense charm that he couldn't even bother to insert the mistakes to cover up for the fact that he was copying the schoolwork he was turning in.
As is the case throughout Chums, Kuper wants it both ways to fit his narrative that Oxford, the entity from which he promises he seeks no revenge, somehow created the political monsters behind a movement (Brexit) that Kuper promises he won’t re-litigate, but that he goes out of his way to say was created by a mass of too-cool-too-care people who, depending on the day didn’t much crack a book to fit one part of Kuper’s argument, but who cracked lots of books to the extent that it fits Kuper’s argument made out of the other side of the mouth that chosen field of study dictated how you came out on Brexit. Alastair Campbell, author of great diaries about his time under Tony Blair, blurbs Kuper’s book as “extraordinary,” and one that made him “angrier and angrier and angrier” as he read it, but unknown is why. Was he angry that Oxford types like his former boss made it to 10 Downing Street via a more enhanced embrace of market economics that has revived the world, and that has by Kuper’s account made Oxford much richer, or is he angry that every broad brush stroke by Kuper is contradicted by what follows? What merely disappointed this reviewer yet again is that instead of writing about some interesting people, a somewhat angry Kuper about Oxford (a little), Brexit (a lot), and the Johnson government’s response to the coronavirus (a whole lot) stepped on what was interesting to fit a narrative that isn’t even a narrative given its myriad contradictions. And they’re constant.
Back to Margaret Thatcher alone, after writing on p. 26 that she’d restored inequality and posh accents, Kuper writes on p. 132 that “Thatcher had purged the mostly posh ‘wets’ from her cabinet.” But on p. 133, he writes that “an astonishing sixty-one Etonians served as ministers in the Thatcher/Major governments.”
What’s unfortunate and disappointing is that Boris Johnson must be an interesting story on his own. Kuper quotes Toby Young as saying about Johnson at Oxford that he was “the biggest man on campus. He was the silverback gorilla, the alpha male.” Which had this reader wanting Kuper to build on that, on how Johnson came to be.
Instead, Kuper writes that “Johnson learned at school to defeat opponents whose arguments were better simply by ignoring their arguments.” Translated, Johnson is like seemingly every successful politician.
Kuper ties Johnson’s path to “Eton,” and the school’s encouragement of “boys” to “develop their individuality,” but what does class and education have to do with it? Some will say because so many of the wellborn migrate toward politics, but Bill Clinton developed a political persona without any of Johnson’s advantages. So did Ronald Reagan. Thatcher’s background surely wasn’t Johnson’s. One gets the feeling Kuper disdains Donald Trump, but he too possesses something that can’t be shrunken to education and upbringing.
Kuper describes the Brexiteers as “talkers, not doers,” and adds that asking them to implement Brexit “was like asking the winners of a debating competition to engineer a spaceship.” If we ignore all the Brexit opinion implied in Kuper’s descriptions, what did he expect? Politicians are precisely talkers as opposed to doers. That’s implied in their choice of profession. Their job is to advance ideas within the electorate, only for others to execute them. Kuper as mentioned up front promised to not “re-litigate” Brexit, but readers will be excused for thinking he perhaps doth protest too much.
Which brings us to the coronavirus. Kuper describes an alleged failure to lock the citizenry down a week earlier as Johnson’s “deadliest decision,” only to follow the latter with a listing of Johnson et al’s errant spending on the virus as more evidence of Johnson’s shallow, careless nature. As with Brexit, it’s lost on Kuper that politicians aren’t doers. More important, Johnson’s errors (or lack thereof) weren’t about Eton, Oxford and Bullingdon as much as it’s the nature of politicians to err not because they’re politicians, but because central planning of anything invariably fails. Tolstoy knew this well with his proper dismissal of “great man” theorizing, but journalists continue to imagine that the central planning that fails in good times is meant to show its grandest virtues in the bad.
It’s wrongheaded. Think back to Barack Obama’s presidency. As one of his top advisers admitted during Trump’s presidency, and while the coronavirus was spreading, Obama was wholly unprepared for any kind of truly lethal virus. Which is and was the point. These are politicians, nothing more. They’re not supposed to know what to do.
Furthermore, what could Kuper possibly mean by “deadliest decision”? Such a view implies that absent governmental guidance, people will do things that get them killed. Kuper of course cites the various Imperial College predictions about deaths without lockdowns while missing the obvious: if people are dying en masse thanks to the impossibility of too much freedom, then they’ll likely lock themselves down sans force. Get it?
None of the above is even contemplated by Kuper given his intent to pin thousands of deaths on Johnson. Which is shameful. It recalls a front page, Covid-era headline in the frequently alarmist (about the coronavirus) New York Times. It read like this: “COVID HAS KILLED ONE OF EVERY 100 OLDER AMERICANS.” Without minimizing humans of any kind for even a second, stop and contemplate where death was largely concentrated among virus sufferers. It raises a question about whether lots of Brits died of the virus in the “week” that Johnson failed to take the freedom of the British citizenry, or were many going to die that week no matter what?
At the time when Johnson was allegedly committing deadly decisions, tests for the virus weren’t even widespread as is, not to mention that at least in the U.S., most were dying in nursing homes (source: New York Times). Did all politicians fail for not taking away freedom, or were a lot of old people going to die with a variety of maladies, including infection related to the coronavirus? Bringing it back to the Times headline, though the virus thankfully took but 1 percent of older Americans, did that 1 percent solely die from the coronavirus?
About the questions, no one expected Kuper to write a book about the coronavirus and its implications, and at least at book’s beginning he once again claimed he would not be re-litigating Brexit. Instead, it was supposed to be a “group portrait of a set of Tory Brexiteers.” Oh well, maybe, particularly if we throw “hatchet job” into the description. And this is not a defense of Johnson and his crowd. It's just an expression of disappointment that a “group portrait” morphed into something quite political care of the person drawing the portrait, only for the analysis to groan with opinions that frequently contradicted one another.
Toward book’s end, Kuper quotes Anthony Kenny, one of Johnson’s old master’s at Oxford, reflecting “ruefully on the college’s part in his education.” Which was just too much. While it’s expected that professors and their ilk will want to make it all about them, this was Kuper yet again wanting it both ways. The Oxford Johnson couldn’t even be bothered to cheat well, let alone study when his careless ways suited Kuper’s narrative, but when it came time to make Oxford look bad despite his promise to not make Chums his “personal revenge,” suddenly Oxford was on the hook for Johnson’s alleged failings.
To Kuper’s credit, he adds Kenny’s comment care of Socrates about his expression of doubt that “wisdom could be taught.” Yes, precisely. While Johnson may well be an ass, and while lots of asses may emerge from Eton, Oxford and Bullingdon, to focus on Johnson or his associations is to miss the greater truth that politics is always and everywhere the biggest ass of all.
Assuming Brexit was a bad idea, its demerits were about politics as opposed to where one was schooled. Same with Johnson’s logically errant attempts to plan a national reaction to a virus. Sorry, but it doesn’t take a libertarian to point out that government error is a redundancy. Kuper’s book would have been much more interesting and entertaining if he’d written it with the historical truth in mind, as opposed to trying to create a portrait that fit his own negative internal view of Eton, Oxford, Bullingdon, and Brexit.
