Kuper, Simon. "Becoming French is like winning the lottery". Archived from the original on 11 December 2022 . Retrieved 6 August 2022. The description of the system is good, but the analysis is a bit thin. Admittedly, Eton and Oxford do have a grip on the ruling class in the UK, but it would be far more interesting to understand why that might be? After all, the UK has more than one ancient and famous university, there is more than one ancient school. What is the grip of these institutions that helps them to maintain their place. It could be money and endowments, but these exist elsewhere. We are never quite given an insight into why that might be. Quote : “ what makes it so hard is not that you had it bad , but that you are so pissed that so many others had it good “. Simon Kuper". Expert Keynote and Motivational Speakers | Chartwell Speakers . Retrieved 2 July 2023. Kuper, Simon (29 June 2022). "The conspiracy against women's football". The Spectator . Retrieved 2 July 2023.

Chums: Updated with a new chapter - Simon Kuper - Google Books Chums: Updated with a new chapter - Simon Kuper - Google Books

Jacob Rees-Mogg speaks at the Oxford Union Society in 1991. Listening are Kenneth Clarke and John Patten. Photograph: Edward Webb/Alamy SK: Politicians are a microcosm and an exaggeration of the system, but in journalism, in finance, it’s always like that. And the same principle that the acceptance letter you get at age 17 determines to a very large degree the future career you’ll have is a very cruel and absurd system, whether it’s for politicians or journalists. The difference in Politics is that other elite jobs in the UK are competed for internationally. So even in journalism, my colleagues really come from all over now, including, for example, Germans and Scandinavians and Indians. And that’s true in finance and in tech as well. In this event, Financial Times columnist Simon Kuper traces how the rarefied and privileged atmosphere of Britain’s oldest university - and the friendships and worldviews it created – has shaped the nation and helped make Brexit.Hannan, among Kuper’s key witnesses here, had grown up in Peru, where his family had a poultry farm. After the collapse of communism, he sniffed – along with Stone – a new “enemy of liberty” in European bureaucracy and found an early acolyte in his absurd Oxford contemporary Jacob Rees-Mogg. On graduating, Hannan persuaded some marginal rightwing MPs to pay him a salary as sole employee of the European Research Group; two decades later he was persuading Johnson to head the leave campaign. And so, as Kuper writes, once again “the timeless paradise of Oxford inspired its inhabitants to produce timeless fantasies like Alice in Wonderland, The Hobbit, Narnia, and, incubating from the late 1980s, Brexit”. Simon Kuper ( @KuperSimon) is an author and Financial Times journalist, born in Uganda and raised around the world. An Oxford graduate, he later attended Harvard as a Kennedy Scholar. He has written for the Observer, The Times and Guardian, and is also the author of The Happy Traitor and Chums: How a Tiny Caste of Oxford Tories Took Over the UK. If you do nothing, you will be auto-enrolled in our premium digital monthly subscription plan and retain complete access for 65 € per month.

Chums by Simon Kuper | Waterstones

Anthony Gardner, another American contemporary of Johnson’s, later US ambassador to the EU, was less impressed: “Boris was an accomplished performer in the Oxford Union where a premium was placed on rapier wit rather than any fidelity to the facts. It was a perfect training ground for those planning to be professional amateurs. I recall how many poor American students were skewered during debates when they rather ploddingly read out statistics; albeit accurate and often relevant in their argumentation, they would be jeered by the crowds with cries of ‘boring’ or ‘facts’!” While Chums damningly examines a very specific cadre of Tories, it’s also an indictment of the whole notion of elite universities. Kuper depicts education at Oxford in the 1980s as loose and shambolic. “I’d like to strip away some of the mystique around Oxford. [Its graduates are] not so brilliant. They sound and write better than they are. And that includes me.” Kuper wrote for Oxford’s independent student paper Cherwell where they would sometimes cover campus eccentrics like Rees-Mogg but he had no conception of what any of it meant at the time. “When I was writing the book, I spoke to a guy who was at Cherwell with me... He said, ‘I thought these people were the past that, they were just going to disappear as Britain moved on into modernity.’ And I thought, Wow, he had a view in the 80s. I didn’t have a view. I didn’t really have any understanding of where people sat or where they were going.” 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?’.” In the 1980s, Kuper explains, both the Oxford tutorial system and the debating style of the Tory-dominated Oxford Union favoured charm, fluency and wit over a grasp of facts and figures. Americans attending the Oxford Union made the mistake of thinking the latter mattered, he says. “They’d say, ‘97 per cent of’ or ‘there are 420,000 who...’ If you did that at the Union, it was ‘boring’ and ‘boring’ is a core upper-class insult word…Johnson is really the epitome of this. You went down better when you do a comedic performance.”

I’m afraid I didn’t qualify to go to Oxford – I was far too clever and insufficiently charming – but from those who did, the impression emerges that it was either milk and honey or a brutal injustice. Formula predicts who will win". Stuff. Archived from the original on 14 December 2014 . Retrieved 14 December 2014. Even during the 1980s when only 13% of people went to Higher Education, less than 0.5% of those graduated from an Oxbridge College, yet 13 of the 17 post war Prime Ministers graduated from Oxford University. Four of them educated at one very exclusive private school in Berkshire (you know the one)

Chums by Simon Kuper | Book review | The TLS

Chums has its inevitable chapter on the antics of Boris Johnson and David Cameron at the “Buller”, a cosplay England of mustard-coloured waistcoats and social condescension. Those were the days. Beyond the panelled debating chambers and honey-stoned colleges, modernity and change could feel like decline. Progress could feel like decline. Little wonder, then, that Kuper identifies Oxford as the incubator of Brexit. Kuper joined the Financial Times in 1994. He wrote the daily currencies column and worked in other departments, before leaving the FT in 1998. He returned in 2002 as a sports columnist and has worked there ever since. Nowadays he writes a general column for the Weekend FT on all manner of topics from politics [10] to books, and on cities including London, Paris, Johannesburg and Miami. [11] Kuper has also written for The Times and The Observer, [5] ESPN, [12] and The Spectator. [13] Simon Kuper: 'Ik ben beducht voor mensen die niet kunnen luisteren' ". NRC (in Dutch). 20 October 2021 . Retrieved 10 July 2023.Some sobering statistics in his quietly devastating critique of the shallow pool the Westminster establishment fishes from to recruit for its political elite. I have skin in this game having been a graduate of one of these illustrious places in 1981 . I was also rather amazed at the schools based hiera

Simon Kuper - Wikipedia Simon Kuper - Wikipedia

In the UK, we’re in a much better position because you have the BBC, which everyone likes to compain about all the time. However, most people get their needs met, and broadly accept it. An example is ‘Partygate’, where even Tories agree that ‘Partygate’ happened. Some of them said it wasn’t really a big deal but there was almost no debate about it being true. It’s very hard, because whatever you do, can be misrepresented but I think, certainly having more local reporters, which the BBC is now working on as well in places like Norwich or Halifax.But how, he wonders in a central theme of the book, has a “Brahmin caste”, educated at the University of Oxford “captured the British machine? And with what consequences?” MAL: Onto ‘Chums’ now, do you think that something like abolishing private school charitable status, would be an effective way to make admissions more meritocratic at university? The union’s debating rules were modelled on those of the Commons. Opposing speakers sat facing each other in adversarial formation, and there was the same “telling” of ayes and noes. But unlike the Commons, the union had no real power. Almost the only thing the union president could actually do was stage debates. Naturally, then, it encouraged a focus on rhetoric over policy. The institution perfected the articulacy that enabled aspiring politicians, barristers and columnists to argue any case, whether they believed it or not. In the union, a speaker might prepare one side of a debate, and then on the day suddenly have to switch to the other side to replace an opponent who had dropped out. I suspect it was this rhetorical tradition that prompted Louis MacNeice to write, in 1939: