As Kuper writes, the British Tory government has been - and is - run by a coterie of privileged individuals many of whom consider politics to be no more than good sport. For them political office promises a continuation of the inconsequential blah-blahs they had in debating societies while at Eton and, later, at Oxford University. It allows them to display their rhetorical skills while pretending to run a country.

Zoekresultaten voor simon kuper | Zoeken | Het Financieele Dagblad". fd.nl . Retrieved 10 July 2023. 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]

Chair

However his central point - when he’s not spoiling his argument by ranting - that the system needs a shake up , I buy that wholeheartedly. In this second campaign, Johnson also worked his charm beyond his base. Gove, a fresher in 1985, told Johnson’s biographer Andrew Gimson: “The first time I saw him was in the union bar … He seemed like a kindly, Oxford character, but he was really there like a great basking shark waiting for freshers to swim towards him.” Gove, who campaigned for him, admits: “I was Boris’s stooge.” And then, using almost the same phrase as Toby Young: “I became a votary of the Boris cult.”

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. In his 2019 diary, following the election of the current Prime Minister, Alan Bennett wrote “It’s a gang, not a government.” Some sobering statistics in his quietly devastating critique of the shallow pool the Westminster establishment fishes from to recruit for its political elite. In early 1983, as a diffident grammar school boy, I sat in a centuries old sitting room, beside a burbling open fire, enduring an interview for a place to study English at Oriel College, Oxford. I was muttering something about Shakespeare.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.” Neil Lee ( @ndrlee) is Professor of Economic Geography at the Department of Geography and Environment at LSE and leads the Cities, Jobs and Economic Change Research Theme at the International Inequalities Institute. Simon Kuper: 'Ik ben beducht voor mensen die niet kunnen luisteren' ". NRC (in Dutch). 20 October 2021 . Retrieved 10 July 2023. Kuper has written several books, starting with the William Hill awarded Football Against the Enemy (1994), which was later released in the United States as Soccer Against the Enemy. [25] The Times wrote of the book: "If you like football, read it. If you don't like football, read it." [26]