Dope isn't a problem; it's the "Bulller" membership that still irks me. I suppose I'll get over it one of these days, but I can't bring myself to trust anyone who signed up for that circus.
He joined the Bullingdon Club while still residing in the college, which suggests that it was during his first year.To be invited to join "Buller" so early in your Oxford career, you have to know the right people and be generally thought of as a good chap, suggesting that older Etonian members (and there were rarely more than 20 all told) had already tipped him as being made of the right stuff to join.
... The Bullingdon Club, satirised by Evelyn Waugh as the Bollinger Club in Decline and Fall, is not the naughtiest club in Oxford. The Assassins is more eccentric, the Piers Gaveston more erotic and the Stoics more emetic. But Buller is the most solidly, reassuringly, predictably, ritualistically naughty of the dining societies. Over 150 years, it has evolved from a club devoted to the pleasures of hunting things and playing cricket, into a club devoted to breaking things and passing out and dinners that cost £100 a head and more.
Brasenose contemporaries say Mr Cameron was a fringe member of the sub-species Bullingdon Man. And paradoxically, Bullingdon chaps disapprove of smoking cannabis on or before evenings out, on the logical grounds that a relaxed and philosophical member, his faculties soothed and enhanced by tetrahydrocannabinol, lacks the cutting edge necessary for a really decent session of wanton havoc.
The ex-Buller man said: "But if you are the sort of person who will happily smash up a restaurant and then pay for the damage in cash afterwards, I don't suppose you are going to baulk at taking drugs the rest of the time."
Check out the photograph of our future rulers posing in evening wear. Hilarious.
MORE: You don't have to be a class warrior to find the Buller boys a pain. Here's a thundering op-ed by Libby Purves that I've linked to before.
YET MORE: Cristina Odone piles in too:
It was more Bacchanalian feast than Brideshead Revisited, and I wondered what kind of a future lay in store for 20-year-olds who thought nothing of wrecking a Michelin-starred restaurant after having spent £1,000 a head there.
Clive, you old class warrior you. Next thing you know, you'll be donning a Phrygian Bonnet and joing the sans-cullottes at the baricades.
Actually, I think the best thing to do is to recognise that we are all more or less idiots between the ages of 18-21 and especially when we live in an environment almost totally composed of others of the same age.
To be honest I would prefer that type behaviour in my future leaders than someone who displayed Oliver Kammian levels of seriousness - or did I mean pomposity? - at a similar age.
Posted by: Recusant | Monday, February 12, 2007 at 02:40 PM
You've rumbled me... But does that make Libby Purves a class warrior too? Sure, I did my share of stupid things at that age (count yourself lucky you were never exposed to my bright green loons...) but the Bullingdon represents more than jolly japes, as far as I'm concerned.
Posted by: Clive | Monday, February 12, 2007 at 09:32 PM
Sorry to say it - but I call bullshit.
To say that he resided in college does not in any way show that he was a first year. I don't know much about Brasenose (except the origin of its name), but I do know that Oxford is very much like Cambridge, and that I lived in college in all three years there.
Posted by: Richard | Wednesday, February 14, 2007 at 03:21 AM