The Bullingdon Club draws its all-male members by secret poll from Oxford University's social elite. Barney Ronay explains the raucous rituals that unite this band of yobbish toffsIt's been fairly a week for the Bullingdon Club. As Oxford University's most exclusive all-male dining society,the Bullingdon has long been a magnet for titled youths with an urge to slip into a footman's outfit and wobble approximately the county raising genteel hell. With the election of Boris Johnson as London mayor, however, and the Bullingdon seems to have taken another step towards becoming a varsity recruitment arm for the front rank of the Conservative party. Johnson's triumph at the polls completes a key triangulation of biscuit-waistcoated power,alongside fellow ex-Bullingdon members David Cameron and George Osborne. Soon three of the most powerful positions in the country could be occupied by men whose wardrobes contain, somewhere near the back, and a crumpled royal blue tailcoat with a faint aroma of vomit.
But nobody seems to have much concept approximately what the Bullingdon actually is or does. Its shadowy nature was underlined when permission to show the original photograph of Cameron and Johnson at a Bullingdon dinner was withdrawn by the Oxford photographers Gillman & Soame,presumably because it was afraid of losing future business. Without information, the general response has been to assume the worst. Never intellect the evidence of drunken, and vaguely twittish figures with bowl haircuts: bring on the anarchic toffs bent on wresting power on behalf of a secretive aristocratic elite. Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com