Funny thing is that, despite my being an Oxford undergrad.Cugel wrote:Boris history:
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/20 ... ng-culture
In 2013, Johnson – who reputedly still greets former members with a cry of “Buller, Buller, Buller” – described it as “a truly shameful vignette of almost superhuman undergraduate arrogance, toffishness and twittishness”. He added: “But at the time you felt it was wonderful to be going round swanking it up.”
The woman who recruited members in Oxford in the 1980s said that she was horrified at the prospect of Johnson becoming prime minister.
“The characteristics he displayed at Oxford – entitlement, aggression, amorality, lack of concern for others – are still there, dressed up in a contrived, jovial image. It’s a mask to sanitise some ugly features.”
Boris is a yobo of the privileged variety often called Hooray Henries. But Boris is very yobbish still, now doing his hooligan on the nation as a whole. No wonder the boot boys and far right sociopaths flock to his tent.
Cugel
during the years 1967-70, I never heard of the Bullingdon at that time. And I'd read Evelyn Waugh's Decline and Fall, which portrays a fictional lookalike called the "Bollinger". Here is a passage from the book:Evelyn Waugh wrote:It was a lovely evening. They broke up Mr Austen's grand piano, and stamped Lord Rending's cigars into his carpet, and smashed his china, and tore up Mr Partridge's sheets, and threw the Matisse into his water jug; Mr Sanders had nothing to break except his windows, but they found the manuscript at which he had been working for the Newdigate Prize Poem, and had great fun with that....
But I remember the "Hooray Henry"s all right! There were a clutch of them infesting my own college (note that at the time all the colleges were single-sex). There was a "dining club" of sorts local to my college, they used to drunkenly romp about the quads on occasion. Yes we had vandalism - it didn't affect me personally, unless you count having a lit firework thrown onto the wooden staircase outside my room as an example. Eventually the Dean had had enough, and he banned the club sine die. I should hope that 50 years later that club is still banned... Anyway my old college, like all the others, is now co-ed.
,although I was in good fettle at the time,wearing shorts and had just that morning shaved me legs,whilst I was flattered I thought retreat was the better part of valour in the circumstances.
