Lessons from Literature

I'm reading Evelyn Waugh's 1928 Decline and Fall at the moment. It starts with a set-piece describing the snobbish, amoral and antisocial antics of an Oxford University drinking club known as the Bollinger (or 'Boller') club:

It is not accurate to call this an annual event, because quite often the Club is suspended for some years after each meeting… At the last dinner, three years ago, a fox had been brought in a cage and stoned to death with champagne bottles. What an evening that had been! … For two days they had been pouring into Oxford: epileptic royalty from their villas of exile; uncouth peers from crumbling country seats; smooth young men of uncertain tastes from embassies and legations; illiterate lairds from wet granite hovel in the Highlands; ambitious young barristers and Conservative candidates torn from the London season and the indelicate advances of debutantes; all that was most sonorous of name and title was there for the beano. 

A shriller note could now be heard rising from Sir Alastair's rooms: any who have heard that sound will shrink at the recollection of it: it is the sound of the English county families baying for broken glass

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…

No resemblance intended to the snobbish, amoral and antisocial Oxford University drinking club known as the Bullingdon (or 'Buller'), of which David Cameron (2), George Osborne (1) and Boris Johnson (8) are previous members.

And lo, it came to pass that those members of the Bullingdon are now inflicting casual and wanton vandalism on their social inferiors still, only on a national scale. What larks!

Poor people's violence is different…

David Cameron was overjoyed by the student violence: it meant he could spend the interview time condemning it, rather than deal with the issues. Violence, he says, is 'unacceptable'.

I agree. There's nothing more despicable than anonymous, disguised students running wild and going on orgies of pointless, selfish violence.

Let's remind ourselves of what Call Me Dave was up to when he was a student, shall we?

Each year, he paid around £10,000 for membership of the Bullingdon Club. He'd dress up in special silly clothes (another few thousand pounds) and go on sprees of drinking and smashing. Because the club had a reputation for destroying restaurants then buying the owners' silence with wads of cash, the club had to go under false names to book rooms.

David Cameron was among drunken posh yobs who vandalised a restaurant, it was claimed last night.

The Tory leader has always denied taking part in the attack by the Bullingdon Club, the elitist Oxford University student society.

Mayor of London and Cameron's fellow Old Etonian Boris Johnson, below, admits he was part of the mayhem.But a former club member says the idea Cameron was not there on the night in 1987 is "ludicrous", claiming he "sprinted off" when others ended up in the cells. The idea someone just went to bed early! I mean, come on... " the Financial Times blogs reports him as saying.

He adds: "Details have been kept a closely-guarded secret by the group of old friends. A policy of omerta has descended on the Cameron episode."

Clearly upper-class violence is a jolly jape, whereas political violence is despicable. Or am I missing something here?

MPs housing crisis solved

I've been ranting a bit recently about the more egregious abuses of MPs - and they deserve it. However, someone on Radio 4 this morning pointed out that this distracts us from the major ripoffs. David Cameron is immensely wealthy. Membership of the Bullingdon Club (pictured below) was £10,000 for each student. Yet he claimed £100,000 to cover his mortgage expenses. It seems to work like this: if you're a Tory, you want a bloody big house. So you buy one and charge us for a mansion.

I have a solution. We should only pay for the London house. But here's the cunning bit. We buy them a council house on a sink estate. Not to punish them, but to remind them how millions of people live. After a couple of months, I bet you'd find pressure on local services to improve absolutely everything!

This is the same reason why I suggested that the Supreme Court be based in Stoke, Birmingham or somewhere equally prosaic, rather than cossetted by gentlemen's clubs, fine dining, the old boys' network and corridors of power.