Bullingdon boys. One of them is running the UK. Another had a go a few years back.
They’re wealthy, powerful former members of the Bullingdon Club, an exclusive society of Oxford University students.
The Club has a long history. One intake left quite a mark on a May evening in 1894 when they shattered more than 450 windows in a frenzy of destruction. Three decades later in 1927 they went for a replay.
The smashing theme is persistent.
Year after year, rooms booked for Bullingdon dinners are systematically destroyed – furniture, doors, plates, glass, wood panelling.
But while there may be an absence of respect, there’s no lack of money. Cash is carefully prepared beforehand to placate people astonished and angered by the trashing of their businesses.
Criminal acts associated with Bullingdon boys range from violent disorder and criminal damage to the possession of class A drugs – and worse.
Like the devastating day in 1977 when Bullingdon Club member Bartholomew Smith drove himself home from an alcohol-fuelled dinner.
Allegedly driving at over 100mph, he lost control, collided with an oncoming car, and killed all four occupants. He walked free from court after his lawyers argued there was insufficient proof to convict him of drink driving.
Four lives. No sentence.
Boris Johnson recently distanced himself from Bullingdon behaviour he now dismisses as ‘toffishness and twittishness’.
But that makes it sound like something you’d smile ruefully and ruffle his hair for.
Oh, twittishness.
Like scrabbling around for your specs when they’re on your head.
But brutish, violent behaviour can’t be shrugged off that easily.
Neither can the fact that its perpetrators escape justice time after time. That instead they face futures of ever-increasing promotion and influence.
I can’t attempt to unpack the suffocating complexity of British class power structures and strictures that create and sustain this reality.
But I do deal in stories. So here’s one about another Bullingdon boy.
His name is Callum*, and he and my son were once in the same class at school.
They’d not seen each other for a couple of years when they met a few months ago at a meal for homeless people.
My son was volunteering during a university vacation. Callum had come for some food and a safe place to sit.
After relationship breakdown at home, he’d found himself sleeping on the streets.
Then, a little while ago, a local news headline caught my eye. I read how Callum, still of no fixed abode, had snatched a couple of handbags and used the stolen cards in a shop.
Getting mugged is shocking and violating.
Maybe it’s similar to the way someone feels when they’ve just seen their restaurant get smashed to pieces.
But Callum wasn’t wearing a fancy suit when he committed his crimes. He hadn’t prepped a pile of cash to make up for the damage he was deliberately doing. There was no band of twittish, toffish friends around him, no parents with an expensive lawyer on speed-dial.
So he was charged and sentenced to four and a half years in prison.
Two handbags. Four and a half years.
He’s just joined another Bullingdon Club, in Oxford’s local prison, HMP Bullingdon.
Some Oxford boys end up in the Bullingdon Club. Some Oxford boys end up in Bullingdon Prison.
It’s clear that where you’re born, where you live, what you sound like, what your parents do, and what influence they wield has more impact than we might ever think in the UK’s 21st century democratic society.
The system as it stands is weighted to sustain this imbalance.
If nothing is done to challenge it, generations of boys from one kind of background will end up incarcerated, sometimes sleeping in a cell and sometimes on a pavement.
Meanwhile, generations of another kind of boy will find themselves in power, keen to keep the lid on some seriously unsavoury secrets.
But something seems to be shifting.
Across the world, structures that have perpetuated injustice are starting to shake.
Voices are being raised in righteous rage and deep conviction, from Black Lives Matter protests to Marcus Rashford’s food poverty campaign.
There’s something new in the air. It’s time to fill our lungs with it. To speak up and speak out.
Change is coming. Don’t let it pass you by.
*Name changed
The meal that Callum came to was hosted by ACT Oxford who help rough sleepers and people transitioning away from life in prison or on the streets. Their work is extraordinary. Please support them if you can.
www.actoxford.com