He studied History and German at Oxford University, and attended Harvard University as a Kennedy Scholar. Most of Kuper’s friends in Oxford were middle-class people who went to state schools (Kuper went to a comprehensive). Oxford is not just seen as three or four years of fun, but particularly for working-class students like me as a beacon of social mobility and a way to progress onto the next stage of their lives.

But Oxford, Kuper argues, especially when combined with posh public schools, has traditionally created an impregnable elite. One young debating hopeful of the day was Frank Luntz, the future American pollster who has become known as a master of political language. The Tory public schoolboys had the advantage of feeling at home (meaning boarding school) as they swaggered across quads into medieval buildings to hear grace in Latin. Boris gave a speech on the Middle East – it’s the best Middle East speech to this day I’ve ever heard, because he talked about it in terms of a playground, and kids attacking the little kid on the playground.Johnson could raise predictable guffaws in union debates when characterising socialist students as “retreating into their miserable dungareed caucuses”.

Allied candidates organised themselves into “slates”, the union version of parties but with the ideology usually left out. Three years older than me … you’d have expected him to play the ambassador role, welcoming an aspiring member of his college … Instead, his piss-taking was brutal. Also in 2021, Kuper released The Happy Traitor, [30] an account of the life and motivations of George Blake, a British spy for the Soviet Union. In 1984, a sixth-former named Damian Furniss came to Johnson’s college, Balliol, for his entrance interview.

If, like you me, you think it was whizzo, Chums reads like a 231- page whinge by a man who, one begins to suspect, wasn’t invited to the best parties and carries a bit of a chip. The political big beasts on the left in the second half of the 80s, in university terms, were the Miliband brothers, Dave and Ted, and Eddie Balls and Yvette Cooper, organising rent protests at their respective colleges. Kuper was born in Uganda of South African-born parents, and moved to Leiden in the Netherlands as a child, where his father, Adam Kuper, was a professor in anthropology at Leiden University. Gove, a fresher in 1985, told Johnson’s biographer Andrew Gimson: “The first time I saw him was in the union bar … He seemed like a kindly, Oxford character, but he was really there like a great basking shark waiting for freshers to swim towards him. In the course of the pint I felt obliged to finish, he mocked my speech impediment, my accent, my school, my dress sense, my haircut, my background.