I admit it: I didn't get into the Bullingdon
James Delingpole's envy is revived by the picture of David Cameron in the navy-blue waistcoat of Oxford's most exclusive and decadent dining club Twenty years ago when I was in my last year at Oxford, living in a house-share on the Banbury Road, I was woken in the middle of the night by a gang of upper-class oiks bursting through the front door, stampeding upstairs and trashing the room of one of my house-mates, Ewen Fergusson.
After the mob had gone, the rest of us went to inspect the damage. Ewen's bed had been upturned, the drawers had been emptied out, and everything had been doused with the contents of our fire extinguisher. 'You bastard!' I remember thinking at the time. 'You lucky, lucky bastard!' Partly, I thought this because he had got off so lightly, with none of his real valuables, like, say, his hi-fi, having been done any serious damage. Mainly, I thought it because with this initiation ceremony he had just been granted the right to wear probably the coolest, sexiest, most desirable kit this side of the Confederate army or the Afrika Korps — the navy-blue tailcoat (with cream and buff facings and yellow waistcoat) of Oxford's Bullingdon Club.
It is now many years since I last thought meanly of myself for not having been elected a member of the Buller. But looking at those pictures in the papers this week of Dave Cameron, Boris Johnson and the rest of the '87 gang preening and pouting in full Buller rig did bring it all flooding back to me: the shame, the humiliation and the abject misery I felt the day I realised that I would never be smart, rich, titled, decadent or popular enough to be elected a member of the world's best university's smartest dining society. The fact that I cared so much shows how dramatically Britain has changed over the last two decades. These days I very much doubt that the Bright Young Things of Oxford — those few who have sneaked through the post-LauraSpence admissions net, that is — give two hoots about who is or isn't a member of the Buller. Back then, though, we knew all right. And it really, really mattered.
Why did it matter? What you have to remember is that back in the late Eighties class at Oxford counted for so much more than it does nowadays. Brideshead Revisited had been on TV, the Sloane Ranger's Handbook told us that 'silly stunts prove you're the goods', and many of us coming up to Oxford in those social-climbing times sincerely felt that it was our bounden duty to behave as decadently and toffily as we possibly could. When we drank it was always champagne, except when it was cocktails (Brandy Alexanders for preference, because that's what Anthony Blanche drinks in Brideshead; or Tequila Slammers, because they get you vomiting-drunk most quickly). Bloody Marys were also acceptable, especially around 11 a.m. when you'd just got up to write the essay you hadn't done for your lunchtime tutorial and you needed something to stop your hands shaking so that you could hold your pen.
It was wholly natural in such a climate that the Buller should be the apogee of one's social aspirations. Not only was it more famously decadent than any other society (apart from the Piers Gaveston, but that seemed to involve too much buggery), but it also had by far the most splendid uniform. You could wear this at the Buller's secret, ritualised dining, drinking and puking sessions but also more publicly at the Bullingdon point-to-point and at any ball where the dress code was White Tie. Possibly girls are no longer stupid enough to sleep with a man on the basis of whether or not his tailcoat is blue, buff and cream as opposed to plain black. But in those days, some of them were. A Bullingdon tailcoat might cost a grand to have made, but it was worth it because it got you laid.
It's worth dwelling, I think, on this sex business, because it goes a long way towards explaining why we chaps behaved so differently back then. Quite simply, our chances of getting our end away in the midto late Eighties were much smaller. First, there was all that specious propaganda being put about by the government at the time about Aids being as prolific a killer of heterosexuals as it was of homosexuals, which unfortunately made girls slightly more careful with their favours. Second, there were far fewer girls around, because male undergraduates outnumbered female ones by six to four, whereas now it's the other way round.
When a young buck is denied his oats, he traditionally takes solace in the boisterous company of men instead. Here he can forget about how troublesome and elusive women are by drowning his sorrows in heroic quantities of booze, engaging in wagers, undertaking daring stunts and indulging in ritualised violence, manly horseplay and pretend homosexuality. Today's male undergraduate, outnumbered as he is by sexually desperate females, has no need for such nonsense. And if he does want to get smashed out of his brain, there are many easier options open to him than trying to hack his way into membership of a snooty dining society. Going to a club and taking lots of drugs, for example.
Drugs are the other main explanation, I think, for the big sociological shift in attitudes between the '87 university generation and the current one. The year captured in that Buller photograph is particularly significant because it was the very last one before Ecstasy — and Class A drugs generally — became widely available to the undergraduate population. When I was up at Oxford no one — save perhaps the extremely rarefied Gottfried Von Bismarck set — took anything stronger than dope or speed. Within a year of my departure, the Summer of Love '88 had arrived, rave culture had taken over, and E (followed a few years later by cheap-as-chips cocaine) had supplanted booze and spliffs as the drug of choice. Ecstasy changed everything.
Looking at that old Buller photograph doesn't make me feel at all nostalgic for my time at Oxford. We were a bunch of arrogant tossers and hideous snobs and, although I have kept many good friends from that period, I do think that we made our undergraduate lives much harder than they needed to be by playing so many petty power games. But we were creatures of our time and I don't think we should blame ourselves for it. Anyway, we must have done something right because look at us now: we're on the verge of running the country.
How To Be Right: The Essential Guide to Making Lefty Liberals History by James Delingpole is published by Headline Books on Monday 5 March.
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