The “chums” of Kuper's title refer to the gang of Johnson, Gove, Cameron, Rees-Mogg, et al., all of whom overlapped at Oxford. The author asserts that had they not honed their rhetoric at Oxford, then Brexit may not have happened. It is a mostly plausible and highly enjoyable narrative, packed full of anecdote and vignette. Much that Kuper asserts in Chums makes explicit that which I had almost always believed implicitly. Put another way, the “elites” defined their own set of rules at Oxford and everyone else's perspectives were considered irrelevant. It would not matter how good a debater at the Union (itself a precursor to the House of Commons) you were; what mattered was who you knew. The conviction of the conclave, its complicity and its inability to understand how different their minority perspective was to the majority of the country proved to be the undoing of the UK. I wish Kuper had some better suggestions on how to solve this deeply entrenched problem, but once you start reading Chums, it is hard to put down.
By Simon Kuper