Rules of the Bullingdon Club

George Osborne, Boris Johnson and David Cameron dressed in Bullingdon Club tailcoats.

When the party’s over.

The Rules of the Bullingdon Club are simple. You must be:

  • Rich
  • Posh
  • Sociopathic
  • Misogynistic
  • Secretive
  • Well-tailored

The Bullingdon Club is for wealthy young men at Oxford University whom, it is said, burn £50 notes in front of beggars as part of the initiation ceremony and trash restaurants and public houses after elaborate dinners – which they pay for in cash.

Bullingdon Club all-male members – Bullers – learn at elite public schools that they are special, chosen, above the law. Most Bullers attend Eton, but also Harrow, Westminster, St. Paul’s, Radley, Rugby, Charterhouse and Stowe.

Britain has had a total of 55 prime ministers. Of these 20 attended Eton, 7 went to Harrow and 6 Westminster. Throughout almost two-thirds of modern history, we have been ruled by the same class with the same objectives and, for the most part, the same tailor.

Of those 55 prime ministers, 28 (more than half) studied at Oxford and 13 at Cambridge. Six prime ministers have come from the ranks of Labour.

Under Clement Attlee’s premiership in the 1940s, the Labour Party introduced the NHS, social security, a house building programme and the nationalisation of key industries. In the 1960s and 1970s, under Harold Wilson and James Callaghan, Labour ended the death penalty, created the Open University, and brought in laws protecting women and minorities. 

During the Tony Blair and Gordon Brown years (1997 – 2010), there was record investment in the NHS, schools and public services, an infrastructure rebuilding programme, the introduction of a minimum wage, and the Good Friday Agreement, ending the ‘Troubles’ in Northern Ireland. Labour delivered Civil Partnerships, the Equality Act and the Human Rights Act.  

Blair is most remembered for the sexed up and dodgy documents falsely showing that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction (WMD), leading to the Iraq War in 2003. His zealous embrace of US President George W Bush’s foreign policy after the 2001 destruction of the World Trade Center eclipsed major social achievements now largely forgotten.

Buller Vandals

David Cameron and Boris Johnson walking together.

Cameron and Johnson stride into the future

With more than 3,000 food banks (Trussell Trust), Universal Credit and zero hours contracts, Britain has slipped back in the last decade to what the upper classes think of as the good old days of cheap labour and hungry children living in Victorian squalor. The tragicomedy of Brexit and Covid was overseen by David Cameron and Boris Johnson, two illustrious members of the Bullingdon Club, rivals at Eton and Oxford, they were the lucky pair who escaped police justice after vandalising a restaurant in 1987.

The furniture smashed, the china shattered, the jolly gaggle of toffs from the Bullingdon Club that summer evening decided to visit a friend in Oxford. He didn’t answer the door when they came calling. Someone threw a flowerpot through a window. Someone else pulled the drainpipe from the wall trying to climb in. The terrified student called the police and the Bullers fled the scene. Local Bobbies with sniffer dogs located a couple of lads ‘whilst two future politicians escaped altogether.’

The two escapologists were Boris Johnson and David Cameron, according to Tim Flight in the History Collection, 13 April 2018. He adds, ‘Mutual indiscretion clearly forges strong bonds, and it is theorised that the club’s arbitrary criminal acts are to ensure that members can be cajoled and blackmailed by one another. Indeed, when Cameron came to assemble his cabinet, he chose as his chancellor George Osborne, another Bullingdon alumnus, and welcomed Boris too in 2015.’

It would be petty critiquing Cameron and Johnson for a few youthful indiscretions, but these two men were born to rule, to make decisions on whether to go to war, increase child allowance, smash trade unions, hive off chunks of the NHS to be run by American hedge funds. They led Britain from 10 Downing Street while our society so masterfully rebuilt after the Second World War by Clement Attlee has disintegrated and now lacks social bodies sufficiently funded to pick up the pieces.

Bullingdon Club Costume

The Bullingdon Club was founded in 1780, originally as a hunting and cricket club. Members dress at club banquets in a bespoke navy-blue tailcoat with a velvet collar, ivory silk lapel revers, brass monogrammed buttons, a mustard waistcoat and a sky-blue bow tie. Suits are made by court tailors Ede and Ravencroft and cost close to £4,000.

In February 2018, members of the club chanting Buller, Buller, Buller, were filmed being kicked out of an Oxford University Conservative Association party. Several Bullers sexually harassed female partygoers, culminating in the suspension of one of the gang from the Conservative Association.

At another Bullingdon Club dinner at the White Hart, Oxford, members were accused of groping the waitresses. The landlord called the police. Four members, including Alexander Fellowes, Princess Diana’s nephew, spent the night in custody, and were each fined £80. The landlord described the event as ‘some kind of ritual’ where ‘vandalism is not merely an inevitable consequence of heavy drinking, but a mandatory part of a Bullingdon dinner.’

According to Tim Flight, prostitutes are a regular fixture at Bullingdon events. ‘We always hire whores,’ says Ralph Perry-Robinson, a veteran of the 1987 skirmish with Cameron and Johnson. Women of their own class invited to social gatherings are encouraged to commit degrading acts. ‘At informal gatherings we would make them get down on all fours like a horse, whinny, and bring out hunting horns and whips,’ Tim Flight was told.

This inherent sexism of Bullingdon Club men saw David Cameron being rebuked for the lack of women in his cabinet. But that’s all changed now. After the Svengali algorithm Dominic Cummings showed Boris Johnson how to take back control, Johnson is reshaping Britain with old Etonians in their country mansions pulling the strings of a Cabinet of puppets that includes Priti Patel at the Home Office, Rishi Sunak as Chancellor, Alok Sharma, Kwasi Kwarteng and Sajid Javid – a City banker who has made a career understanding the money market now in charge of the future the of the NHS. As Britain slides into fascism, when fingers are pointed, they won’t be pointing at members of the Bullingdon Club.

Incidentally, the Rules of the Bullingdon Club are my own invention except for the last one. Bullers do have to be well-tailored, which makes you wonder how Johnson was allowed in.

 

Cover of the book Sex, Surrealism, Dali and Me

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4 Comments

  1. Prime ministers coming from the same bunch of private schools seems to be a British peculiarity. Of the last 10 Taoisigh (Irish prime minister), only 4 went to fee-paying schools and no school has more than 1 Taoiseach alumnus.

  2. “… whom it is said” not “… who it is said”. 🤣

  3. Humans are essentially tribal. We love to belong to a group whether it be a football fans group or the Bullingdon club. Sadly in the UK, or more accurately England, we still have vestiges of class consciousness. We may not knuckle our foreheads to the local squire any more, but we instinctively look up to successful, wealthy individuals.
    Unfortunately our need for tribal acceptance makes us prone to othering people outside our tribe. For people like those in the Bullingdon club, this means looking down on those less wealthy or influential. This could be a paternal Noblesse Oblige way, as I think Cameron had, or a contempt of the mass of the sans culottes like Johnson and Rees Mogg. Either way it does not serve us well to put these people into power.

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