Simon Kuper

Financial Times journalist and author Simon Kuper traces how modern Britain has been shaped by a narrow group of people who went to university in Oxford.

Kuper says Whitehall is swarming with old Oxonians, from Boris Johnson and David Cameron to Michael Gove, David Cameron, George Osborne, Theresa May, Dominic Cummings, Daniel Hannan, and Jacob Rees-Mogg. He says they debated each other in tutorials, fought each other in student elections and attended the same balls and black tie dinners. They took their university politics with them when they left and set out to shape modern Britain.

‘A searing onslaught on the smirking Oxford insinuation that politics is all just a game. It isn’t. It matters’ Matthew Parris

Kuper is a Financial Times columnist who writes on everything from politics to sport, books and cities.  He is also author of Football Against the Enemy and Ajax, The Dutch, the War: Football in Europe during the Second World War.

FT Weekend at the Bodleian.