The British counterpart of Yale’s Skull and Bones? Oxford University’s Bullingdon Club has spawned a rogue’s gallery of Elite movers and shakers over the years, and has a dark reputation.
Now an embarrassment to many of the luminaries posing in self-important swagger, we thought this was an apt moment to re-introduce these images from 1987. Aside from former Mayor of London and new PM Boris Johnson, also of note are ex-PM David Cameron and circled, Jonathan Ford, chief writer for the Financial Times (yes, politics and mainstream media in the same boat as usual).
Three of the most powerful men in Britain today…were all members, joining an illustrious list of alumni that includes ambassadors, countless CEOs, titans of the financial industry, and four kings. Because the members swear a code of silence, or “omertà,” when initiated, the club has been shrouded in mystery until now…Oxford establishments won’t have them. The Kings Arms, a popular student pub, banned them from entering the building when the Bullingdon boys started a fire in one of the rooms and smashed an antique mirror in 2006. That was just a friendly drink. Their organized events—known as “blinds”—have been banished from the city for more than 100 years. They were ordered not to hold any meetings within 15 miles of central Oxford in 1894 after smashing all 534 windows in Peckwater, a quad in Christ Church, the grandest of Oxford’s colleges… “A bunch of pissed up toffs, that’s all they were,”…
The Daily Beast
Shocking revelations exist of the vile shenanigans of the Bullingdon Club; a tale of vandalism, drunkenness, prostitutes and most shockingly, one member killing four people in a drunken stupor while driving his Maserati. “Despite being convicted of dangerous driving causing death and having four previous driving convictions, he got off with a driving ban and a fine.”
Among prominent former members are Nathaniel and Jacob Rothschild:
“The amount of wealth and power concentrated in former club members is staggering, with Jacob Rothschild alone estimated to be worth more than $7 billion.”
Read more about the shocking and disgusting antics of this “rich boy’s club” at The Daily Beast
The image of the Tory leader flaunting his idle, boozy image with Boris has been censored. Even as undergraduates, Cameron and Osborne thought they were born to rule. But they now fear voters will be turned off by their antics at university.
So they do what the rich and powerful have always done: suppress the truth.
How long, I wonder, before the tampered picture of Osborne and Rothschild joins the exposure of Cameron and Johnson in the closet of a lawyer’s safe?
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/riddle-of-the-airbrushed-bullingdon-boys-picture-352224
