Chums: How a Tiny Caste of Oxford Tories Took Over the UK, by Simon Kuper

Victorian neo-Gothic Friar Park at Henley-on-Thames (home of Beatle George Harrison from 1970 until his death in 2001), built, at the far end of his four-acre Alpine garden, a miniature replica of the real Matterhorn. It was made from ‘thousands of tons of York gritstone. The peak “came from the top of the real Matterhorn”, and the slopes were mantled with “snow”, produced by pulverised Derbyshire spar.’

Not all of TLG’s eccentrics were so comfortably bankrolled or, indeed, intellectually inclined. Obscure yeoman Thomas Bland (1798-1865), described by one contemporary as being a ‘short & somewhat insignificant figure … [with] a great contempt for anything mean or upstart or pretentious’, caring ‘nothing for fame’, nonetheless became a local celebrity in his native Lake District.

His half-acre, so-called Italian Garden ‘was like no other in the county … richly adorned with sculpture, paintings and other works of art, primarily the “products of his [own] brush & chisel”.’

Bland stands in delightful contrast to Londoner Dr John Phené (1824-1912 – his name commemorated in the Phene Arms pub in Chelsea), a fellow connoisseur of statuary, who was rich enough to buy them.

Longstaffe-Gowan’s 21 eccentrics have been my unlikely companions these last few weeks. I’ve not bidden them farewell yet. Nor will I in a hurry – so rich are their details, so compelling their stories, that each and every one must be revisited to glean missed snippets of sometimes ridiculous but always enthralling yarns.

Beautifully designed and with an array of unfamiliar images which mightily augment these short biographies, English Garden Eccentrics is simply unputdownable. It also revealed me – book in one hand, trowel in the other – as someone displaying his own new and somewhat worrying eccentricity.

David Wheeler is The Oldie’s gardening correspondent and editor of Hortus magazine

Boris Johnson and Melina Mercouri at the Oxford Union, 1986

Oxford revisited

HARRY MOUNT Chums: How a Tiny Caste of Oxford Tories Took Over the UK By Simon Kuper Profile Books £16.99

It is extraordinary that of the 15 postwar Prime Ministers, 11 went to Oxford. The other four didn’t go to university at all (Winston Churchill, James Callaghan and John Major) or went to Edinburgh (Gordon Brown).

A gripping book would explain this phenomenon. Chums, by Oxford graduate and FT columnist Simon Kuper, is not that book.

Instead, it’s a sloppily argued, unconvincing polemic about how Oxford shapes modern Britain through its prominent politician graduates.

They include Boris Johnson, Michael Gove, David Cameron, George Osborne, Theresa May, Dominic Cummings, Jacob Rees-Mogg and Rishi Sunak. From Labour, they include Keir Starmer, Yvette Cooper and the Miliband brothers.

Of the many contradictions in this book, the fundamental one is that hardly any of this group were actual chums at Oxford. They were rarely in the same year. At Oxford, Boris Johnson barely knew David Cameron, two years his junior. Neither of them overlapped with George Osborne, five years younger than Cameron.

So the idea that a network of friends plotted world domination at Oxford University just doesn’t hold true. Nor did the infamous Bullingdon Club play any part in any putative political plot, even though its blue bow tie dominates the book’s front cover. Of those politicians listed above, only three of them were in the club: Johnson, Cameron and Osborne.

Kuper claims that Oxford ‘is an independent variable, shaping British power’ – because this group of politicians supposedly debated with one other in tutorials, ran against each other in student elections and attended the same balls and black-tie dinners.

With a few exceptions – Michael Gove did overlap with Boris Johnson at the Oxford Union, but he’s three years younger – this just isn’t true. What happened was that they all met later on when working together in politics at the same time, despite having been at Oxford at different times.

Kuper reverse engineers the political success of a few prominent Oxford graduates and tries to trace it back to some sort of shady combination of the Illuminati and the Bilderberg Group, formed in their youth.

To make this false connection, Kuper has to play around with dates. He claims Jacob Rees-Mogg was a contemporary of the journalist Owen Matthews when they were at prep school together. In fact, they were two years apart – a yawning gulf at that age.

Kuper gives an elaborate description of the rituals of the Oxford Union debating society, which consciously apes Parliament. He argues that membership of the Union gave Oxford graduates a dress rehearsal for power. Yes, Boris Johnson was President of the Union, but Cameron and Osborne barely went near the place. Kuper wrongly calls Osborne an ‘ambitious student Tory’ – which he wasn’t (I was a contemporary of his at Magdalen College). Again, one of Kuper’s theories collapses.

Kuper correctly attacks the limited work demands for arts undergraduates at Oxford – an essay or two a week for 24 weeks a year, for only three or four years. (Still, that’s more than at most British universities.) But he then goes on to say this sparse handful of essays constitutes a brilliant training in the art of bluffing your way through politics without knowing very much.