The journalist and writer Toby Young co-produced and co-wrote 'When Boris Met Dave'. He was a contemporary of Boris Johnson and David Cameron at Oxford. Here, he reveals what the pair were like as undergraduates, what their club was all about, and why the two men now have very different attitudes towards their Bullingdon associations.
Channel 4: As well as working behind the scenes on this, you're a talking head yourself, because you were a contemporary of Boris and Dave at Oxford. When you were there, did you know much about the Bullingdon Club? Did everyone know of its existence?
Toby Young: I knew about it. I should think most people knew about it. It was very much a period in which organisations like the Bullingdon, which had been operating behind closed doors during the egalitarian 60s and 70s, emerged back into the open and became highly visible again. It wasn't just the Bullingdon, it was the Piers Gaveston Society, the Assassins and so on. They didn't exactly hide their light under a bushel. You'd be walking past the Radcliffe Camera and suddenly this group of roaring public schoolboys would rush past crying ‘Buller, Buller, Buller.' It wasn't as if they were an underground society, they were right there out in the open.
Channel 4: What were your opinions of the Bullingdon?
Toby Young: I suppose it seemed to me like a throwback to Britain's imperial past. I thought of them as a sort of relic of a bygone age, and I didn't for a second imagine that the public schoolboys who comprised the Bullingdon club would one day be running the country. I thought they were members of a class that was on its way out. Britain was becoming more meritocratic; people who had been educated at comprehensives were the coming men. I don't think anyone anticipated that in the 25 years since I was there, Britain would become so much less meritocratic, that social mobility would flatline, and that the Eton mob would re-emerge on the national stage to recapture the commanding heights of British politics. I think that's taken everybody by surprise, and how that happened is, in part, the subject of the film.
Channel 4: What do you think the motivations were of the guys who joined the club? Did they see it as a networking opportunity, something that would benefit their careers? Or was it more about having fun?
Toby Young: I think it was an exclusive dining society which people were, in general, honoured to be asked to join. It was a way of advertising the fact that you were a member of the university's social elite. It was the equivalent of being a member of a London Gentleman's Club.
Channel 4: Did you know either Boris or Dave at Oxford?
Toby Young: Yes, I did. I was an exact contemporary of Boris', and my uncle was a friend of his mother's, so I'd been told to look out for him, as well as his younger sister who came up the following year.
Channel 4: Is it fair to say that Boris was well-known at Oxford?
Toby Young: Yes. Boris was probably the biggest man on campus for the four years that he was there. He almost instantly became a kind of university-wide celebrity.
Channel 4: Based on what?
Toby Young: Based largely on his performances at the dispatch box of the Oxford Union. He immediately joined the Union and set about trying to become its president. He was a very impressive and dazzling public speaker, much like he is today.
Channel 4: And David Cameron was less prominent?
Toby Young: Yeah, David Cameron was at the same college as I was. I was at Brasenose College from 1983-86, and Cameron came up to Brasenose in 1985. We did the same subject and had some of the same tutors, so I did know him slightly too. He wasn't involved in student politics, and was much more a college man than a university man.
Channel 4: Why do you think he didn't get involved in university politics? Was he not that interested?
Toby Young: My own view is that David Cameron formed the ambition to become Prime Minister when he was still at Eton. And various people who knew him then have told me that he confided that in them. The reason that he didn't get involved in student politics, I think, is because he felt that he didn't need to. He already had plenty of connections within the Conservative party, and knew that he could just slide into politics on leaving university, without becoming an activist whilst at university. I think he didn't feel the same need for recognition and affirmation that Boris felt. Boris comes from a striving, middle class background, in which he has to win all the prizes going in order to prove that he deserves to be a member of the ruling class, whereas someone like David Cameron, who comes from a ruling class background, doesn't feel he has to prove anything.
Channel 4: You've written about Boris before, haven't you?
Toby Young: Yes, Lloyd Evans, who's one of the co-writers of 'When Boris Met Dave', he and I wrote a sex farce about the various scandals that beset The Spectator in 2004. That was staged in 2005, and won a theatregoers' Choice Award as Best New Comedy.
Channel 4: Was there not an element of biting the hand that feeds you there?
Toby Young: Well, at that time Boris was indeed mine and Lloyd's employer on The Spectator, but he took it very well, I have to say. Full credit to him. The only response we got was a postcard from Boris saying 'I always knew my life would be turned into a farce, I'm just glad it's been entrusted to two such distinguished men of letters.' Had there been a typeface called Irony he would have used it.
Channel 4: Does the Bullingdon Club still exist in the same way? Do you think it will continue to produce such influential types?
Toby Young: My understanding is that The Bullingdon went through a very fallow period in the mid-noughties, in which it was struggling to find enough people to maintain its annual membership. But when that famous photograph of Boris and Dave started being reproduced in 2007, suddenly applications started surging again, and I gather that The Bullingdon is now back to full strength and has never been healthier. But for a while there, it nearly disappeared.
Channel 4: It occurs that today, David Cameron would probably be far more bothered about being linked with The Bullingdon than Boris Johnson. Would you say that's true?
Toby Young: Yes. I think he thinks that it's a potential source of political embarrassment. I don't think he's personally ashamed, but I think he's aware that it doesn't look good. I think he and Boris have both gone to some lengths to detoxify their toff-ness. The way Dave has done it is to play it down. He hasn't gone as far as Tony Blair and adopted a mockney accent, but nevertheless he plays it down, he tries to present himself as just a normal bloke with a family living in west London, facing the same problems that other ordinary families face. The way Boris has decontaminated the toff brand has been to exaggerate his poshness, turn himself into a kind of pantomime toff, a bit like Stephen Fry, turning it all into a bit of a joke. So for Boris the Bullingdon isn't embarrassing at all, it's part of his brand, whereas for Dave, it doesn't sit at all well with his overall image.
Channel 4: Does any of it really matter, what they got up to at University? Should we care what they were like as students?
Toby Young: I think to a great extent, the child is the father of the man. A great way to try and understand our new masters is to learn more about what they were like as teenagers.
