A Viscount Speaks

David Cameron is a disgrace to the Buller

What ho, plebs!

Well, Good Heavens, what a frightful let-down was last night's programme on the Buller!  I speak not of Boris, who throughout displayed exemplary wit and delightful disdain for the opinions of the lower orders (well, when he wasn't chasing votes at the Union, that is).  Nor do I speak of Ralph Perry-Robinson, who boldly stated that the chaps of '87 had "nothing to be embarrassed about".  Quite so, Ralph, old fruit. 

I do, however, speak of David Cameron.  I found his attitude deeply disturbing.  Not for our Dave the perfectly natural hi-jinks of throwing plant pots through restaurant windows or spanking grammar school boys with tennis racquets.  Oh no, young Dave preferred to slink off back to his rooms and listen to Phil Collins so as to avoid any trouble with the plod.  When he wasn't in his rooms, he was mooching around West Indian restaurants talking shop with rastafarians.  And when he wasn't schmoozing with rastas, this grotesque little wannabe oik was playing darts! I mean, for pity's sake!

What a puzzling man.  I spoke yesterday of my deeply contemptuous attitude towards oiks (such as Herodotus-reading Jenkins) trying to be gents.  But how much worse is a gent who tries to be an oik?  In all conscience, young Cameron is a disgrace to the Buller and a disgrace to his class.  

Crouchback

The Buller is on television tonight, chaps

What ho, proles!

I know that many of you oiks - that horrible North Countryman, Maguire of the Mirror, being a prime example - hold an unhealthy fascination with the doings of the noble chappies of the Bullingdon Club.  You get yourselves into a frightful tizzy when Buller boys smash a few bottles of champers in a restaurant or plonk a few plebs upside down in the front quad of the House.  Well, tonight (When Boris Met Dave - More4, 9 p.m.) you'll get a chance to see for yourselves what goes on.  

Of course, it has been quite some time since I was at the House and in the Buller.  It was 1949 (gosh, how times flies!) when I won my spurs by dangling Jenkins, a ghastly first year Grammar School oik (and Welsh, to boot!), from the belltower of Tom quad.  His feral screams woke up the entire college and caused poor old Hugh Trevor-Roper to lose his temper completely and rusticate Jenkins for an entire term for breach of the college peace.  I felt quite sorry for the poor blighter but really he should have learnt to keep the noise down when being dangled naked by his ankles fifty feet above the earth.  After all, it was the third time it had happened to him that Michaelmas alone. 

This is the problem with oiks, especially clever ones.  They have a hopelessly inappropriate sense of propriety and of their own rights. They think it simply not right that a man be confronted with imminent death merely for the crime of sitting quietly in his study reading Herodotus.  Well, sorry, chaps, but life isn't fair!  If you want to enjoy the sublime privilege of sharing an Oxford college with noblemen, then you'll jolly well be served up for their amusement occasionally!   

So I shall watch tonight with interest.  I hope that Boris and David dished the plebs in the 80s with as much panache as we dished them in the 40s!

Crouchback

Lay off Boris, chaps

Chaps,

I do not know what has happened to Englishmen in the past century.  We were once a proud and resilient race who withstood the fierce attentions of Kaiser William and Hitler.  Now we are so denuded of phlegm, courage and honour that we refuse to pay homage even to the select band of Englishmen still in possession of those qualities.

Yes, I talk of Boris Johnson and his admirable chum, Darius Guppy.  Some misguided class warriors in the blogosphere have reacted unfavourably to Boris's trenchant and pithy dissection of Damian McBride's tawdry antics.  One plebeian poster on Conservative Home commented:

"Erm...is this the same Boris Johnson who had that ever so immoral phone conversation with Darius Guppy regarding beating somebody up?"

Now this really will not do!  Let us not make the mistake of drawing moral equivalence between the vulgar antics of a Scotch Labourite and the entirely reasonable behaviour of an old-fashioned old Etonian whose only goal in life is to live by a strict Homeric code of honour. 

Really, do people expect a man like Darius Guppy - handsome, clever, well-bred - to tolerate the unwelcome attentions of tabloid newspapermen?  Do people really think it acceptable for lower middle-class (and sometimes even working-class) journalists to pester the finest men in England?  I think it very far from being acceptable.   

It seems to me that some modern Englishmen would have told off Hector for handing out biff outside the walls of Troy.  They would have sat on the sidelines carping and criticising when they should have had the courage and honour to run into the battle and slay Agamemnon's men!

And now they expect Mr Guppy to be as soppy, humble and effeminate as themselves.  They judge him by their own lax and dishonourable modern-day standards when they should see him as a proud, straight-backed warrior who has stepped straight from the pages of the Iliad.

I leave the last words to Mr Guppy himself.  My readers would do well to ruminate on this sentence:

"I consider the events in question a source of pride and of honour – a viewpoint that will no doubt jar with the average Briton today but which, I am sure, would have found resonance with his counterpart of, say, a hundred years ago".

Yours, etc
Viscount Crouchback