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Hello and welcome to the Spectators Book Club podcast. I'm Sam Leith, the literary editor

of The Spectator. And this week my guest is our occasional reviewer, Simon Cooper,

whose new book is called Chums,

How a Tiny Cast of Oxford Tories Took Over the UK.

Simon, welcome.

I mean, obviously, to some extent, the thesis of your book is set out in its title,

but we've heard a lot of play about, you know, the Old Etonian cabal, and yet you want to

refocus the attention a little bit in this, don't you? Is that...

Yeah, I think that too much has been made of eaten. I think Oxford is actually a more powerful

network. It was different in the David Cameron era because really for Cameron, his tribe was eaten.

He came from a kind of hereditary, Etonian family.

Etonians are the people he was closest to, so he assembled them around him in power,

people like Ed Mowellian and Oliver Letwin, Joe Johnson.

With Boris Johnson now, you see in his era it's a broader cast of Oxford

private schoolboys who've come in and out and play different roles at various times. Johnson

himself, but also Daniel Hanan, who's the thinker of Brexit, sort of the call marks of Brexit,

sketches out the vision,

works on it for 25 years, makes it happen. Dominic Cummings, Michael Gove, Jacob Rees-Mogg is a

notonian, but it's a much broader cast. And actually, I think power in Britain, post-war Britain,

lies very much at Oxford, the university that has produced 11 of the 15

post-war prime ministers. In fact, the only prime minister that goes to any university other than

...