Boris Johnson was at Oxford from 1983-87 and notoriously part of the elite Bullingdon Club.
However Sonia Purnell’s biography Just Boris notes a more interesting detail. Namely some of the people who Johnson was a contemporary of at Oxford. He may or may not have known some of them at the time or later but they all came out of a 1980s Oxford University culture.
There is nothing hugely remarkable about that except that the culture was not about getting people ready to drive a bus or work in routine public service. It was about giving people the confidence to feel they could run things. As will be seen from the list some were better at it than others:
David Cameron
William Hague
‘Radek’ Sikorski (Polish politician)
Michael Gove
Nick Boles (former MP)
Jeremy Hunt
Roland Rudd (People’s Vote)
Nick Robinson (BBC)
Gary Gibbon (Channel 4)
David Miliband
Ed Balls
Yvette Cooper
Ian Katz (ex-Guardian & Newsnight now Channel 4)
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