Oxford's elite Bullingdon Club - The Bully boys

[TonyGosling]

Has to be worth its own section this little nest of the elite.

[TonyGosling]

This morning's Broadcasting House programme on Radio 4 heard from a fascinating witness to a Bullingdon Club initiation. Here it is - 3m 25s long
http://www.bilderberg-mirror.org.uk/BullingdonClubIanRogers.mp3

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/news/bh/

Also... The Mail On Sunday has an extraordinary revelation that the photo above has been photoshopped! Who has been removed???

[acrobat74]

[paul wright]

Nest of vipers, more accurately, exactly exemplified by the Bullingdon/Bilderberg/Banker/Mafia Corfu set
I like that story about Osbourne's given Bullingdon nickname being 'Oik', because his baronetcy background wasn't quite posh enough, and his initiative ritual - being held upside down by established club members and asked "What are you?", his head being repeatedly banged on the ground for each incorrect reply, until he came with the correct answer
"A despicable c**t"

[John White]

[TonyGosling]

Photos of Cameron with the Bully Boys were banned last year - yes BANNED!

Cameron Bullingdon Club photo is banned
In the photo Mr Cameron and several other Bullingdon members, including the young Boris Johnson, now shadow higher education minister, pose in their £1,000 uniforms of blue ties, tails and biscuit-coloured waistcoats.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/6409757.stm

BBC backed off but it is published here & elsewhere on the web

1) Sebastian Grigg, 2) David Cameron, 3) Ralph Perry Robinson, 4) Ewen Fergusson, 5) Matthew Benson, 6) Sebastian James, 7) Jonathan Ford, Boris Johnson, 9) Harry Eastwood
http://www.provokateur.com/news/index.php/category/uncategorized/

This banned from UK Indymedia today

Then this book - just published

[Keith Mothersson]

Thanks for this post Tony, and follow up comments, the links to Hell Fire Clubs and initiation rites are especially interesting.

I see this as something to alert us to the likelihood that Cameron and Osbourne are still likely to take big decsions with arrested development frat-bullied parts of their psyches (along with compensatory inflation, sense of over-entitlement) rather than as family values caring guys we would like to break out of frat straightjackets/dinnerjackets.

A suitable case for pity, compassion as well as On our Guard! Indeed the more contempt we throw at this lot, the more hatred we indulge, the more we are likely to be ourselves manipulable e.g. by Nu Labour offering a different frat-alliance to go towards rather than seeing the problem of mens' clubs and initiation into Manhood anthropologically and sytemically, the FRAT as a dominant INSTITUTION - with the individuals 'in it' mainly as unfree much conditioned robots/victims rather than as some kind of Master-race of their own sad posing.

I theorise the FRAT and Real Class Manhood here:
http://www.keith-mothersson.co.uk/resonning.html
and main article here:
http://www.keith-mothersson.co.uk/RE-SONNING.html

An immediate implication of a gendered analysis of power is how the hell we develop a Matri-sphere or Motherland, a non-male-dominated social space? Imagine a truth movements with 50 percent plus women in them?

Advice needed please!

[Disco_Destroyer]

[TonyGosling]

Yup, seen, but they are willing too. and Compassion should be reciprocated shouldn't it?

more today..
They are among only eight of the 20 students in the Bullingdon photograph to have been identified.......
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1080808/Riddle-missing-hellrai sers-Was-George-Osborne-Bullingdon-Club-picture-doctored--why.html

It is a cult make no mistake when people are bound by these rules of initiation and secrecy.

As a onetime Oxford resident of many years the detail here to flesh out the rumours we used to hear in the 1990s has been most enlightening.

I did apprecuiate Peter Hitchens' rant yesterday. Some righteous ranting and even a little anger is justified with the enormity of the crimes of these types. Undermining democracy etc etc.

It's our equivalent to the Skull and Bones and Heinrich Himmler had his own little 'freindship group' too, which turns out to be rather too similar to the Skulls and the Bully boys.

[TonyGosling]

This website seems to be saying coup plotter Mark Thatcher was also a member of the Bullingdon Club, possibly one of the airbrushed out people. This confirms my longtime Oxford source who confirmed to me Mark Thatcher was a member of the Bullingdon in the 1980s or possibly early 1990s

[TonyGosling]

Or could it be Osama Bin Laden who was airbrushed out?


From arms deals in Africa to oil speculation in China - the mercenary world of Mark Thatcher
One name dominated the trial of ex-SAS officer Simon Mann: Mark Thatcher. But, as Kim Sengupta reports, Mann's former friend is engaged in his favourite pastime, the pursuit of wealth
Wednesday, 25 June 2008
Sir Mark Thatcher, son of Baroness Thatcher: some of his exploits have been called into question
Mark Thatcher, say those who know him, has always liked two things: the limelight and wealth. But in the recent past the former prime minister's son has been remarkably elusive, hiding his money-making activities from the public eye, keeping away from the minor celebrity events which were once his regular haunts.
Perhaps it is not surprising. He is hon the run from Equatorial Guinea and the safest place for him at the moment is Spain's Costa del Sol – the infamous bolthole of Englishmen who have issues with the law.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/profiles/from-arms-deals-in-a frica-to-oil-speculation-in-china--the-mercenary-world-of-mark-thatche r-853530.html

[IanFantom]

The trashing of the Oxford restaurant by the Bullinger Club, it seems, was first reported on 3 December 2004. Apparently it's a regular event. The article adds Lord Bath and Alan Clark to the list of Bullinger Club people.

[astro3]

I seem to remember a pub in Thame, Oxfordshire also being trashed by the Bully boys.

[IanFantom]

[TonyGosling]

Intereting six minute video on the Rothschild family.

Link

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gRQ6dtJyAo0

[TonyGosling]

I've just been digging around and discovered the restaurant they trashed was called Thatcher's in Thame.

Also... Bill Clinton lived in Oxford at the time as a CFR/Trilateral/Elite Rhodes scholar - in the same exact North Oxford house as Howard Marx the big time drug dealer who was nailed by Operation Julie - what with the Mina Airbase scandal that figures!!

[TonyGosling]

Posh yobs from David Cameron's Bullingdon drinking club slapped with 'ASBO Lite' orders
It is one of Oxford University's most exclusive societies, counting David Cameron and George Osborne among former members.
The students of the notorious Bullingdon drinking club pride themselves on their wealth, their tailcoats and their fine champagnes.
Yet it seems that despite their money, some can be no more refined than common yobs. ...

Famous friends: Francesco Ciardi who is part of the Bullingdon club, pictured with hotel heiress Lydia Forte and Princess Beatrice
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1165994/Posh-yobs-David-Camero ns-Bullingdon-drinking-club-slapped-ASBO-Lite-orders.html

[outsider]

Did they get away without costs to repair and replace damage to pub?

[IanFantom]

They offered to pay, but the restauranteur reported them to the police. The police wouldn't give him the details, so I presume he didn't get the money.

[TonyGosling]

An excellent point sir.

[TonyGosling]

Let me tell you the secret behind the Bullingdon posturing of David and Boris: Oxford contemporary looks behind that decadent image

By Toby Young
Last updated at 11:11 PM on 22nd July 2009

David Cameron would prefer that the picture did not exist. Boris Johnson, too, in his now more sober guise of Mayor of London, probably wishes it was never taken.

Together with a number of other young men with their eyes set on glittering prizes, they pose swaggeringly in the blue tailcoats and mustard-coloured waistcoats of Oxford University's notorious Bullingdon Club.

Since becoming Tory leader, Mr Cameron has done his best to play down his days with the elite dining society whose members got drunk on champagne and trashed the restaurants in which they caroused.


Bullingdon boys: Boris Johnson (sitting right) and David Cameron (back row, second left) pose with other club members, including Ewen Fergusson, now a lawyer, and Jonathan Ford, now a journalist

The picture was even withdrawn from general circulation after pressure from his office. In vain, it seems.

A no-holds-barred TV drama portraying the Bullingdon set will acutely embarrass Mr Cameron, Mr Johnson and another former member, Shadow Chancellor George Osborne.


To be shown on More4, it will be set against the backdrop of the miners' strike, when communities in Labour's working-class heartlands were brought to their knees.

Questions were raised last night over the ultra-liberal Channel 4's aim to screen the film in the autumn - just months before Gordon Brown must hold a general election.





Young and free: David Cameron and Boris Johnson are just two members of the Bullingdon Club to enter politics

Tory MP Philip Davies, a member of the Culture, Media and Sport Committee, questioned the timing of the drama-documentary.


He said: 'They may well say there will be more interest in the programme before we go to the polls, but the timing seems curious to say the least and opens them to accusations they are pursuing an agenda.'




More...
TV drama to depict David Cameron's days as member of infamous 'Bullingdon Club'

The club - which has been terrorising the residents of Oxford for 200 years - is still going strong.

Not many weeks ago, it was reported that several of its present members were threatened with Anti-Social Behaviour Orders following a raucous house party at which dozens of champagne bottles were smashed.

What's really interesting to me about all this is that - though it might be a cliche - these really are the young men and women who will fill the ancient professions of medicine, the law and politics in the future.

They ran amok through Oxford

Indeed, it's fair to ask of that notorious Bullingdon photograph of Cameron and Johnson: How many of the participants will be in the Cabinet in a few years?

Others in the picture have gone on to have equally successful careers, including Ewen Fergusson, now a partner in the prestigious City law firm of Herbert Smith, and Jonathan Ford, a senior journalist at Reuters.

However, it was the presence of the future Tory leader and future London Mayor that really made people sit up and take note.

If this elite Oxford club boasted the two most prominent Conservative politicians in the country among its ex-members, isn't it about time we learned a little more about it?

In 1986, shortly after Cameron, Johnson and fellow members had posed for that notorious photograph, they ran amok through the streets of Oxford.

One of them threw a plant pot through the plate-glass window of a restaurant, triggering the burglar alarm. The police arrived, complete with sniffer dogs, and six of the ten-strong group were arrested.

'The party ended up with a number of us crawling on all fours through the hedges of the botanical gardens,' says Boris Johnson. 'And once we were in the cells, we became pathetic namby-pambies.'

Back in 1983, when I first went to Oxford, the Bullingdon was reemerging from a period of obscurity in which it looked as if it might vanish altogether.

It was one of several Oxford societies, including the Assassins and the Piers Gaveston, that only began to emerge from the shadows after Margaret Thatcher's election victory in 1979.

The generation of students that attended the university in the early Eighties - a group that included Hugh Grant, PR man to the stars Matthew Freud and Nigella Lawson - treated Thatcher's triumph as an excuse to reinvent themselves.

The modern, egalitarian Britain of the Sixties and Seventies was rejected in favour of a nostalgic fantasy based on the novels of Evelyn Waugh and P.G. Wodehouse.

In 1981, an unknown photographer called Dafydd Jones decided to enter a photo competition by documenting the excesses of this generation.

The resulting magazine cover story was headlined The Return Of The Bright Young Things and featured the Hon Pandora Mond (the sister of former Greenpeace director Lord Melchett) exposing her nipple, the now respected author Katie Hickman removing a young man's trousers and - most notoriously - Nigella Lawson playing croquet through the window of a sedan chair.

The publication of these photos - and the attention they received - helped redefine Oxford as a playground for the sons and daughters of Britain's privileged elite.

That was far from true, with the so-called 'Bright Young Things' making up only a tiny fraction of the student body. But the TV screening of Brideshead Revisited in the autumn of 1981 did nothing to dispel this myth.


Ambitious: Shadow Chancellor George Osborne was also part of the notorious Bullingdon Club

During the three years I spent there, it was as though Oxford - and no doubt the same was true of Cambridge - was a stage and people like Gottfried von Bismarck and Darius Guppy were the theatrical stars we had all come to see.

The reason they paraded around in tailcoats, empty champagne bottles strewn in their wake, was not because they didn't care what ordinary people thought of them. On the contrary, they were playing up to people's prejudices about what people from privileged backgrounds were like - and revelling in the attention it brought them.

For instance, at one Piers Gaveston Society 'debauch' I attended, I saw one of the senior members march up to an attractive young girl and grab her breasts. He then looked over his shoulder, anxious to see who had noticed this 'outrageous' behaviour.

As someone from a middle-class background who'd been educated at a comprehensive, I was initially as dazzled by the antics of these exotic creatures as everyone else. To my inexperienced eye, they looked as if they had stepped straight from the pages of Brideshead.

But towards the end of my time at Oxford, it became clear that it was just an act - and rather a pathetic one at that.

This dawning realisation meant that I didn't take the members of clubs like the Bullingdon very seriously - and neither, in the end, did the rest of the student population.

But what few of us imagined was that the Bullingdon would be incubating the leaders of tomorrow.

So what did George Osborne, David Cameron and Boris Johnson know that we didn't? I think they grasped that the theatrical element of Oxford's secret clubs and societies, the fact that so much of their activity seemed designed to dazzle and mystify bemused onlookers, is precisely what makes them such ideal training grounds for British public life.

Everyone in this club is fraudulent
As we saw from Gordon Brown's stewardship of the recent G20 Summit, creating the impression that you've achieved an historic agreement, even if there's very little substance to it, is the key to success in politics. Much of it is artifice, image - and that is what they traded on even when they were irritatingly selfsatisfied undergraduates.

The lesson each generation of Bright Young Things is taught at Oxford, thanks to their membership of these organisations, is that you don't have to be to the manor born to become a member of Britain's ruling class - or even particularly clever.

You don't need charisma or sexual confidence or a sense of entitlement. All you need is the wherewithal to pretend to be someone who has these qualities. Provided you can do a reasonable impression of a person with the right stuff - and provided you wear the right uniform - that's enough to propel you to the top.

I sometimes wonder what these contemporaries of mine must be thinking as they sit in their glasswalled corner offices, surveying the world beneath them through their picture windows.

Do they congratulate themselves on having fooled people into taking them seriously? Does it strike them as miraculous that they've made it, despite having indulged in behaviour at Oxford that would have seen them sent to jail if they were from less privileged backgrounds?

I doubt it. The discovery that all these young pretenders make when they take their seats at the Cabinet table, or become QCs, or pocket £100million on a complicated land deal, is that the people at the very pinnacle of British society - the people pulling the levers of power - are exactly like them.

There is no such thing as the real McCoy, just a bunch of schoolboys parading around in the contents of the dressing-up box. They don't feel like frauds, because everyone else in this elite little club is as fraudulent as they are.

But then that's the dirty little secret at the heart of British public life - and for the lucky few who are invited to become members of the Bullingdon, it's a secret they discover much sooner than the rest of us.

[TonyGosling]

Here's a pic relating to the above mentioned (have the producers or the commissionimng editor been 'leaned on' yet?) drama production.


A young Tony Blair in his underpants played by actor, Christian Brassington who will now play Boris Johnson

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1201370/TV-drama-shame-David-C amerons-days-member-infamous-Bullingdon-Club.html#ixzz0Rh0kCpSF

[Pugwash]

[IanFantom]

More 4 TV: WHEN BORIS MET DAVE (Bullingdon Club)
Wednesday October 7 21:00

[TonyGosling]

Getting closer now.
Time to set your DVD recorder.
Thanks Ian for flagging this up.

[fish5133]

Boris v Paxo: How Johnson turned the tables on Newsnight attack dog in clashes cut out by the BBC. Paxo quizzes Boris on his friendship with cameron at the Bullingdon Club


http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1218478/Boris-v-Paxo-How-Johns on-turns-tables-Newsnights-attack-dog.html?ITO=1490&referrer=yahoo


Link

[TonyGosling]

Very good - instructive at the time of the Tory conference - and you can see it online here if you don't have More 4
(some swearing)
http://www.channel4.com/programmes/when-boris-met-dave/4od#2972823

[Micpsi]

Empty vessels make the most sound, Boris.

[TonyGosling]

With the release of Simon Mann today I am reminded of the suggestion that Mark Thatcher may have been in the Bullingdon Club.
Also from his pockmarked face and stony demeanor Mark Thatcher looks to me like some sort of heavy drug user. Probably Cocaine?

[TonyGosling]

Steve Bell in today's Grauniad