Bad beat/Moaning/Venting thread - Mammy told me not to come.

[The Situation]

Torres officially retired today about a full decade after he mentally checked out. Some player in his Atleti/ early Liverpool days though.

[ArmaniJeans]

SPOILER

Leichtenstein.

Football is great for helping with obscure European place names.

English towns and suburbs as well.
I reckon most of us would have little idea where Burnley, Middlesboro, Tottenham or Bromwich are if it wasn't for football.

[Guest]

Rough comparison of the standard vs back in the day times

Still a good few spanners early on but everyone from 3 tables out was very good...except me of course.

[rounders123]

Just finished Chernobyl, the HBO miniseries. Thought it was brilliant and told the story excellently. Definitely worth the watch and only 5 episodes.

5!?. No way thought it was 4. Finished the 4th and thought that was it.
Also only learned the other day Jared Harris is the son of Richard Harris!.

[Guest]

Also only learned the other day Jared Harris is the son of Richard Harris!.

Killer whales are actually dolphins

There original name which was mistranslated is whale killers

[Strewelpeter]

I've 4 as well, Think I might be missing an obvious one... have the two tricky ones.

SPOILER

Vaduz and the Vatican, Vienna and Vilnius

[Rufio]

Ben listening to some funky Hot 8 Brass Band covers today:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fBuTK-E0gxo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C21CoosW4y0

I also decided recently that fat people with powerful voices are great, they can produce a restrained power full of emotion and anticipation that they let it rip at some point.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4edjh2sJvxc

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vjHtFbjXDzc

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZsDUXo5TcZY

This is one of my favourites.

[Strewelpeter]

Oh Yeah that place where half of ye live

FFS!

[Goodluck2me]

I've 4 as well, Think I might be missing an obvious one... have the two tricky ones.

SPOILER

Vaduz and the Vatican, Vienna and Vilnius

SPOILER

Valletta in Malta

[Goodluck2me]

@Kayroo and the likes

Can you explain to me what the legal (or otherwise) rationale is for not naming the Boys in the Recent trail? I’m just trying to remember the logic again. Same question for why not after they turn 18. Cheers

[Rufio]

@Kayroo and the likes

Can you explain to me what the legal (or otherwise) rationale is for not naming the Boys in the Recent trail? I’m just trying to remember the logic again. Same question for why not after they turn 18. Cheers

https://www.thejournal.ie/explainer-ana-kriegel-4681033-Jun2019/

The Journal wrote a piece on this earlier in the week.

[Dice75]

Bowyer! Spot on!

Thanks be to fuck

All the poker talk inspired me to spend the crumbs in my Stars account on a $5 satellite to the Big $55. Didn't realise that the tournament started immediately after and I couldn't bank the T$. Finished 9th at 2 am for $450. Pretty tired this morning! It was definitely easier to sit in the same seat for 7 hours straight 10 years ago.

Turbos or Hyper turbos FTW. Couldnt play the likes of that and i still play a bit online.


Went out last night and ate something for the first time in 3 weeks (FU Gallstones - 2 weeks for Private scan results so still hanging). Also had a few drinks. Not many but after 3 weeks of eating water they fairly stuck. Woke up this morning oblivious to the fact the missus had fooked off and the hotish Moldovan cleaner was upstairs doing her thing. Opened door and launched last morsel of clothing towards the clothes basket on the landing.

HMC " Oh hi Chi-ron"
Me "Yowzers"

She didnt laugh or faint so I'm taking that as a win.

[Goodluck2me]

https://www.thejournal.ie/explainer-...81033-Jun2019/

The Journal wrote a piece on this earlier in the week.

Thanks, I’m looking for something that explains what was the rationale for creating it, like case x where’ vigilantism took over or we want to protect Y outcome. I’m not sure the argument of them being young (mentioned in the linked article) is enough of one for me.

[Rufio]

Thanks, I’m looking for something that explains what was the rationale for creating it, like case x where’ vigilantism took over or we want to protect Y outcome. I’m not sure the argument of them being young (mentioned in the linked article) is enough of one for me.

Fair enough, it is enough for me tbh, I realise what a heinous crime it was that committed, but people do a lot of changing during their development from child to adult.

I'm not saying that this should mean that they get released upon turning 18, but similarly, I do think they should be afforded protections that an adult creating the same crime would not get.

On the other hand, if they were named, then it takes away the risk of having innocent people "outed" as being the guilty parties (ideal world this would all be moot as people would have the cop on to not try and identify them.)

In any case, I don't see what the public gains from having names and pictures of 13 year old kids that won't be free for a decade or so, at which point it will be impossible to identify them unless updated photographs are circulated - no doubt any person coming out of prison could just change their name and move abroad to try and hide a criminal past?

[Hitchhiker's Guide To...]

...

[DeadParrot]

FYP Surely

nah....
The ERG are nutters but not as big an influence as reported.
No deal and may deal have been voted down a bunch of times , the fantastical is fun to speculate but realistically I can't see it.
What i do see is Johnson elected, a different in name only may deal, a general election where tories get a majority, based on the fear of corbyn, NI is fucked under the bus and boris gets to deliver brexit before sailing into the sunset.
The only way to get No Deal is unified Tory plus DUP, there are some Tories that will never go No Deal, the only way to get MayDeal through is a majority, the only way to get a majority is an election.
The only way to get an election is a VONC raised by labour, that is done by getting Boris to be pro no deal.
The fact is Corbyn is unelectable. If labour had the stones to bin him off they'd walk into government but they don't want to alienate the hard left and the pro brexit north.
Their plan is to walk across the ashes of a fucked up economy post Brexit into power when it's too late.
The only weird way out is a VONC and a mad coalition of Labour+Lib Dem+SNP+ChangeUk (or whatever they are alled this week) but that is fanciful in the extreme

[tylerdurden94]

I've a few bits & bobs for sale on adverts, drone/lenses/headphones and I've a couple other bits to add over the next day or so iPhones & my Macbook Pro Retina, if anybody is interested or you know anybody on the lookout please do drop me a line. Link to my profile HERE

[KevIRL]

Mali women are Really Really Really Really shit at cricket

[Guest]

Many of ye are landed lads/lasses and may have experience of below

Interwebs extending question

In cousins gaff in Spain, two granny flats out back, no internet as wifi coverage stops halfway up garden (occasionally makes it to door of flats depending on weather I suppose)

What's best way outside of cable to extend it, his internet box is in front room, bit messy looking to just cable I feel
(Might look at that)
*Actually tips on cables acceptable and all

Outdoor wifi extenders/ boosters ok?
So do I just end up running cables to power them anyway

Internet a bit confusing on issue if you do searches on subject

On another subject, internet has too much stuff on it now and toooo much written by pleabs or bad adware

Ta

[rounders123]

tylerdurden94 id suggest to put in the shutter count for those lenses so people know.

[limpwhacker]

Your word for the day is You're

Definition : You are.

Common usage ''You're spelling your wrong''

Cheers for the help I need lots of help in many areas daily 😂 Thought or meditation for today:
Anger is an acid that can do more harm to the vessel in which it is stored than to anything on which it is poured.

Copyright Mark Twain and Limpwhacker

[shrapnel]

Many of ye are landed lads/lasses and may have experience of below

Interwebs extending question

In cousins gaff in Spain, two granny flats out back no internet as wifi coverage stops halfway up garden (occasionally makes it to door of flats depending on weather I suppose

What's best way outside of cable to extend it
(Might look at that)

Outdoor wifi extenders/ boosters ok?
So do I just end up running cables to power them anyway

Internet a bit confusing on issue if you do searches on subject

On another subject, internet has too much stuff on it now and toooo much written by pleabs or bad adware

Ta

do they have electricity? Do you know if they are part of the same board/fusebox as the main house? if so you can use power plugs which work pretty well

[Guest]

do they have electricity? Do you know if they are part of the same board/fusebox as the main house? if so you can use power plugs which work pretty well

Have electricity, separate fuseboxes by look of it

[Kayroo]

Thanks, I’m looking for something that explains what was the rationale for creating it, like case x where’ vigilantism took over or we want to protect Y outcome. I’m not sure the argument of them being young (mentioned in the linked article) is enough of one for me.

Sometimes to have an orderly and functioning society we need to draw arbitrary lines. One of the lines we draw is the age of majority and the age of criminal responsibility. They are not the same. Majority is 18, criminal responsibility is 10. So be it.

Once you choose those lines you need to decide as a society how you will treat children over ten but below eighteen when they have committed crimes. We elected to give them certain protections in the hope that rehabilitation would see them return to society as useful and productive members. To do that we put in place a suite of measures that meant that when Johnny, who fell in with a bad crowd and was arrested for credit card fraud and theft at age 14, comes to college age he might still be able to go and make something of himself without the stigma of his youthful transgressions hanging over him.*

We have decided that any offender under the age of 18 is responsible for their actions but we recognise that a person aged 14 is not the same person when they are 34 no matter who they are. We all change. We have drawn the arbitrary line and that's where we make a distinction.

The Oireachtas could have put in a discretion for the Court to name the offenders if it saw fit. But they did not. The people's representatives decided it was better to have a blanket prohibition on the publishing of children's names and faces. This saves us the unedifying sight of national media vilifying children.We may not always like the consequences of that, but overall as a society I think we are better off that for every Boy A and Boy B who we may wish to see named, we know that Johnny who fell in with the wrong crowd had at least a fair chance to make something of himself.

You don't need to agree with the rationale by the way. It's not perfect. But neither is the rationale for wanting to know their names. In a world of imperfect reasons I'm happy to side with the one that gives children a chance to grow out of their mistakes, even ones as horrific and potentially unforgivable as this one.



*

SPOILER

This is basically what happened to Stephen Fry

[shrapnel]

Have electricity, separate fuseboxes by look of it

then you'd want a mesh disk system. Apparently they have very good range but unsure how much is enough for you though.

[Kayroo]

I feel like my tone with Hitch on Twitter is becoming unnecessarily combative

[Hitchhiker's Guide To...]

...

[Hitchhiker's Guide To...]

...

[Kayroo]

You suggested a judge had determined that there was a link between complications/negligence in birth and autism relating to this article.

Both the headline and the first sentence of the article make it clear that the case was settled. The body of the article makes it clear it was settled in mediation. The Court had nothing to do with it other than the requirement that when a case involves a child as plaintiff the award must be accepted by the Court.

No determination or finding of fact was ever made by Judge Cross. Yet in your second tweet you question how this non-medically trained judge could possibly make such a finding. Apparently the irony of a non-legally trained person criticising the judge did not overly burden you.

I then asked if you had read the article since it made this clear. My tone was, to be fair, combative though not entirely unjustified. Unlike your criticism.

[Hitchhiker's Guide To...]

...

[Guest]

then you'd want a mesh disk system. Apparently they have very good range but unsure how much is enough for you though.

Cheers shrap, will look into that

Also, ya know when you pondering a question, ask someone and you then become aware of the obvious flaw that has stumped you about the question

Asking the wrong question

So might have simply figured it out

+ Now have the mesh option

[Kayroo]

In that case how the fck did the HSE concede on a link between birth and autism. Thats just crazy. There's absolutely no scientific evidence showing that link.

Could well be that the negligence caused other long term issues. An award of that size is primarily to cover long term care requirements and people on the autistic spectrum don't always require massive medical costs over their lifetime. It may be that there were other complications and the HSE decided better to settle based on other physical/cognitive issues for which they were liable then potentially open up a precedent on the autism connection if it went to trial.

They may also have taken the view that they did injure this child (albeit may not have caused all of his issues) and should have to pay for their negligence. Since the Mediation Act came into effect more cases are dealt with in these non-contentious ways and it gets around the State Claims' Agency's problem on admitting liability.

[Guest]

Boards.ie stats:

First post: April 2005
Last post: January 2010

655 poker posts = 11.29 posts a month

That seems very little, maybe they wiped loads of posts at some point?


IPB stats:

30,066 posts = 262 per month. Jaysus.

1999 boards posts

Only came over here to wish ye well

[Hitchhiker's Guide To...]

...

[ArmaniJeans]

Boards.ie stats:

First post: April 2005
Last post: January 2010

655 poker posts = 11.29 posts a month

That seems very little, maybe they wiped loads of posts at some point?


IPB stats:

30,066 posts = 262 per month. Jaysus.

boards.ie BBV got wiped/archived a few years ago and no longer appears in count/post history.

[hotspur]

Anger is an acid that can do more harm to the vessel in which it is stored than to anything on which it is poured.

Tell that to honour acid attack victims.

[Hectorjelly]

Quick question. You put your hand in your pocket and find what appears to be nougat, Providence unknown. It's very small. Do you eat it? Or dispose of it.

[Hitchhiker's Guide To...]

...

[Strewelpeter]

Have electricity, separate fuseboxes by look of it

Try and move the router near a window and put the lid of a biscuit tin or a sheet of tin foil behind the antennae

[Strewelpeter]

boards.ie BBV got wiped/archived a few years ago and no longer appears in count/post history.

I scraped it one time but I can't seem to find it now.

[hotspur]

I've a few bits & bobs for sale on adverts, drone/lenses/headphones and I've a couple other bits to add over the next day or so iPhones & my Macbook Pro Retina, if anybody is interested or you know anybody on the lookout please do drop me a line. Link to my profile HERE

I'll buy it all. Might get a little museum going.

[Goodluck2me]

Fair enough, it is enough for me tbh, I realise what a heinous crime it was that committed, but people do a lot of changing during their development from child to adult.

I'm not saying that this should mean that they get released upon turning 18, but similarly, I do think they should be afforded protections that an adult creating the same crime would not get.

On the other hand, if they were named, then it takes away the risk of having innocent people "outed" as being the guilty parties (ideal world this would all be moot as people would have the cop on to not try and identify them.)

In any case, I don't see what the public gains from having names and pictures of 13 year old kids that won't be free for a decade or so, at which point it will be impossible to identify them unless updated photographs are circulated - no doubt any person coming out of prison could just change their name and move abroad to try and hide a criminal past?

I’m not sure they gain anything either but what I’ve found most with the laws I disagree with is that I hadn’t fundamentally understood why the6 were there in the first place I.e. a Garda finds loads of indictable material in your house, you get off because the warrant said 22 Church lane instead of 122 church lane. That’s there to stop Gardas just randomly trashing houses with tenuous search warrants (as has happened before).

Presumably it's that they have a right to serve a normal life post-serving their conviction and that wouldn't be possible if named.

Realistically they've only two routes post conviction:

- say fuck it, we'll never be redeemed in societies mind, so turn to a life of serious crime and add this to a list of convictions

- move to England and try for some semblance of normality


A normal life in Ireland is finished as a prospect, as there isn't real anonymity anywhere in Ireland. Sad really for the families.

Are they from reasonably okay families, or was family background one of the problems?

Same goes for 18 year olds. I’m curious mostly as to why children, but I suspect it’s because children aren’t expected to be doing these serious crimes.

Sometimes to have an orderly and functioning society we need to draw arbitrary lines. One of the lines we draw is the age of majority and the age of criminal responsibility. They are not the same. Majority is 18, criminal responsibility is 10. So be it.

Once you choose those lines you need to decide as a society how you will treat children over ten but below eighteen when they have committed crimes. We elected to give them certain protections in the hope that rehabilitation would see them return to society as useful and productive members. To do that we put in place a suite of measures that meant that when Johnny, who fell in with a bad crowd and was arrested for credit card fraud and theft at age 14, comes to college age he might still be able to go and make something of himself without the stigma of his youthful transgressions hanging over him.*

We have decided that any offender under the age of 18 is responsible for their actions but we recognise that a person aged 14 is not the same person when they are 34 no matter who they are. We all change. We have drawn the arbitrary line and that's where we make a distinction.

The Oireachtas could have put in a discretion for the Court to name the offenders if it saw fit. But they did not. The people's representatives decided it was better to have a blanket prohibition on the publishing of children's names and faces. This saves us the unedifying sight of national media vilifying children.We may not always like the consequences of that, but overall as a society I think we are better off that for every Boy A and Boy B who we may wish to see named, we know that Johnny who fell in with the wrong crowd had at least a fair chance to make something of himself.

You don't need to agree with the rationale by the way. It's not perfect. But neither is the rationale for wanting to know their names. In a world of imperfect reasons I'm happy to side with the one that gives children a chance to grow out of their mistakes, even ones as horrific and potentially unforgivable as this one.



*

SPOILER

This is basically what happened to Stephen Fry

Well reasoned but I was hoping for more of a silver bullet.

It sees. The cliff notes are... children have a better chance of rehabilitating and the upside of allowing that is better than the downside of them reoffending again (in an offense that somehow would have been prevented if named, however unlikely that actually is).

Interesting case in Sweden where an 11yo did the same thing, and age of responsibility is 13 there, he therefore was never prosecuted. He went to counseling and was never seen before the courts again. I think I prefer that outcome to 20 years in jail, followed by even petit criminality. The first victim can’t recover, so Better to prevent future ones.

[Kayroo]

Well reasoned but I was hoping for more of a silver bullet.

No silver bullets available here. It is a choice between imperfect options and this is the one we went with. For what it's worth I think it's the best overall option.

[Goodluck2me]

Quick question. You put your hand in your pocket and find what appears to be nougat, Providence unknown. It's very small. Do you eat it? Or dispose of it.

Reminds me of dealing at the Irish open, bought a Yorkie had one square and rushed back from break. Went to check my phone at the next break to a handful of goo.

[Goodluck2me]

No silver bullets available here. It is a choice between imperfect options and this is the one we went with. For what it's worth I think it's the best overall option.

Yes, often it’s the least worst you must choose.

[DeadParrot]

From the FT
How Oxford university shaped Brexit — and Britain’s next prime minister

SPOILER

You turn the pages of yellowing student newspapers from 30 years ago, and there they are, recognisably the same faces that dominate today’s British news. Boris Johnson running for Union president, Michael Gove winning debating contests, Jeremy Hunt holding together the faction-ridden Oxford University Conservative Association (OUCA).

Six of the seven men who survived the first round of the Tory leadership contest earlier this month studied at Oxford. The final two remaining candidates, Johnson and Hunt, were contemporaries along with Gove in the late 1980s.

The UK is thus about to install its 11th Oxonian prime minister since the war. (Three postwar PMs didn’t attend university, and Gordon Brown went to Edinburgh.) This beats even the grip of the Ecole Nationale d’Administration on the French presidency (four of the past six presidents have been énarques), let alone Harvard’s on the White House.

When I arrived in Oxford aged 18 in October 1988, it was still a very British and quite amateurish university, shot through with dilettantism, sexual harassment and sherry. Gove, Hunt and the much less political David Cameron had graduated that summer, and Johnson in 1987, but from my messy desk at the student newspaper Cherwell I covered a new generation of wannabe politicians.

You couldn’t miss Jacob Rees-Mogg, seemingly the only undergraduate who always wore a suit, or the early Europhobe Dan Hannan. Both became ideological fathers of Brexit. I’m still covering them today.

This isn’t a jolly boys’ story about the japes we all had together. I didn’t know any of the Oxford Tories personally, because we were separated by the great Oxford class divide: I was middle class, from a London comprehensive (after years abroad), and they were mostly upper-class public schoolboys. But the night Brexit happened, I sensed it was rooted in 1980s Oxford. I wrote a column about this in July 2016, then gradually came to see that the roots went even deeper than I had realised.

Any understanding of the British ruling class — and the next prime minister — requires returning to that place and time.
Being president of the Oxford Union was an opportunity to mix with influential figures – it was ‘the first step to being prime minister’, said Michael Heseltine. Here, Union president Boris Johnson with Greek culture minister Melina Mercouri in 1986.



At Cherwell, we were always writing about the Oxford Union. The debating society, off a courtyard behind the Cornmarket shopping street, was a kind of teenage House of Commons. Its officers wore white tie, speakers black tie, and everyone called each other “honourable member”. You won debates not by boring the audience with detail, but with jokes and ad hominem jibes.

Almost all aspiring Tory politicians passed through the Union. Theresa May never won the presidency — disadvantaged by her gender and with no rhetorical gifts — but in 1979 her future husband Philip did. The Mays had been introduced at an Oxford Conservative disco by another Union president, Benazir Bhutto, future prime minister of Pakistan.

In May’s day, the Union was a small circle of debating obsessives. But then it hit financial trouble and began recruiting among the broader student population. By 1988, about 60 per cent of Oxford’s undergraduates had paid the £60 joining fee.


I never joined but I sometimes got press tickets to debates, and I still remember a young Benjamin Netanyahu trouncing hecklers, and, on the 50th anniversary of Dunkirk, the former prime minister and ex-Union president Ted Heath evoking Oxford on the eve of the second world war, when German invasion loomed. Another lure was the Union bar, which — almost miraculously in 1980s Britain — stayed open till 2.30am, until the deferential local police finally intervened.

Most Oxford students opposed Margaret Thatcher by the late 1980s, but the Union’s biggest political grouping was the Tories, split between Thatcherites and “wets”, who would exchange arcane factional insults.

The biggest political issues in mid-1980s Oxford, recalls Tim Hames, then a Union politician and member of OUCA, were Britain’s deployment of nuclear weapons, apartheid (many Tories weren’t entirely anti) and the miners’ strike. Europe rarely came up then. The European Commission had given Thatcher the British rebate she had demanded, and she was working with the Commission’s president, Jacques Delors, to create a European single market. The Single European Act was passed in 1986.

Most Union politicians weren’t very interested in policy anyway. Anyone wanting to make policy that affected students’ lives got involved in the separate Oxford University Student Union or their college’s junior common room (JCR). That kind of politics mostly attracted aspiring Labourites. Dave Miliband chaired the student union’s accommodation committee, while Yvette Cooper, Eddie Balls and Ed Miliband were JCR presidents.

By contrast, the Union favoured debating skills and ambition without a cause. Every eight-week term, the Union elected a president, secretary, treasurer and librarian. The “hacks”, as student politicians were known, would traipse around the colleges soliciting votes from ordinary students.

As the future Spectator columnist Toby Young wrote in the Union’s house magazine in 1985: “It doesn’t matter how unpopular you are with the establishment, how stupid you are, how small your College is or how pretentious your old school: if only you’ve got the sheer will you can succeed.”
Michael Gove, president of the Oxford Union two years after Boris Johnson, defends the institution in Cherwell newspaper in 1988.



Johnson’s Oxford days are now usually mentioned in connection with his membership of the hard-drinking, posh and sometimes destructive Bullingdon Club, but in fact he was a vessel of focused ambition. Arriving in Oxford from Eton in 1983, he had three aims, writes Sonia Purnell in Just Boris: to get a First-class degree, find a wife and become Union president. That post was “the first step to being prime minister”, said the 1980s Tory politician Michael Heseltine. At speakers’ dinners, a 20-year-old Union president would find himself or herself sitting next to cabinet ministers and other useful contacts.

Most students arrived in Oxford barely knowing the Union existed, but Johnson possessed the savvy of his class: he had run Eton’s debating society, and his father Stanley had come to Oxford in 1959 intending to become Union president. Stanley had failed but Boris was a star. Simon Veksner, who followed Johnson from their house at Eton to the Union, tells me: “Boris’s charisma even then was off the charts, you couldn’t measure it: so funny, warm, charming, self-deprecating. You put on a funny act, based on The Beano and PG Wodehouse. It works, and then that is who you are.”

Johnson also came equipped with the peculiarly intimate network that an upper-class boarding school confers. Ordinary schoolchildren spend eight hours a day with their classmates but boarders live together, and often have inner-class family connections going back generations. Johnson arrived in Oxford knowing dozens of people, whereas some state-school kids knew precisely nobody.

He didn’t let his degree — Classics — interfere with his Union ambitions. In 1980s Oxford, studying was almost optional. A common workload for arts students was one essay a week, often penned during an overnight panic, then typically read aloud to one’s tutor. When I reread my old essays while revising for finals, they were so pathetic that I wanted to write to my tutors to apologise.

One thing you learnt at Oxford (even if you weren’t in the Union) was how to speak without much knowledge. Underprepared students would spend much of a tutorial talking their way around the holes in their essay. Cherwell praised Simon Stevens (a Union president in 1987) as “Oxford’s most talented off-the-cuff tutorial faker”: “Recently Simes read out almost half of an essay to his tutor before his partner revealed that he was ‘reading’ from a blank piece of paper.” Stevens is now chief executive of the National Health Service, appointed in 2013 under health secretary Jeremy Hunt, his Oxford contemporary.

Johnson just missed his First. His tutor Jonathan Barnes recalls, “If you’re intelligent enough, you can rub along in philosophy on a couple of hours a week. Boris rubbed along on no hours a week, and it wasn’t quite good enough.” Johnson’s sister Rachel said that it later fell to her to “break the terrible news” to Boris that their brother Jo had got a First. (Rachel, Jo and Boris’s first wife Allegra Mostyn-Owen all edited the Oxford magazine Isis.)
David Cameron at the Oxford Union Valentine Ball in 1987. After Oxford, Cameron went straight to the Conservative party’s research department – where he would later encounter his future chancellor, George Osborne


In 1984 Johnson ran for Union president against the grammar schoolboy Neil Sherlock. The election dramatised the Oxford class struggle: upper class versus middle class. (Working-class students were rare.) In the vernacular of some public schoolboys, state-school pupils were “stains”, below even the “Tugs” from minor private schools.

Sherlock, later a partner at KPMG and PwC, and special adviser to the Liberal deputy prime minister Nick Clegg in 2012/13, recalls: “Boris Mark I was a very conventional Tory, clearly on the right, and had what I would term an Old Etonian entitlement view: ‘I should get the top job because I’m standing for the top job.’ He didn’t have a good sense of what he was going to do with it.”



Mostyn-Owen invited Sherlock for tea and tried to charm him into not standing against “my Boris”. Undeterred, Sherlock campaigned on a platform of “meritocrat versus toff, competence versus incompetence”. Johnson mobilised his public-school networks but lost. Sherlock came away underwhelmed by his opponent: “The rhetoric, the personality, the wit were rather randomly deployed, beyond getting a laugh.” Sherlock expected OUCA’s president Nick Robinson to become the political star, and Johnson to succeed in journalism. Instead, Robinson now presents BBC radio’s Today programme.

Johnson learnt from his defeat. A year later he was elected president, this time disguising his Toryism by allying himself with Oxford’s Social Democrats. His second campaign was more competent: the American graduate student Frank Luntz, now a senior Republican pollster, conducted polls for him. And Johnson worked his charm beyond his base.

Michael Gove, a Scottish fresher in 1985, told Johnson’s biographer Andrew Gimson: “The first time I saw him was in the Union bar . . . He seemed like a kindly, Oxford character, but he was really there like a great basking shark waiting for freshers to swim towards him.” Gove told Gimson: “I was Boris’s stooge. I became a votary of the Boris cult.”

In an essay for The Oxford Myth (1988), a book edited by his sister Rachel, Johnson advised aspiring student politicians to assemble “a disciplined and deluded collection of stooges” to get out the vote. “Lonely girls from the women’s colleges” who “back their largely male candidates with a porky decisiveness” were particularly useful, he wrote. “For these young women, machine politics offers human friction and warmth.” Reading this, you realise why almost all Union presidents who become Tory politicians are men. (Thatcher’s domain was OUCA, where she was president in 1946.)

Johnson added: “The tragedy of the stooge is that . . . he wants so much to believe that his relationship with the candidate is special that he shuts out the truth. The terrible art of the candidate is to coddle the self-deception of the stooge.”

Tory MPs now backing Johnson’s candidacy for leader may find the essay interesting. Gove, who wore a kilt in debates, was such a gifted speaker that he could even make a compelling case to a student audience against free choice in sexual behaviour. He was unusually ideological by Union standards, a Thatcherite meritocrat. As Union president in 1988, he wrote a paean to elitism in the Union’s house magazine: “I cannot overemphasise what elitism is not. It is not about back-slapping cliques, reactionary chic or Old Etonian egos. It is a spirit of unashamed glamour, excitement and competition . . . We are all here, part of an elite. It is our duty to bear that in mind.”

Meanwhile, Jeremy Hunt, an OUCA president in 1987, made much less noise. Hames sums up: “The Boris appeal was Boris. Michael was interested in ideology and ideas. Jeremy was more a small-c managerial conservative.”

Hunt wasn’t charismatic or eloquent, and had no obvious political passions, but he was the archetypal head boy (a role he’d held at Charterhouse). An admiral’s son, distant relative of the Queen, tall and courteous, he usually rose above Tory factionalism. After Cherwell reported that a “libertarian faction” was trying to “take over” OUCA, and that one committee member was a “Moonie” (a member of the Unification Church cult), Hunt wrote a letter to the editor: “OUCA remains a moderate association controlled by neither libertarians nor any other faction within the Conservative party, and exists to represent the views of all Conservative students at Oxford.” The Moonie, he added, had been expelled.

Amid all this Oxford politicking, there was one notable absentee: David Cameron. He got his First, and amused himself in posh dining clubs, but felt no need to do anything so vulgar as burnish his CV with student politics. After all, he too was distantly related to the Queen, his father chaired the establishment club White’s, and his cousin Ferdinand Mount headed Thatcher’s Policy Unit. Cameron went straight from Oxford to the Conservative Party’s research department, where he later encountered his successor in the Bullingdon and future chancellor, George Osborne.

Rees-Mogg arrived at Oxford at the same time as me in 1988. Almost immediately, Cherwell nominated him (as it had Gove before) for the traditional title of “Pushy Fresher”. The paper printed a photograph of him speechifying in his suit, above the caption, “What more need we say?”

Studying the picture, you realise: Rees-Mogg hasn’t changed. Like Johnson and Gove, he even has the same hairstyle today. They were almost fully formed at 18. School had given them the confidence, articulacy and know-how to bestride Oxford. They also already knew what they wanted to be when they grew up. If most students back then had had to guess who would be ruling Britain in 2019, they would probably have named Johnson, Gove and Rees-Mogg.
Like Michael Gove before him, Jacob Rees-Mogg is nominated for the traditional title of ‘Pushy Fresher’ by Oxford University’s student newspaper Cherwell in 1988


The last became president of OUCA in 1991, with Cherwell citing his “campaign for world domination and social adequacy”. However, he proved just too peculiar to be elected Union president and lost to Damian Hinds, who is now the education secretary.

The Oxford Tories were climbing the greasy pole before most students had even located it. The majority arrived at university uncertain, terribly dressed, trying to find themselves, often wrestling with imposter syndrome. Only at Oxford did they acquire the qualities that Johnson et al already had: a ruling-class accent, rhetorical skills and the ability to feel confident in any establishment setting.

In 1988, British politics changed. The previously pro-European Thatcher suddenly turned Eurosceptic. She had realised that her beloved single market would be accompanied by closer political integration. In her “Bruges speech” in September 1988, she warned against “a European super-state exercising a new dominance from Brussels”.

That idea spooked the Oxford Tories. They revered Britain’s medieval parliament filled with witty English banter, whereas Brussels offered ugly modernism and jargon-ridden Globish. Ruling Britain was their class’s prerogative. It was none of Brussels’ business. In 1990, the future OUCA president Dan Hannan founded the Oxford Campaign for an Independent Britain at the Queen’s Lane Coffee House on the High Street. With hindsight, some see this as the start of the campaign for Brexit.
Magdalen College, Oxford, where Jeremy Hunt studied, as did future chancellor George Osborne © Getty Images

Toby Young had written in 1985 that it was lucky the Union existed — “that in an environment as full of ruthless, sociopathic people as Oxford, there should be an institution that sucks them all in, contains all their wilful energy and grants them power only over each other”. He hoped that one day its officers could be similarly contained within the House of Commons.

But the Commons couldn’t contain them. These people spent years agitating for Brexit. In 2016 they secured their referendum. Johnson sniffed the chance to become prime minister, and — in Union jargon — decided at the last minute to back the motion. Gove is a true believer in Brexit, but his decision to campaign for it — undermining Cameron — was partly an outflow of the Oxford class struggle. As education secretary under Cameron, he had thought they were friends, but when *Cameron suddenly moved him to chief whip in 2014, Gove was devastated. He felt that Cameron and his coterie of Old Etonians (a stronger network for Cameron than Oxford) had treated him “like staff”, one person in his circle told me. He wanted revenge.

Timothy Garton Ash, professor of European Studies at Oxford, describes the referendum as “a Union debate with the addition of modern campaigning techniques”. He says, “One of the great things about British public life is that it’s irradiated by a gentle sense of humour — but ‘chaque qualité a ses défauts’ [‘every quality has its downsides’].” In a cross-class alliance with Nigel Farage and the tabloids, the Oxford Tories triumphed.

Politicians from 1980s Oxford dominated both the Remain and Leave camps, but they were divided by the subject of their degrees. Oxford’s “prime minister’s degree” is PPE: politics, philosophy, economics. It has often been associated with the Brexiters. Ivan Rogers, for instance, a grammar schoolboy in 1980s Oxford and the UK’s permanent representative to the EU until he resigned in 2017, discerned “a very British establishment sort of revolution. No plan and little planning, oodles of PPE tutorial-level plausible bullshit, supreme self-confidence that we understand others’ real interests better than they do . . . ”


Yet in fact in 2016 the PPEists were almost all Remainers: Cameron, Hunt, Stewart, Philip Hammond, Matt Hancock, Sam Gyimah, Hinds, Nick Boles, the Milibands, Balls, Cooper and Peter Mandelson. They had presumably chosen the degree in search of the cutting-edge knowledge needed to run a modern country. (Fatefully, the one great PPEist Leaver was the media proprietor Rupert Murdoch, who in 1950s Oxford had been business manager of Cherwell and a Labour Club member.)

By contrast, most Brexiters had studied backward-looking subjects: Classics for Johnson, History for Rees-Mogg and Hannan, and English Literature (which mostly meant the canon) for Gove. They were nostalgics. Hence Johnson’s hagiography of Churchill and Rees-Mogg’s much-mocked recent paean The Victorians, while Gove as education secretary strove to make sure pupils learnt 19th-century literature and Britain’s “island story”.

After the Oxford Brexiters won the debate, Cameron resigned, and they switched to another familiar format: the in-house leadership election. As one former Union president remarked, the ensuing contest could be described entirely in Union slang: “Boris knifed Dave. Michael knifed Boris. Theresa and Michael stole Boris’s slate. Boris self-binned.”

May became prime minister, and entrusted the Brexiters with executing Brexit. She gave them the key jobs in cabinet. But they were debaters, not policymakers. They couldn’t debate Brussels into submission, because the EU’s negotiators followed rules. So poorly briefed were the Brexiters that in December 2017 they accepted the principle of a “backstop” plan to keep the Irish border open, before spending the next 18 months fighting it.

Now the Tories have another leadership election. Second time around, just as at Oxford, Johnson is running a competent and centrist campaign, talking up his liberal reign as mayor of London. Like Sherlock in 1984, Hunt is targeting Johnson’s lack of “seriousness”. Then as now, Gove stands in his hero’s shadow. He needn’t worry: in the Oxford tradition, there may be another election coming along soon.

In the small, insular world of the British establishment, every so often a clique of people can exert an extraordinary influence. There is a curious parallel between the 1980s Oxford Tories and the 1930s Cambridge spies. The charming, blond, dishevelled Etonian sybarite Guy Burgess, Kim Philby, Donald Maclean, Anthony Blunt and John Cairncross also emerged from an intimate, all-male, public-school network. Four of them were at Trinity College, with Maclean next door at Trinity Hall. Confident enough to formulate a revolutionary worldview despite being ill-informed, they embraced a utopian cause: Soviet communism. It promised a far-off paradise that they never expected to live in themselves. Working towards it was great fun.
A letter written to Cherwell newspaper in 1987 by Jeremy Hunt, who was president of the Oxford University Conservative Association (OUCA). Hunt ‘made much less noise’ than Boris, and usually rose above Tory factionalism


There is a similar element of play in Tory Brexit. Caroline Lucas, the Green MP, chastised Rees-Mogg last year: “This is not a parlour game or debating society. These are real people with real lives.” Well, that’s what she thinks.

The Cambridge Five were given roles of responsibility because they possessed elite CVs and came across as archetypal British gentlemen (partly through displays of eccentricity in hairstyles, drink and dress). They pursued their utopia for decades, ignoring all evidence that contradicted it and looking down on the rest of the establishment for its unimaginative thinking. When the spies were finally exposed, British trust in the establishment suffered a lasting dent.

Admittedly, the comparison between the Cambridge and Oxford sets isn’t entirely fair: though both betrayed Britain’s interests to the benefit of Moscow, the Brexiters didn’t mean to.

It’s an odd feeling to return to a town that you have barely seen in 25 years but where you know every street. Oxford looks almost unchanged, yet the time-traveller from the 1980s experiences a series of small shocks: there are Chinese tourists! Students sit in coffee shops working on laptops! The food is decent!

Wandering around my old college, I marvelled at the Chinese and German names at the bottom of staircases. There are far more applicants to places nowadays, lazy alcoholic tutors are dying out, and rubbing along on “no hours a week” is no longer tolerated.
The Oxford Union Debating Chamber as it was in 1949. By the 1980s, ‘you won debates not by boring the audience with detail, but with jokes and ad hominem jibes’ © Getty
Welsh Labour MP Chris Bryant speaking in 2013 at the Oxford Union, which operates rather like a student House of Commons © Alamy

But the Union, weekly tutorials and therefore the outsize role of rhetoric survive. Is there some soul-searching at the university over the triumph of the Oxford Brexiters? “I think there should be,” replies Garton Ash. He exempts the tutorial system from blame: “Having an hour a week with an expert on the field cross-examining you — that doesn’t seem to me to lead to glibness.”

But he adds, “Public schools and the culture around them provide a training in superficial articulacy: essay writing, public speaking, carrying it off. The Oxford Union reinforces that, even among those who didn’t go to public school. Compare and contrast the German elite. For me, Gove is the ultimate example.” Garton Ash says Oxford as an academic institution no longer encourages this style.

Kalypso Nicolaïdis, professor of international relations, says: “If a student is capable of producing two well-written essays a week, with well-structured arguments, they can kind of get away with not knowing much about the subjects. This may sound superficial, but communicating is useful in life. Sometimes you need to convince people succinctly, especially if you go into politics.”

But, she adds, “it’s not what Oxford is about. I believe most colleagues would agree that our commitment is to convey knowledge as deeply as possible. Whether as a student you want to take advantage of this is up to you.”

I deplore what my contemporaries are doing to Britain. But given that I too learnt at Oxford how to write and speak for a living without much knowledge, I can hardly talk.

[Guest]

The absolute shade he threw at the barrister who suggested what Lord Sumption thought based on his book was phenomenal. A cutting remark from a judge tends to be sharper than most because they save them for the absolute best moments.

I finished the lectures, absolutely brilliant, far superior to McMillans on war. I thought Sumptions were brilliant independently and as a collective where McMillians seem a tad more disjointed and repetitive at times.

I'd be curious what thoughts of his that you would be in disagreement with or even a suggestion of where to get some opposing views.

[Denny Crane]

Think that's the first Trump tweet I've ever liked.

[Lazare]

Think that's the first Trump tweet I've ever liked.

Haha, that is good. Not liking it though. Fuck that.

[rounders123]

Quick question. You put your hand in your pocket and find what appears to be nougat, Providence unknown. It's very small. Do you eat it? Or dispose of it.

Unwrapped dispose of it, wrapped eat it.

[DeadParrot]

From the FT
How Oxford university shaped Brexit — and Britain’s next prime minister

Huh... Surprisingly that worked

[Hitchhiker's Guide To...]

...

[Strewelpeter]

What new story is that?

[oleras]

I've a few bits & bobs for sale on adverts, drone/lenses/headphones and I've a couple other bits to add over the next day or so iPhones & my Macbook Pro Retina, if anybody is interested or you know anybody on the lookout please do drop me a line. Link to my profile HERE

The drone is great craic when you learn to fly it.

Then...

edit, just on the asking price....

[Raoul Duke III]

Seems a bit of dodginess in that new Boris Johnson story. Far too much unsubstantiated 'senior MP' comments, plus the fact that his neighbours are actively campaigning against him.

They hardly faked a recording?

Just sounds like a fairly standard domestic tbh.

[Emmet]

Classify standard domestic?

Am a disgraceful individual at times, but herself has never needed to call the police on me. More likely she rings my ma!

[oleras]

Fake news.

Mon the Boris...

[Hitchhiker's Guide To...]

...

[Mellor]

Interesting case in Sweden where an 11yo did the same thing, and age of responsibility is 13 there, he therefore was never prosecuted. He went to counseling and was never seen before the courts again. I think I prefer that outcome to 20 years in jail, followed by even petit criminality. The first victim can’t recover, so Better to prevent future ones.

It's a really tough one imo.
Terry Venebles has had a string of child porn offenses. It's impossible to say if he was always wired wrong, or locking up a 10 year old stunted his development.

But that said, the majority of serial killers express violent tendencies during childhood. How are we supposed to distinguish young murders who are clinical psychopaths and those who simply too young to grasp the consequences.

[KK82]

It's a really tough one imo.
Terry Venebles has had a string of child porn offenses. .

What?! Are you sure?