The Bluestocking, vol 108: Stooges, hatchet jobs and the Fifth Young One
Happy Friday!
I really get now why, after my parents retired, they never seemed to be any less busy than before. Turns out it's verrrry easy to fill your days without a job.
Helen
How Oxford University shaped Brexit
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.)
Basically, if a meteorite had hit the Oxford Union bar in the early eighties, British politics would now be unrecognisable. Also, Porky Decisiveness is a great 1920s gangster name.
(FYI, if you don't have an FT sub, you can google the headline and get a free read by clicking through.)
"One of the specialities of Norman Stone was character assassination"
At a time when malice and rudeness were highly prized by some rightwing Cambridge dons, Stone outdid them all in the abuse he hurled at anyone he disapproved of, including feminists (“rancid”), Oxford dons (“a dreadful collection of deadbeats, dead wood and has-beens”), students (“smelly and inattentive”), David Cameron and John Major (“transitional nobodies”), Edward Heath (“a flabby-faced coward”) and many more.
There are some people who think obituaries are not the place for savagery. I am not one of those people. Richard J Evans is himself an absolute master character assassin. His review of Boris Johnson's Churchill book - "one man who made history by another who just makes it up" - still makes me wince. "The book reads as if it was dictated, not written," it notes. "All the way through we hear Boris’s voice; it’s like being cornered in the Drones Club and harangued for hours by Bertie Wooster."
The Wild Ride at Babe.Net
The site was frequently and defiantly unsanitized and “real.” Editor Amanda Ross, who was in charge of all the writers, told me she gave new writers links to the old Gawker archives to read in order to nail the tone. (Rarely had the new writers, with an average age of approximately 23, heard of Gawker — much less did they know about its fall.) “It’s like, you know, women have to care about politics, and you have to care about your appearance, but just the right amount,” Ross explained. She had been appointed the editor of babe.net in the fall of 2017, after working with Tab Media for two months. “And you have to care about sexual health but sometimes I just like, Don’t want to use a condom, I wanna use Plan B instead, you know what I mean?”
This piece is the feminist equivalent of "bro, if she'll cheat with you, she'll cheat on you". If you are being employed by men to patrol other women's decisions, it ain't feminism.
Quick links:
1. The Fifth Young One.
2. "The short answer is that you write because you have to. If you rationalize it, it seems as if you’ve seen this sight, felt this feeling, had this vision, and have got to find a combination of words that will preserve it by setting it off in other people. The duty is to the original experience." The Paris Review interviews Philip Larkin.
3. The Nowhere Man behind the Yesterday script. A TV writer had an idea - what if everyone, except one man, forgot the existence of the Beatles overnight? He sold it to Richard Curtis.
Guest gif: when you take off your make-up at night
See you next time . . .