kadi-lak
16.03.10, 13:49
Fragmenty, ktore trudno przeczytac nie zadajac sobie tego jednego,
zasadniczego pytania podkreslilem. Pytania zas nie zadaje bo bylby
to policzek w inteligencje czytaczy i pisaczy tego forum.
Wasz Kadi.
Oxford University, the mid 80s, good times! Oh, the pranks, the
drinking and the student politics. And all the different cliques –
the trendies, the rahs, the Brideshead set, the sloanes pretending
to be non-sloanes, the non-sloanes pretending to be sloanes, even
the whites pretending to be non-whites. Seriously. "Everyone was
trying to pretend they were black," remembers Rachel Johnson. "You
know, we listened to James Brown, we spoke in patois, or mockney, it
was ridiculous, really."
Oh go on, Rachel, do your patois for us now, will you? Or your
mockney. Or just be James Brown, please, for us: One two three four,
get up, get on up, stay on the scene yah, like a sex machine . . .
no?
Anyway, it all sounds horrendous: lots of horrid young people trying
to decide who to be, and getting it very wrong. The same as any
other university, really, but extra-ghastly because of the extra
poshness of the Oxford toffs. Toffiest of all were the members of
the Bullingdon, a dining club made up mainly of old Etonians who
galloped around town on horses that weren't there, braying and
throwing pot plants through windows. "They did all the right things,
like getting heinously drunk on very expensive champagne and
trashing expensive restaurants, which seemed to me the epitome of
the Oxford life," says James Delingpole.
James never made it into the Bullingdon, though for a moment he
thought he had. "I remember one night, erm, lying in bed and hearing
this stomping up the stairs and this sort of waff-waff-waff of these
chaps talking in upper-class voices. They came closer and closer and
I thought for one fantastic moment that they had come to trash my
room and make me a Buller member." Sadly, they hadn't; they went on
up the stairs to initiate Radek Sikorski, now foreign minister of
Poland.
Poor James. He wasn't really Buller material, to be honest – too
middle-class, too middle-England. "It was laughable that someone of
James's background affected to be a son of the Tory squirearchy,"
says Rachel Johnson.
So why do we care about any of these ridiculous people? Because of
Rachel's brother, Boris, and because the floppy-haired young man who
used to go out with her friend Alice (among others; quite a lot of
others, it seems) is now leader of the Conservative party.
When Boris Met Dave (More4) is pretty silly, really. The hammy drama
scenes – Cameron grooving out to Sade with his tennis-racket guitar
in his room, Boris boffing about the place and having conversations
with statues (Pericles, Churchill) – are neither funny nor
convincing. Both portrayals are poor, and the script is as stiff as
an Eton collar. There's a bit of archive footage from the famous
public school – black-and-white, and grainy. I'm not sure why,
because Dave and Boris were there in the 80s, not the 20s.
More revealing and entertaining are the talking heads that pop up to
provide the docu part of the show. Best of all is Neil Sherlock, a
funny little man who once beat Boris in a student election,
calculating his election strategy using a little black book full of
figures. Neil's now an accountant in Godalming, and wouldn't you
know it.
The others are biographers and fellow alumni: sister Rachel, an ex-
girlfriend of Dave's called Francesca, the hapless Delingpole. No
one remembers much about Dave, really. James says he was "a good
egg, he was not out-there cool, he was not . . . you know, um, well,
he wasn't out-there cool." Then he adds that "he always managed to
pull attractive birds, which I envied him for". A good egg, not out-
there cool, able to pull: I think those are all the qualities you
need to run a country.
Then there's the Polish dude who had his room trashed by Boris; the
inevitable Toby Young, who also co-wrote and co-produced; US
pollster and political consultant Frank Luntz. They're all Frank
Luntz, to be honest, in a mockney rhyming kind of way (Rachel "Get
up offa that thing" Johnson will understand). But I like toffs who
operate in a different universe from everyone else: they're amusing
and entertaining. How the hell did one of them come to run the
capital, though? And another get to be on the verge of running the
country? Quick, stop it, before it's too late.