THE NEW YORK TIMES: Simon Kuper has written a book that captures Boris Johnson and other future Conservative politicians when they were ambitious and misbehaving undergrads, planning their rise to power.
LONDON — Soon after Simon Kuper began his first year of studies at Oxford University in 1988 he noticed an undergraduate who was always carrying an umbrella, wearing a dark double-breasted suit and old-school spectacles.
“He looked like a Victorian vicar,” Kuper recalled recently, drinking tea at a restaurant in the London neighborhood of Islington. “We made fun of him in the paper” — that would be Cherwell, Oxford’s student-run weekly, where Kuper was a reporter — “all the while not realizing that we were helping to build his brand.”
The man, and the brand, was Jacob Rees-Mogg, whose starchy, patrician style didn’t change as he rose through the Conservative Party ranks and who now serves in the cabinet of Prime Minister Boris Johnson as Minister of State for Brexit Opportunities and Government Efficiency. He was just one member of a tribe of young men — others included Mr. Johnson; another future prime minister, David Cameron; a cabinet member, Michael Gove; and a former adviser to Mr. Johnson, Dominic Cummings — who coalesced at Oxford in the mid and late 1980s and would go on to run the country. » | David Segal | Saturday, May 14, 2022
