12/04/2004|||110217991272299316||||||

CIRCLE OF JERKS

Ah, the joys of the English class system.

Earlier this week a dozen or so affluent, well-dressed men arrived at an old inn near Oxford and spent the next hour trashing the restaurant in the cellar, leaving the walls streaked in blood and wine. The bemused landlord tried his best to restore order:

"They were swearing at each other and smashing bottles and glasses at the walls and punching each other in the face," he said. "It was all so bizarre because each time I pulled one of them out of the melee they apologised to me and were extremely polite but then jumped right back in. It was not just a food fight, they were throwing bottles and attacking each other and ripping clothes. The strange thing is they were never aggressive to me or my waitresses. It seemed like some kind of ritual... They scared my other customers and wrecked one of my rooms."

The guests turned out to be members of the infamous Oxford University dining society, The Bullingdon Club. Before leaving, one of them paid the £600 bill in cash and gave the waitresses a £200 tip. Later, after heaving a bottle through the pub window and trying to tear down traffic signs, four of the group were arrested and, after a night in a police cell, were each fined the mighty sum of £80.

Readers of "Decline and Fall" will be familiar with all of this. Apparently, it remains a Bullingdon tradition to create as much mayhem as possible and then pay off the unfortunate locals afterwards. (The next time football hooligans are in the mood to lay waste to a pub, they should adopt similar tactics and see how much good it does them.)

Today, in a boys-will-be-boys piece, (registration required) Telegraph journalist and former Bullingdon member Harry Mount recalls his own undergraduate misadventures. His piece is headlined 'A smashing time was had by all when we earned 'Blue' for drinking'. Wednesday's violence, he cheerily informs us, was merely the result of 'extreme playful joshing'. Bullingdon members, he assures us, are actually jolly good eggs:

"When it comes to their exams, they all aim for top degrees with the same dogged application they brought to breaking bottles of Chablis over each other's crania. From my year, there are now four businessmen, three bankers, three lawyers, two art historians, two journalists and an MP."

I rest my case.

|||Clive|||http://clivedavis.blogspot.com/2004/12/circle-of-jerks-ah-joys-of-english.html|||12/04/2004 04:59:00 pm|||||||||

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