Young, rich and drunk

http://education.guardian.co.uk/higher/news/story/0,,2279012,00.html

May 9, 2008

The Bullingdon Club - Oxford University's social elite. The Bullingdon has long been a magnet for titled youths with an urge to slip into a footman's outfit and wobble about the county raising genteel hell. Soon three of the most powerful positions in the country could be occupied by men whose wardrobes contain, somewhere near the back, a crumpled royal blue tailcoat with a faint aroma of vomit.

You really couldn't hope to meet a more confident and charming bunch of arrogant upper-class drunken fops. You've got to have a certain standing. An impressive lineage helps. As does a degree of jaunty charisma, either as a titled clown with a good line in drunken buffoonery. If you can't afford to be in the Bullingdon, you're extremely unlikely to be asked to join in the first place.

Breakages, scraps and bust-ups seem to be a hazard of membership. Standard Bullingdon practice is for club members to pay off in cash any injured party. It's the attitude, the innate sense that position and - more specifically - wealth will always be able to make good any inconvenience suffered by "civilians". There's the air of lurking violence, and above all the sense that its members consider themselves above the law on such occasions.