It is a badly kept secret that David Dimbleby was in the Bullingdon Club and he has finally spoken about it, telling the Radio Times that he ‘loved being elected’ to the notorious Oxford dining society and that he is ‘very proud of the uniform’ that he still fits into. Refreshing honesty, especially after years of hearing politicians profess their deep shame at their involvement. Dimbleby goes on:
‘We never did these disgusting disgraceful things that Boris did. We never broke windows or got wildly drunk. It was a completely different organisation from what it became when Boris Johnson, David Cameron, and George Osborne joined, who seemed to be ashamed of it, pulling their photographs and so on.’
Boris would later describe the club as ‘a truly shameful vignette of almost superhuman undergraduate arrogance, toffishness and twittishness,’ but it was Evelyn Waugh who found the most beautiful words to to describe the club in Decline and Fall. Using the thinly veiled pseudonym of the ‘Bollinger Club’, Waugh lifted the lid in 1928:
‘There is tradition behind the Bollinger; it numbers reigning kings among its past members. At the last dinner, three years ago, a fox had been brought in in a cage and stoned to death with champagne bottles. What an evening that had been! This was the first meeting since then, and from all over Europe old members had rallied for the occasion. For two days they had been pouring into Oxford: epileptic royalty from their villas of exile; uncouth peers from crumbling country seats; smooth young men of uncertain tastes from embassies and legations; illiterate lairds from wet granite hovels in the Highlands; ambitious young barristers and Conservative candidates torn from the London season and the indelicate advances of debutantes; all that was most sonorous of name and title was there for the beano…’
That certainly does sound like a ‘completely different organisation from what it became when Boris Johnson, David Cameron, and George Osborne joined’: it seems it had tamed by the eighties. And what of Dimbleby’s claim that the Bullingdon of old never smashed things up? Waugh disagrees with that as well:
‘It was a lovely evening. They broke up Mr Austen’s grand piano, and stamped Lord Rending’s cigars into his carpet, and smashed his china, and tore up Mr Partridge’s sheets, and threw the Matisse into his waterjug; Mr Sanders had nothing to break except his windows, but they found the manuscript at which he had been working for the Newdigate Prize Poem, and had great fun with that. Sir Alastair Digby Vane Trumpington felt quite ill with excitement, and was supported to bed by Lumsden of Strathdrummond’
Given that Decline and Fall was published a full ten years before Dimbleby was born, the former Buller boy’s cover story has been well and truly blown.
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