Don’t be misled by their Bullingdon days: Boris and Dave are masters of re-invention
Last night, More4 broadcast a 90-minute drama-doc called When Boris Met Dave that I helped to make. It documents their Eton and Oxford years and I hope they saw it — or, at least, recorded it on Sky Plus — because the impression given in the press is that it was a spiteful hatchet job designed to cause them maximum discomfort. In fact, it was nothing of the kind. On the contrary, when we handed the film in to Channel 4 I was worried they’d think it was a Party Political Broadcast on behalf of the Conservative party.
The film was actually a fairly straightforward attempt to find out a bit more about the two most prominent Conservative politicians of our era. How did Boris and Dave manage to overcome the electoral handicap of being toffs? And what is the source of the rivalry between them? The film contends that you can discover the answers to both of these questions by examining their early years. In the course of making the film we interviewed dozens of their contemporaries, including Boris’s sister, Dave’s former flatmate, several of Boris’s Oxford Union stooges, an ex-girlfriend of Dave’s, James Delingpole and the foreign minister of Poland. All of these people appear in the film, along with Boris and Dave’s biographers, offering witty recollections and valuable insights, most of them pretty favourable.
So why has When Boris Met Dave been portrayed in the press as a demolition job? The answer’s simple: the Bullingdon Club. We included a handful of dramatic reconstructions in the film, including one of the Bullingdon running amok, and any reference to the Buller is automatically seen as an attempt to embarrass Boris and Dave. And of course, the press was bound to exaggerate just how compromising these scenes were because that made for a better story.
I’m not complaining — I’m happy the film got any attention at all — but lavishing too much attention on Boris and Dave’s involvement in the Bullingdon is misleading, because to a great extent they were both engaged in an attempt to reinvent themselves at Oxford. They recognised that their Old Etonian brand needed ‘decontaminating’ if they were to pursue successful careers in public life. What’s so fascinating is that they each adopted radically different strategies for doing this.
In Boris’s case, he transformed himself into a kind of Wodehousian parody of a public school boy. It wasn’t enough to be mildly toff-ish; he became a toff from Central Casting. By hamming it up — by turning himself into a music-hall caricature of an Old Etonian — Boris succeeded in defusing any hostility that his privileged background might have provoked in his Oxford contemporaries.
Dave, by contrast, chose the more conventional route. He turned the volume down, rather than up. While Boris was hacking away in the Oxford Union, Dave was sitting at home watching Going for Gold or hanging out at the Hi-Lo Café, a Caribbean restaurant in Jericho. It was almost as if he was using his time at Oxford to study people from different backgrounds in an attempt to appear more ‘ordinary’ — though that makes it sound more premeditated than it was. In both cases, their attempt to ‘detoxify’ themselves was largely instinctive.
This begs the question of why Dave became a member of the Bullingdon. It makes sense in Boris’s case — dressing up in tails and trashing restaurants was all part of being a pantomime toff — but it doesn’t fit with Dave’s ‘man of the people’ image. Why revert to form in that way if he found the Old Etonian stereotype so unattractive?
The best answer to this question was provided by another member of the Bullingdon who, in spite of my best efforts, refused to be interviewed on camera. ‘Dave’s a joiner,’ he explained. ‘A group of his friends from Eton asked him to become a member and he didn’t want to antagonise them by saying no, even if he did think it was a bit déclassé. The thing you have to understand about Dave is that he’s an alliance-builder. Unlike Boris, he goes out of his way not to offend people.’
That struck me as spot-on — and goes some way to explaining the rivalry between them. Boris is a reckless romantic — hot-blooded and bold — while Dave is a utilitarian who plays the percentages. So far, the latter strategy has proved more effective, but it would be a foolish to write Boris off. The next ten years promise to be very exciting.
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