Good Chaps. By Simon Kuper. Profile Books. 2024. £9.99
This is effectively the sequel to Kuper’s excellent Chums, reviewed in the September 2022 Socialist Standard. The focus this time is the idea that English gentlemen (and it’s usually men) have always been trusted to follow the rules and ‘play the game’, this being an intrinsic tenet of a public school and Oxbridge upbringing. Kuper catalogues how in recent years this seems to have gone very badly awry.
In the 1960s and 70s, these types started to get rather pushed out of politics and the upper echelons of the civil service and other professions, though far from disappearing entirely. Under David Cameron (Eton and Oxford) they started to reassert their natural right to govern again, but with a twist – this being that the gentlemen’s code they had abided by in earlier eras had largely been eroded by the type of ruthless competition that capitalism promotes, and the narcissism and inflated egos that go with it. It found ultimate expression, of course, in the tawdry and shambolic government of Boris Johnson (Eton and Oxford).
Of particular interest to Kuper is the financial base to this political superstructure – exemplified by the buccaneer capitalists that massaged Johnson’s ego so thoroughly and who have sought influence through the connections to which they can buy access. Many of these have been arriviste Mayfair hedge-fund managers and private equity tycoons – the same types of people behind the likes of Reform UK and GB News (often people bizarrely casting themselves as ‘outsiders’ to the traditional City of London and media establishments). And of even more interest still, many in these circles have been Russian oligarchs. As ever, Kuper sums up this type of development beautifully:
‘The moment Russians became British citizens, they were allowed to give to political parties. From about 2012 through 2022, they were the foreign nationality that topped the list of British political donations. Naturally, they gave to the ruling party rather than the powerless Opposition.The Tories were delighted. It was as if extraterrestrials had stepped out of a spaceship on Parliament Square and inexplicably begun handing them money. The Russian you met over whiskies in 5 Hertford Street was charming. Of course he wasn’t working for the Kremlin! Don’t go all Le Carré on me. And if you did make the effort to perform the most basic due diligence on where his money came from, well that might get in the way of taking it’ (p.94).
Kuper details many instances of Russian donations and influence to the Tory Party. To cite just one example, these include Lubov Chernukhin, whose husband became – at the tender age of 32 – deputy finance minister under Putin and later chair of the Russian state development bank. By 2023, she had donated £2.4 million to the Tories and was a member of the Party’s secretive ‘Advisory Board’ which was restricted to mega-donors who were entitled to monthly meetings with the Prime Minister and Chancellor. This is just one of several instances of this type and in case you are wondering, the embarrassing connections with the father-and-son press magnates the Lebedevs are also described in all their glory.
As the Tories fell from grace in the last couple of years (and some of the Russian connections became embarrassing after Putin’s invasion of Ukraine) the money started to dry up. There’s an interesting chapter on how Labour started to hoover up significant donations before the General Election instead, including from David Sainsbury, Dale Vince and Gary Lubner (of the family that own Autoglass and who reportedly gave £5 million alone). Kuper says Labour’s donors tend to have more of an obvious ideological affinity with them (rather than being people who will simply cosy up to whoever is in power) though it will be fascinating to see whose interests ‘the government of service’ will effectively serve – even if rather more indirectly. We think we can guess.
Dave Perrin
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