There’s a probably apocryphal saying that is attributed to Napoleon: “To understand the man, you have to know what was happening in the world when he was 20.”
That’s how I try to understand the people now running the UK. Specifically, I imagine them as they were at the University of Oxford, preparing for power. I see Boris Johnson as the tousle-headed president of the Oxford Union debating society, in 1986. Michael Gove, today Johnson’s right-hand man in cabinet, was the Union’s most incisive debater, despite his stock joke, “As I was telling my Filipino manservant this morning . . . ” Their future political rivals, from David Cameron to Keir Starmer, were at Oxford then too, but it’s the Tory Brexiters who ended up remaking Britain.
