Does it strike you as somewhat odd that a pair of life-long chums became the faces of Brexit's "Remain" and "Leave" campaigns?
Does it perhaps strike you as even stranger that the one who lost yesterday's vote, Prime Minister David Cameron, looks likely to hand his job off to the other, London's newly ousted former Mayor Boris Johnson?
When Cameron announced his intent to step down, he didn't mention an election and, under the British system, he can be succeeded by anyone who's chosen as his party's next leader --- and Johnson was swiftly deemed the favorite by Ladbrokes. Both are Tories, of course, so it's easily doable. And surely it's at least possible that they've put on a show of strained friendship in these past few months.
What a prank this palace coup would be for the old playfellows!
If you don't think of them as quite prankish, please think again. By the time they'd progressed from Eton to Oxford, they were legendary, along with fellow-members of the Bullingdon Club -- a sort of dining club, if you dine with the likes of Attila and rock stars in full rampage. For instance:
"A well-documented typical evening while Cameron was a member in the late 1980s consisted of the members taking over one of Oxford's fanciest restaurants for the night, eating the priciest food on the menu, ordering and quaffing copious quantities of the most expensive wines and champagnes -- and then totally trashing and destroying the entire restaurant, furniture and fittings. The coup de grace at the end of each such excursion was to go up to the traumatized, distraught restaurant owner and, in a gesture that dates back to the aristocrat-peasant relationship of centuries passed, contemptuously throw wads of banknotes at the hapless owner as recompense for the massive damage caused."
Back in 2011, I chanced to save that material from a blog by Brit-born commentator Martin Lewis. The entire piece very much deserves rereading today.
Getting back to the heartbreak trail of trashed restaurants for a minute, it
seems no fuss was ever raised by authorities, who evidently concluded that Boys
Will Be Boys, provided that they're among the richest brats in the
kingdom.
Luck seems to have held for the Brexit Bros.
Now please enjoy Martin Lewis' piece. It even has wonderful pix of the thug-toffs in their spiffy tuxes! I tried showing one here, but that required too much folderol.
4
4
3
