How The Other One Per Cent Lives

The Spectator has excelled itself, with a cover cartoon of Cameron and Osborne in their Bullingdon Club uniforms, beating up Gordon Brown.

Consider what would happen if a group of boys on a council estate, the same age as Oxford undergraduates, formed themselves into an organisation - complete with a name, a uniform, officers and a membership list - specifically for the purpose of becoming drunk and disorderly before committing criminal damage and even assault.

They would rightly be sent to prison.

Whereas the Bullingdon Boys go on to become, simultaneously, an aspirant Prime Minister, an aspirant Chancellor of the Exchequer, and an actual Mayor of London.

Living in rural England, as I have done most of my life and which is a very different matter from merely owning great swathes of it while living in Knightsbridge or Notting Hill, I suspect that the publicans of Oxfordshire are not without connections in the local constabulary and magistracy.

One of those publicans should simply tell the Bullingdon Club to stick the money that they offered them at the end of one of their "events", because he would be seeing them in court. How would it look for Cameron and Osborne if the Bully Boys were to be locked up for just long enough to have themselves sent down?

Until that day, however, we will continue to be treated to spectacles such as that broadcast last night.

Under his, her or its emerging bouffant, Squeaky Osborne, the campest man in Britain outside professional football (and an old boy of a school with close links to a London Anglo-Catholic shrine noted even in such circles for being full of men in tweed skirts but no biological women whatever), had much to say on Question Time about the arrest of Damian Green.

But that wasn’t the question asked by a member of the audience. Bullingdon Dave Dimbleby managed to protect Osborne entirely from answering that question, which was about prostitution. How very, very odd…

Might this the beginning of an occasional series, The Questions That George Osborne Is Protected From Having To Answer? And another, The Protective Hand of Bullingdon Dave Dimbleby?