Very occasionally – and much more occasionally than you’d know from the British Press – the personal is political.
It’s only through social media that we know that the leader writer of the Financial Times, Jonathan Ford, who explained the paper couldn’t endorse Ed Miliband in the general election because he was “preoccupied with inequality”, was a member of the the Bullingdon Club along with Prime Minister David Cameron and his most probable successor, Boris Johnson.
This photograph was taken in 1987. On Tuesday, a team of young student journalists at Versa Magazine revealed they had discovered the original photo on the wall the exclusive outfitters, Ede and Ravenscroft.
The team of Jack Myers, Eleanor Sharman and Jake Hurfurt, led by Nick Mutch, discovered it in a toilet corridor with an array of other Bullingdon Club photos:
“Never-seen-before photographs… reveal twenty members of Britain’s aristocracy, ten business magnates, multiple ambassadors… and some brand-new shots of our very own Prime Minister.”
The famous image from 1987 was still on display until yesterday.
The image has returned to haunt the Prime Minister:
“David Cameron told Andrew Marr in 2009: “We do things when we are young that we deeply regret,” adding that he was “Of course, desperately, very embarrassed” about the 1987 photograph – featuring himself as well as Boris Johnson.”
It also has caused some embarrassment for the Mayor of London and prospective Parliamentary candidate for Uxbridge, who explained to to the BBC in 2013:
“This is a truly shameful vignette of almost superhuman undergraduate arrogance, toffishness and twittishness. But at the time you felt it was wonderful to be going round swanking it up.”
In the 1987 photograph, David Cameron looks distant from the group, almost marginal.
“But VERSA can reveal that just one year later, Cameron was promoted to the centre of the annual photo. In the 1988 photograph, the other members surround him. Whilst there is no sign that he ascended to the Presidency in 1988, Cameron certainly appears quite the leader. Conveniently, all names have been removed from this image…”
The image is hosted here and here.
The Versa team have researched the background of many members of the Bullingdon Club going back nearly 150 years, and promise more historically important revelations in the weeks to come.
