Drunk weekends and class disdain with the Camerons

It was late, the garden was almost dark and the conversation was beginning to fade, but the night was warm and calm and no one was moving to leave. A conversation with the man on my left had stalled when I heard his son’s voice from a few feet away talking about how discipline was being enforced at Eton, which he left not long ago.

Corporal punishment and the institutionalized system of bullying known as fag are long gone, but the older boys still dominate the younger ones. He described the kind of fairly harmless seizures they handed out, like sending a child to look for the cheapest ticket in the farthest parking lot in town.

“When they come back and give it to you, you don’t even look at it. Just throw it away, ”he said.

It seemed like useful lifelong training for the little acts of cruelty and disdain that keep things on track within a chunk of English upper crust. I was reminded of it a few days later reading excerpts in the Times from the Diary of a deputy Sasha Swire’s wife.

Swire’s husband, Hugo, was a Conservative MP until last year, and became Northern Ireland’s minister during the presidency of his friend David Cameron. His book isn’t published until next week, but he’s already created more buzz than any political journal since Alan Clark’s in the 1990s and early 2000s.

Much of the fascination lies in Swire’s sincere delight in his place in the “chumocracy” around Cameron and George Osborne, going from one drunken weekend to another in the various houses they occupied with public funds.