BORIS JOHNSON
POLITICS
Boris Johnson was born in New York in 1964. He won a Brackenbury Scholarship to read classics at Balliol. He contributed to Oxford publications and edited the satirical magazine Tributary in his second year. He was elected President of the Union in 1986, having also held the positions of Secretary and Librarian. He now works for The Times.

Before they even arrive in Oxford, freshers have their attention forcibly drawn to the Oxford Union Society by Ousu (Oxford University Students' Union) leaflets encouraging them not to join it. 'What is this other Union?' screams the leaflet in big black capitals. To help the bewildered students out, a drawing accompanies the text, of a youth in dinner jacket and black tie, hair swept back, with a monocle, hook nose, buck teeth and receding chin and waving an admonitory finger. To judge by the OuSu leaflet, so far from being the glory and paradigm of the Oxford political scene, the Oxford Union is a shameful anachronism, to be shunned by sound- thinking students. It is elitist, divisive and wildly over-priced, nothing but a massage-parlour for the egos of the assorted twits, twerps, toffs and misfits that inhabit it. Its customs are futile, its debates are fatuous. The implication, above all, is that the Oxford Union is inhospitable to the average Oxford student. In spite of these stern warnings, of course, first-year students join it in droves. Of the 12,000 undergraduate members of the University, about 5,000 are members of the Union. It is quite correct to say that the Oxford Union Society does not represent the body of Oxford students. But it is wrong to say that since it costs about £65 to join for life, it must represent a privileged sector of the student community.
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For £65 you buy yourself access to a different world. In the centre of town a secluded clutch of brick Victorian buildings are hunched over a patch of grass and gravel. Go through the green garden gate, up the path and into the main building. The best way to get an idea of the importance of the Oxford Union in British political life is to spend a they wend back up the stairs and the landing to the beginning of the quarter of an hour looking at the standing committee photographs as century. Our first image is of Edwina Cohen, later Currie, simpering over the shoulder of William Waldegrave as he flanks the Queen. Benazir Bhutto wears very odd dresses. Tariq Ali dispenses with dinner jacket. Heath looks fat. Tony Crosland looks suave and assured, hair slicked back, in contrast to the pallid figure of Tony Benn at the back of the photograph. As we near the top of the stairs, we see a very youthful figure sitting cross-legged at the front of the group, like the scorer in the school cricket team. He looks about thirteen. He is Harold Macmillan. The nine undergraduates on the standing committee form the executive of the society. There are five ordinary members and four officers - Secre- tary, Treasurer, Librarian and President - all elected at the end of each term. Also elected are seven members of a junior committee, called the Secretary's Committee. Does one need all these officials to run what is, after all, a debating society?
To many undergraduates, the Union niffs of the purest, most naked politics, stripped of all issues except personality and ambition. It looks like an election machine, a degrading war between factions. Ordinary punters are frequently discouraged from voting by this thought. Are they doing anything else but fattening the cvs of those who get elected? Many other members, however, are more enlightened, and less resentful of the constant electioneering. They realize that the election of a bad President, or a bad Treasurer, is not in their interests: and a run of them could mean curtains for a financially fragile society. About four years ago, the trustees of the Union, the Rt Hon. Edward Heath, Lord Blake, Lord Jenkins, Sir Robin Day, Sir Zelman Cowen, Sir Claus Moser, Michael Heseltine, Lord Hailsham, Harvey McGregor, Lord Goodman, Lord Wigoder and Sir Peter Tapsell, had decided to close it. Aside from calamitous staffing arrangements, a series of bad Presidents had produced lacklustre termcards. The failure to attract big names - well-known public figures - to participate in the debates as guest speakers had led to a failure to attract fresher members at the beginning of the Michaelmas term. Without those vital subscriptions, worth about £100,000 in a good year, the society seemed doomed.

It is in this kind of situation that the most typical political battles continue to be joined. In 1983 the society was saved by an aggressive President, who succeeded in sacking an incompetent and corrupt steward, and arranging for several debates to be televised in Britain and the USA. He turned the society around. If members had not seen that he was the man for the job, they might have paid their life subscriptions in vain. Before and after him candidates for the presidency have used impending financial ruin as their rallying cry. These tend on the whole to be the Treasurers, the third in line to the throne. In the Union, as in politics and life generally, the contest is between those who believe all problems can be solved by tight financial control, and those who believe good financial government is compatible with a wider range of civilized objectives. The latter sort tend to be represented by the Librarians, the seconds-in-command. Almost invariably, in the classic run-off between Treasurer and Librarian, the Treasurer's camp will claim that the Union is on the brink of financial disaster, and crying out for the economic wizardry of their candidate. The Librarian, who is often the better orator, is forced to adopt a more statesmanlike tone. He cannot afford to deny the Treasurer's lurid tales of bankruptcy without the risk of seeming insouciant. So he indicates his superior speaking ability and stresses the cardinal importance of debates. Sound finances is nothing, he points out, without interesting debates, and only he has the flair to orchestrate them.
For the ordinary member, the result of the elections is important not just for the good management of the society, but also for the political complexion of the place. Some would prefer to elect a financial incom- petent than someone who would not think twice about inviting Gerry Adams. In an ideal world, members would choose their Presidents and officials on the basis of only three criteria: his or her debating skill, competence in organization and political allegiance. But in the Union today these factors can be hopelessly relegated by the skullduggery and execration of the campaign.
Suppose you arrive for your first term in Oxford with a dim awareness of the existence of the Oxford Union - you heard, perhaps, that in 1933 it voted that it would not fight for King and country, so encouraging Hitler's belief in an enfeebled Britain. You might even have been given the membership fee in advance by your parents. You are leafleted by OUSU. You hear people talking about it authoritatively in the college bar: in particular the conversation focuses on the figure of the President - his or her bizarre sexual preferences, alternate and unexplained rudeness and oiliness, beauty, deformity, machismo, tepidity. Clearly this is a person of some controversy. You wonder what it would be like to be such a person. Secretly, perhaps, you decide to have a shot at taking your
place in the presidential chair. Before you do so, there are quite a few things you ought to know.
In the first place, lots of other people have just had exactly the same idea. You may be possessed of Ciceronian gifts of oratory, but you will never convert them into electoral success without first grasping and mas- tering the principles of hacking. Only a sound grasp of hacking will put you ahead of the field. The best way to get an idea of hacking is to be hacked.
On Saturday of the first week of term, a gang of people from college have drifted along to the Union's matriculation drinks party. With a pint of Blue Lagoon going for 50p the scene rapidly becomes drunken and lewd. The cavernous bar is churning with freshers and you have been washed up on your own in a corner by a window. Idly, you notice a young man in a tie, jersey and familiar face in lively conversation with a group of freshers from Queen's College. You place him - he's one of the officers from the freshers' debate the previous night - the Treasurer or the Librarian or someone. The freshers from Queen's listen moonily to his bright interrogation. Suddenly, with the practised, mechanical motion of a Thunderbirds doll, his neck rotates to take in the room; before you have time to gaze into the depths of the blue lagoon, he catches your eye. 'It's John, isn't it?' You explain that your name is not John, and add your college and subject for good measure. He is absolutely fascinated by this information. Forgetting your surprise that one of the great ones should take an interest in you, you permit the process to continue, for a good five minutes, until you have been thoroughly hacked. The theory is that by exposing the full force of his personality to an impressionable fresher, a candidate for election has increased his even- tual poll by at least one vote: if he's lucky, you will spread the word among your friends that he's a good sort; and at the very least you ought to remember his face when you meet the photographs in the polling booth in eight weeks' time.
But with such a vast membership and so many hundreds of floating votes, the candidate cannot hope to tie them all up by flesh-pressing and eye-contact alone. There are twenty-four colleges in Oxford, some of them with vast Union memberships. For the candidate, struggling to
find support even from his own college, the task can be daunting. He may, if he is exceptionally astute, have support from the Worcester- Christ Church axis or the Balliol-New College alliance. But his world may be shattered when he learns that his rival has captured the hearts and souls of the anonymous hordes from St Anne's, or has discovered an entrée to the Keble rugby xv.
As he chats you up, the candidate tries to gauge your interest in the whole business of standing for office. By means of a couple of oblique questions he will try to discover whether you have conceived the desire which now rules his life. Having detected that flicker of interest, he will mentally note your name and college and move urbanely on. But as he continues his circuit of the room his hack's brain will quickly process the data: a proto-hack in a middling but politically important college - in other words, he concludes, a potential stooge.
To spread the good news of his candidature discreetly throughout the University, he needs much more than his charisma and a weekly oration that brings the chamber to its feet. In fact – and this is the shame of the Union – he may not need these things at all. What he really needs if he is to be a successful Union hack is a disciplined and deluded collection of stooges. A stooge, briefly, is a first year who can be relied upon, both in advance and on the day, to rustle up support from his own college - otherwise inaccessible - for the candidate. When a candidate has accumulated enough stooges from the major voting colleges, he is deemed to have a machine.

When he next sees you returning sightlessly from the Bod to write your essay the hack lets out a bellow of greeting. He is travelling very fast by bicycle from tea-party to tea-party, and he brakes histrionically, shooting over the handle bars in surprise and delight. You are extremely flattered when he remembers your name and college - little suspecting that they are recorded on a 3 inch by 5 inch card in his room more flattered still when he lets you in on what is obviously a personal secret: he is running for office at the end of the term. You desperately want to let him know that you have the same feelings too. To your joy, he seems to be giving you a chance to breathe your innermost cravings: 'Of course, most of the people who are running for Sec's Committee this term are complete rizzers [rizzer = Union slang for a risible candi- date]. I heard you speak in that Freshers' Debate. You'd stomp all over them.'

The hook is now deeply in. After so much disappointment with your first term at Oxford, you agree to stand for the Secretary's Committee and pitiless multitude. You will become a stooge. You will become the at the end of the term. You have found a raison d'être among this blank college gauleiter, serving the interests of the candidate in return for his ostentatious patronage and support. The candidate will use a variety of means to knit the loyalty of his stooge. He may take you out to lunch with his mother. He may dangle before you membership of some alluring club. If you are of the opposite sex, the candidate will flirt with grim extravagance. Above all, he will offer the promise of a sure-fire political advancement. In return for your support in his campaign for office, the candidate pledges the wholehearted backing of his machine in your battle to be elected to the Secretary's Committee.
But the brutal fact of the candidate-stooge relationship is that it can never be one-many, but only many-one. That is, no candidate can give effective support to more than one stooge for the same committee, where- as he absolutely requires support from several stooges to get those vital votes from a broad sweep of colleges. The relationship, then, is founded on duplicity. If the stooge stops to think he will realize that the machine that has apparently swung massively into line behind him is composed of individuals exactly like himself: who have all been individually promised the unique support of the machine. The tragedy of the stooge is that even if he thinks this through, he wants so much to believe that his relationship with the candidate is special that he shuts out the truth. The terrible art of the candidate is to coddle the self-deception of the stooge.
As the term picks up speed, you, the stooge, begin to appreciate your role as part of the machine. It gives you a structure, a hierarchical certainty that you have missed since your schooldays. It gives you an Oxford identity. Soon the basic incoherence of the system is obscured by a welter of cocktail parties, faction meetings, late-night brandy meetings, breakfast meetings, wooings, alliances, betrayals. Perhaps they are all of them point- less, but at least you feel wanted. The degree of your esprit de corps will depend on exactly what sort of machine you are in. Broadly speaking, there are two sorts, natural machines and artificial ones.
Natural machines have their structure already in place. The most obvious natural machine in Oxford has traditionally been known as the Establishment. It is a loosely knit confederation of middle-class undergraduates, invariably public school, who share the same accents and snobberies, and who meet each other at the same parties. If you are a member of the Establishment, you will know it. You cannot be recruited. As an ambitious stooge-candidate in the Establishment, you will do well not to appear too party-political. Working this particular machine in favour is an exercise in social politics. To all your chinless friends in the Establishment, you simply look as though you lead a dynamic social life. Indeed, it is essential for success as an Establishment candidate that you do not appear too gritty or thrusting. Only you know that you collect as you flit from party to party will the nectar of goodwill that eventually be translated into votes. Until that time deliberately dampen down discussion of the Union and Oxford politics. Establishment folk have an English middle-class distaste for political conversation, and the stooge-candidate must do a great deal of subtle playing along before he can cash his chips, and ask them to vote. But when that time comes, the Establishment votes with a surprising and unthinking loyalty. of the Establishment recall with a shudder how the Old opponents notice of poll used to be posted up in the Gridiron Club (the 'Grid'), with the names of sound candidates underlined. After lunch, breathing beerily, scores of Grid members would pass through the Union to do their duty with the ballot paper before driving to the Cheltenham races. Those days are now mostly gone and the Grid is not the force that it was. But the Establishment fastnesses remain, lonely eyries impregnable to all but the most nimble social climbers. Prime among them is the Canning Club. This is an all-male right-wing essay society, whose mem- bers specialize in the use of difficult words like diachronic while sitting in an acceptably panelled room and drinking large amounts of old red wine. If a candidate is able to go along to the Canning as a guest, he can guarantee their wholehearted support if he tosses in a word of suffi- cient chewiness. He has, in a stroke, become a sound chap. After rising at the end to toast 'Church and Queen' they may even make him a member: they will certainly vote for him in the election, and perhaps bring along a couple of their brogued and bespectacled chums. Other Establishment strongholds are the college and University drinking and dining societies. The best way of ensuring their support is to do nothing but exclude your opponent and grin.
Only the secret knowledge of the candidate and his stooge-candidates really qualifies the Establishment as a machine. It has no obvious political structure, and hacking within it is taboo. But it is a natural organization that can be exploited with devastating effect on the day of the election:
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to tap,
and despite the revilings of those who have no such social pool t it is no bad thing to be an Establishment candidate. People vote for you, since to vote for the Establishment candidate is to affirm your identity
as a member of the Establishment.
Alternatively, you may be recruited to an artificial machine. These are run much more efficiently than the Establishment, and usually begin as the brainchild of an ambitious candidate. Most of them are overtly political, but there have been notorious exceptions. One candidate, advertised on college notice boards for freshers to join his 'Pooh Sticks unusual in that he was blessed with a winsome, Brideshead-type appeal, Club'. Impressed by such infantilism, they thronged Magdalen Bridge on the stated morning, while the candidate brandished a teddy bear and led them in dropping twigs into the fetid Cherwell. Soon this group had swelled and hardened into a dedicated political machine. By Seventh Week (term is measured by weeks one to eight) the tough-guy tactics of the Pooh Sticks Club, not to mention their substantial block vote, had made victory for their candidate a piece of cake.
gay little
There are other machines that are shadier still. The electors could not tolerate for long the naked corruption of the Pooh Sticks Club, but hardly anyone knew of the long-standing clandestine activities of the Strategic Studies Group. This was run by the classic Quiet American, a soft-spoken CIA agent in one of the big postgraduate colleges. Every week members of the SSG would meet, ostensibly to discuss global nuclear deterrence, but in reality to defend democracy by getting their candidate elected. Each would be equipped with a task sheet containing lists of people to be sounded out, invitations to be secured for the candidate, parties to be fixed in his honour. A robust network was established among most intelligent and frustrated group in the university, the American postgraduates. Weedy British hacks curled up in embarrassment at the slick campaign technology of the SSG. But it worked. For several terms, support from the group seemed to be a sine qua non of gaining the presi- dency.
the
But the Pooh Sticks Club and the SSG are numerically insignificant by comparison with the big traditional artificial machines. OUCA, the Conservative Association, is second only to the Union in size, with about 1,800 members. The alignment of the various Conservative machines, the OUCA factions, is almost always decisive in Union elections. If you are lucky enough, in your first term as a stooge-candidate, to be recruited into the TRG, you are joining a bunch of professionals. You may not
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be able to string a sentence together, but if you have the sincere support of the TRG, getting elected to the Secretary's Committee in the Union
ought to be a piece of cake.
TRG stands for Tory Reform Group, and its dominance in OUCA reflects a long-standing tradition of leftish Toryism in Oxford. Undergra- duate politicians naturally gravitate towards it in the face of two consider- ations: (a) they feel basically Conservative; (b) they do not want to appear uncaring - I'm a sort of centre-left Tory, I think, but it could be changing,' is a popular declaration of political faith among Union candidates. The TRG is the most thoroughgoing and organized Union machine. In some ways, its influence in the Union is bad for OUCA - it distracts the Association from the more important fights, the council and parliamentary elections, and turns it in on cannibalistic squabbling. But if you manage to find favour with the TRG moguls, it is thoroughly good news for
you.
you,
The senior apparatchiks in the TRG are often gifted student politi- cians, and the Oxford group, for instance Richard Fuller, Neale Steven- son, Nick Robinson, have played an important part in preventing the national Young Conservatives from lurching irredeemably to the right. But the crucial people to get to know, from the point of view of the stooge-candidate, are those marvellous people, the non-candidate stooges. The TRG has the most social cachet of the OUCA machines, and its sherry parties, laid on by its entertainments bureau, the 'Disraeli', present rich pickings for the proto-hack. Lonely girls from the women's colleges, very often scientists, find themselves there and suddenly discover their own worth. Under assiduous courting, they become the TRG rep for St Hilda's or Somerville. Within a few weeks they are well on the way to becoming figures recognizable from English political life. With their fresh complexions and flowery frocks, they are the prototypes of local Conservative Party workers. Brisk, stern, running to fat, but backing their largely male candidates with a porky decisiveness, they are vital people for the new TRG candidate to cultivate. For these young women, in their structured world of molecules and quarks, machine politics offers human friction and warmth.
The strongholds of this earnest middle-class Tory politics are in the women's colleges, Worcester and Christ Church. It would not have much chance of flowering in somnolent New College or the prickly bed of Balliol. It relies on discipline, loyalty and an unappreciated amount of political fervour.
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The enemy, for over five years now, has been the Magdalen Machine. In the days when it was the dominant faction in OUCA, the Magdalen Machine was simply a way of getting elected, founded by a particularly astute student who was a Conservative candidate at the last election. For several terms the nabobs of the Magdalen Machine carved up the Union over scones and cream in their honey-hued cloisters. But the fir flush of Mrs Thatcher's victory in 1979 began to fade; and while Cam- bridge emerged as a breeding-ground for the New Right, Oxford, ever a royalist, paternalist city, drifted back to the old ways of High Toryism. In other words, the Wets gained the upper hand, and the pool for the Wets, the Oxford TRG. The Magdalen Machine lost the centre ground of Oxford Toryism and was marginalized to the right. Its parties became macabre imitations of the Disraeli, where sharp-faced men with waistcoats and piercing stares made hopeless hugger-mugger deals for second-pre- ference votes. To be a successful political machine in Oxford means keep- ing hold of some kind of social lustre, and this the TRG just went romping away with, wagging its tail.
One group of dissidents tried to fight back by throwing a series of budget-breaking parties all over the University. The new faction appeared to have no distinctive politics, but were recognizable by their blond hair. Called the 'Macmillan', they appealed obscurely to an older, grander, Balliocentric Toryism. But they were outgeneralled by the TRG who flooded their parties with crack troops of stooges, with instructions to drink the place dry. Within half an hour, the Macmillan was bankrupt, and the ordinary punters had scarcely tasted of their largesse.
Provided you feel vaguely Tory, you ought, as a stooge-candidate, to be able to sew up one chunk or another of the OUCA vote. But if you feel like joining the SDP, your future is surely now veiled in mystery. It is hard not to feel that the shadows are falling on this once prosperous machine. Rather like its model in Westminster, it has always looked like a one-man band. In the old days - 1985, 1986- they were to be seen walking through the streets in a posse round their leader. They favoured grey overcoats, furled umbrellas and black leather gloves, swinging their arms as they paraded their sincerity and love of Proportional Represen- tation. Now the complete loss of credibility of the national party must surely affect the choices of the politically ambitious fresher. SDP-minded freshers are now known as the 'scuba club', from their urge to join a ship that has sunk.
If you come to Oxford as a socialist, your chances of election in the
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Union are not necessarily diminished
-
-
there have been several recent
Labour Presidents. But you will not be helped by the Labour Club. For a start, it is tiny by comparison with the Conservative Association, with only about 500 members. Worse, since it lost control of the Union in the early 1970s, the Labour Club has adopted the classic spoilsport tactics of the left wing - the boycott. Because they were failing to win the political arguments, they rejected the context in which those argu- ments took place, citing spurious ideological reasons. There are no grounds whatsoever for the Labour Club boycott. The Union has no intrinsic political bias. Debates are carefully balanced and have always boasted national and international left-wing figures, from Ken Liv- ingstone to Sergio Ramírez of Nicaragua. There is no elitism: over half the student population are members. There is no sexism: thirty-four per cent of the Union membership are women, only one per cent below the proportion for the University as a whole. Rather than retreating into their miserable dungareed caucuses, the Labour Club should take up the challenge offered by the death of the SDP and take up the cudgels
in the debate with the Tories.
The SDP may be swirling towards the plughole of history, but those who love the Union should shed no tears for the death of machines. Prolonged domination by one faction, particularly if it has a semi-rigid hierarchy, can have obvious bad consequences. Like the Chinese dynas- ties, which moved from soldier to statesman to poet to homosexual to collapse, the machines suffer from problems of strict inheritance. For three or four, sometimes even five, terms the machine is able to offer decent candidates for election, usually the visionary founder and his immediate henchmen. Then, inevitably, comes Buggins' Turn, when the machine feels honour-bound to support the stooge who is loyal and hardworking, but a weak candidate. If the machine is strong, Buggins will get elected, and that is bad for the Union, where the success of the term relies very much on the drive and originality of the President. But sometimes the voters will baulk at the prospect of Buggins. He does not get elected: and that is bad for the machine. Freshers do not want to join a losing team. So some machines are more flexible and aim to maintain an illusion of power by making sure they always back the winner. But this has its risks: when the slavish Buggins gets passed over in favour of a more promising candidate, the machine looks ruthless and the tight system of reward for service is seen to dissolve. Realizing that they cannot expect to be supported simply in return for their loyalty
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and exertions, the stooges lose heart, and the effectiveness of the machine is greatly reduced. An effective machine, then, is likely to be short-lived and subject to dynastic decay. Longer-lasting machines may appear glossy and successful, but they probably lack real political muscle because the
stooges lack incentive.
Whatever your political leanings, by Fifth Week of the term in which you are running for Secretary's Committee, you will be associated with one of the machines. These days, with the number of people voting in elections having tripled in the last four years, from 500 to about 1,500, solid machine support is by no means enough to guarantee victory. You have an awful lot of hacking to do.
But before you begin to berserk through the parties, waving and shak- ing hands like a shimmying Shiva, you must beware of some important realities. The first is Rule 33. It is a rule against hacking of any kind: the poignancy of Union life is that its distinctive activity is expressly forbidden. You may not verbally or otherwise solicit votes. You may not draw attention to your candidacy in any way. If an allegation of such electoral malpractice is successfully brought against you, you will be stripped of any office you may have won and you may even lose some of your membership rights: in other words, total disaster.
The rule is in one sense ludicrous in that it is impossible to conduct any campaign for election without massive breach of Rule 33. It is defended on the grounds that it prevents candidates with more money from taking out full-page advertisements for themselves in the Oxford Times. But its real virtue is that it helps to protect the electorate from the ghastly experience of being hacked. To give an idea of the importance some members attach to the rule, and the severity with which it is some- times, randomly, enforced, here is a story of a great orator who was strolling across Balliol Quad on the day that he hoped to be elected Secretary. Spotting a fellow classicist, a tutorial partner who was also a member of the Union, he hailed him cheerily: 'Exercised your democra- tic right yet?' The other blenched unaccountably, and hurried off without a word. The following day, as the orator was celebrating his landslide victory with some of Lionel's champagne in the Balliol Buttery, he heard a piece of gut-wrenchingly frightful news: the returning officer had received an allegation of electoral malpractice, that he, the orator, had broken Rule 33 by soliciting a vote at 4.30 p.m. in Balliol Garden Quad. A tribunal was called. Three prosperous lawyers were called up London, former officers of the Union. They set up court in the debating
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from

chamber. The proceedings continued into the night. They continued into the small hours, as more and more witnesses were called, as the accu- sations redoubled. By the end, the miasma of electoral corruption seemed to leave no one untainted, and the whole Union breathed a sigh of relief when the orator was acquitted, not on the grounds that he did not solicit the vote, but that he could not have been in Balliol Garden Quad at 4.30 p.m. As for his tutorial partner, he was unrepentant. 'A rule is a
rule,' he said.
panacea
you
Just the other term an innocent stooge-candidate - someone like y - from one of the women's colleges was facing defeat in her bid to be elected to Secretary's Committee. Her machine was not proving the she had hoped. College support was lukewarm. So she wrote acquaintance in one of the larger mixed colleges, inviting herself to tea. Her male friend was amused by such forwardness, and showed the letter to a friend of his. Unfortunately, his friend was from a hostile machine. He seized the letter, photocopied it, and when the girl was elected by the skin of her teeth, submitted it as evidence of electoral malpractice. There was nothing to be done. Here was graphic evidence of an attempt by a candidate to advertise her candidacy. For inviting herself to tea in uncharted territory, the girl was deposed and humiliated. Your enemies will seize on any indiscretions and publicize them fero- ciously. They may even have a special think-tank to compose plausible rumours about you, a wheeze for which the SDP faction was particularly notorious. One dark-haired Tory candidate with unnaturally pale skin was baffled to find his friends clasping his hands with the words, Tm so sorry,' or inexplicably offering him their chairs. It turned out that the SDP smear-mongers had let it be known- strictly confidentially - that the Tory was suffering from leukaemia and would not be able to take up office, even if elected. Another Tory enjoyed the boisterous sup- port of the Worcester rugby xv and other denizens of the Worcester beer cellar. His opponent in the race for the presidency was an adroit Sri Lankan man, who would be certain to try to infiltrate the enemy camp as the day of the election approached. So late one evening in the beer cellar, the Tory drew his men in round him. 'Boys,' he announced, 'my opponent for the presidency' - and he gave the Sri lankan's name - 'is a woman!' 'A woman!' they roared, and vowed forthwith to hurl the candidate into Worcester's beautiful ornamental lake should she ever set foot in the college's hearty confines. Some smears must be pitched at exactly the right audience: for instance, allegations of femaleness or
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homosexuality might offend the Worcester rugby xv, but would leave the vast majority of voters unmoved. And all smears tend to backfire very soon on the smear-monger. Besides being painful and unpleasant, they are a very poor electoral tactic. But, for a while, people are prepared to believe almost anything. On one election evening I discovered that I was widely credited with allowing several public clocks in Oxford to
be quarter of an hour slow.
More dangerous than a smear is an attack in a newspaper. Isis, a very
frequently
aloof magazine, does not go in for this much, but hacks are attacked in quite scandalous terms in the weekly newspaper Cherwell. This representation of a candidate is sometimes the only information that a large number of punters get about the candidate either way. So particularly cunning and low-down hacks curry favour with the gossip column, John Evelyn. They may even be able to place a stooge. The normally random violence which John Evelyn dishes out - boorishness, ugliness, drinking habits of the hacks - can, week after week, develop an alarming focus. If you, poor stooge-candidate, begin to feel unjustly persecuted in the press - perhaps, for instance, you have been described as 'Pushy Fresher of the Term' - you have several courses open to you. You can take the manly 'sticks and stones may break my bones' approach, keep mum and console yourself with the thought that all publicity is good publicity. This risks seeming acquiescent. Or else you can stampede through the city, jabbing at the article with print-stained finger beneath the nose of any one who will listen, crying, 'Look what they wrote! How dare they!' This certainly draws attention to you, but leads many undergraduates to conclude that there is no smoke without fire.
Let us say you steer a course between the randomly clashing rocks of Rule 33 and the dark whirlpool of smear and scandal. How are you doing? What are your chances of getting elected on Friday of Seventh Week? The answer is: probably quite high, but not for the reasons your hack's brain has come to believe in. A term of solid Union mythologizing, tea-parties where hack speaks endlessly unto hack will have filled your mind with subtle calculations of 'block vote' movements, knifings, factio- nal splits and transfer votes. Scarcely any of them make a bean of difference to the final outcome. Over the seven weeks of the campaign you have become addicted to the concept of the 'deal' as an easy way of increasing your support. Beware - your visions of regiments of new- found, unmet backers are usually mirages.
will
A union deal is more or less anything negotiated on an I'll scratch
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back if you scratch mine' basis. Some read this cynically as 'T'll scratch your back if you stab mine', or 'T'll scratch
your
your
back if you
scratch my face', but most hacks love a deal. There are two sorts. The simpler version is a pledge of mutual support between two officer candi- dates, say for Treasurer and Secretary. The chances are that they will come from the same machine, in which case they will form a 'machine ticket. But the optimum deal is between runners from opposing machines. Theoretically their two separate pools of support will suddenly be poured together, sweeping both hacks on an irresistible tide to victory. The notorious 'transfer deals' raise fewer expectations, but they are no less deluded. In this, your first-ever bid for office as a stooge-candidate, will be joined by about a dozen others, some of whom are doomed never to make it to Secretary's Committee. Now, the distinguishing fea- ture of STV (single transferable vote), the system used in Union elec- tions, is that the poor punters are asked to vote for the candidates in order of preference: 1, 2, 3, etc. When it comes to counting the votes the hack with the fewest first-preference votes is eliminated: pfft! As soon as he is clearly out of the race, his votes are reactivated, and his 'second prefs' (those occasions when he was the punter's second choice) are allocated to the remaining candidates who got the first-choice votes on the ballot papers concerned. And so on with each successive elimination.
Complicated, eh? But what it boils down to is that you can enter the count with few first-preference votes and grim prospects, but steadily claw your way back up the poll if for some reason a lot of people have chosen you second. The crucial thing is not to have the fewest first prefs. Realizing this, hacks have for long traded-in the second-preference votes of their diehard supporters: 'My guys will put you second if your guys put me second.' In a race for an officership, where there can only be one winner, each of course gambles that he will get more first-preferences and avoid elimination.
The flaw in both simple and transfer deals is the same: they rely on the notion that a large number of people will be prepared to take the line', to remember to vote for not just one person but two or more In reality, people's tolerance and memory are not so elastic. What's more your stooges have to plug two names, which makes their task difficul On The Day. You can only really hack for one person. It's got to soun personal. Reeling off a list of names doesn't sound personal. It sound hacky.
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But the basic flaccidity of transfer deals in no way weakens the market for second-preference votes. Hacks spend a tremendous amount of mental energy picking out candidates who they think will give a good return on their transfers, i.e. the weakest of the herd who are likely to be elimi- nated early on, releasing their second prefs into the arena. One mature German student from Hertford, a veteran committee candidate, sometimes to be found securing pledges of support in return for his sixth-preference votes! He never got elected, but he did get a first in
PPE (Politics, Philosophy and Economics).
was
As a rule of thumb, any Union deal conducted in terms of numbers - second preferences, thirty votes from the Labour Club, the Football XI - is likely to be fraudulent. Don't believe in them. Names and faces are what count. Totting up their support, hacks can get carried away by insane arithmetic. One honest and well-meaning hack once confided to me that he personally controlled 400 votes. The real figure was proba- bly nearer five.
What candidates can successfully exchange is the lustre of their associa- tion. One way you will certainly help your cause is to attach yourself to a strong candidate for another post. This means, in about Sixth Week, that you start to walk around town with him or her. Since, for the serious hack, just to walk down Turl Street is an elaborate routine of eyebrow- twitching, nodding, smiling and waving, you will soon pick up vital face-recognition among his/her acquaintances; and if he is known to be a masterful debater and tireless organizer, some of that impression, with luck, will rub off on you. Hacks can exploit this in subtle ways: an outrageously public school type can pick up cred and votes by boule- varding with a militant feminist. And perhaps even vice versa, though this cannot be overegged. Never alienate your natural constituency, and never take it for granted. If you are a Labour Club candidate, you may easily be convicted of selling out. If you are an Establishment lad, you may lose the precious badge of 'soundness'.
But it is the constant sniffing around for more glamorous or psephically lucrative alliances that leads to the worst unpleasantness, the terrible 'knifings' for which the Union is justly unpopular. When your candidate tells you he is backing you up to the hilt', be careful to examine his meaning. Most hacks only become aware of the bloodstained handle disfiguring their tweedy backs on Friday of Seventh Week, and by then, of course, it is too late. To knife a fellow candidate is to renege on a deal, to switch your support secretly to someone else. If this happens
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publicly it can affect the stock market: not because the knifee has lost any votes, but because he is liable to walk around with a glassy hollow look that puts off the punters.
If you want to pay lip-service to inter-machine deals, that is fine, but do not be shattered if they seem to come adrift. No one ever won by doing deals. Some candidates have won mainly through the solidity of their own machine support, and there are a variety of other factors that may boost your chances: for instance, you may be Somerville's answer to La Cicciolina'; you may, particularly if you are American, have a cool, votable name like 'Randy I. Luntz; you may even have the luck
to appear
of the ballot the
at top
paper
and receive the coveted 'donkey
vote". But all these things are not enough on their own. You absolutely must get a big hand for your speeches in the chamber.
And I emphasize 'get a big hand' - people tend not to remember the coherence or learning of a speech, but how much they clapped. The minute you get to the despatch box and stare around at the hundreds of goggling eyes, trying to remember what you were going to say, you understand the importance of pleasing this crowd: even if you are the most seasoned and far-faring of hacks, you will hardly recognize a soul there. Every hack is tried publicly by a huge jury that he has no chance to buttonhole and hack individually. Their decision is crucial. But if you feel that you lack the Scargillian touch and will never be able to set a claptrap, you have another think coming.
Debating in the Oxford Union is a knack that can be easily learned. Full many a potential Union bloom withers in the first week of Michael- mas term, when the wondering freshers behold these gods in dinner jackets and snowy shirts bouncing great matters of state off each other like ping-pong balls, burbling their impenetrable jokes in their elderly voices. 'Ugh' is a common verdict, or 'Not my cup of tea.' But if in that first debate you are gripped by that wild surmise I mentioned earlier, you have nothing to fear but fear itself. Turn up, listen, speak. The im- provements can be dramatic.
The people who have been sitting in the leather chairs of the bar for about twelve years, claiming to be writing a novel, will tell you that debating skill has always been the decisive factor in a presidential race.
By Seventh Week, if you are a committed hack, you have all the dread and yearning for ta eschata that went with the Oxbridge exam. Every morning you wake up to the shock that you are still a prisoner of your ambition. Every glance becomes full of meaning, and every snub a tor-
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entrails of your Cumberland sausage.
ment. You are cast down if no one seems to be talking to you in the lunch queue in the college hall, and you read your fate gloomily in the Academic work becomes a meaningless imposition, and your tutors, recognizing the intoxication of pure adrenalin, will go through the char-
ade of listening to your drivel without complaining. Now you are not just a hack, you are a hackoholic. The pages of your diary will be dark with tiny entries, as every hour is spent in the lassooing of the remaining stray votes. The soles of your shoes will grow thin, but you will be fat with the rich foison of political tea-parties.
By nine o'clock on the Sunday at the beginning of Seventh Week you must nominate yourself for election and pay a £10 election fee. But there is many a slip twixt the crouch and the leap. Kindly hosts at drinks parties on that fateful evening have been known to ply the emotional hacks with unexpectedly large amounts of plonk, or even employ the services of a hostile machine's seductress, until Tom Tower chimes the hour, nominations close, and all is lost. For hacks, obsessed with what each other is doing, will often wait until the last moment before nominating, in case an unforeseen peril or opportunity arises, with the result that they let slip the moment they have been waiting for all term.
On Friday of Seventh Week you wake up for the longest day and have a slap-up bacon-and-egg team breakfast. All your cronies crowd round with bits of paper bearing lists of people to knock up, thoroughly fed up with your egocentric behaviour, but prepared to show willing for the sake of peace and quiet. After reassuring you of their loyalty, which is much the most important thing, they generally go back to bed. All sorts of rules govern your movements as your last moments as an unjudged hack trickle away. They say the golden one is never to be seen alone. Some manuals insist on the importance of the home patch, and recommend a team breakfast at seven, a college hall sizzler at eight, followed by breakfast in the JCR from nine to eleven, a quick trawl of the college library pretending to look for a book, lunch in hall, lunch in the JCR, a spot of loafing in the Lodge pretending to look at the notices, and then a good stint in the afternoon, particularly in the summer, of highly visible trolling round the quad, hands demurely furled behind
your back as you share a good laugh with your tutor about Frege's theory
of Sense and Reference.
Other experts favour a policy of subversion abroad. They believe that, like Hector at the Greek ships, you should aim to cause maximum confu-
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sion in the enemy camp. This means striding into your opponent's college and watching them snarl and cringe when you accidently walk into their and hallooing to his stooges as they scuttle about their knocking-up, campaign HQ in the company of the Returning Officer. But this sort of tactic, while gratifying, has its risks. More than one intruding candidate has spent election day unexpectedly locked in Christ Church Law Library. However you choose to spend the dying hours of your campaign, nothing will come more sweetly than 8.30 p.m. and the close of poll. Many hacks limp home on blistered feet to bed. But you are jolted awake around midnight with the thought that the immensely complicated pro- cess of counting the votes must be almost over. You roll off the bed and head towards the Union. Your pulse races as you pass anonymous of revellers weaving through the wide, misty streets. Is it your imagination or are they passing you silently and with averted eyes, as though embarrassed in the presence of the bereaved?
groups
You quicken your pace and dart down the litter-strewn alley, jammed with bicycles, that leads to the back door of the Union. The thought that the result of the poll may already be known makes your heart beat so hard that your blood makes a funny slooshing noise in your ears. As you go through the swing doors you are startled by the light, the noise and the blank drunkenness. Your eye is caught by a couple kissing deeply beneath a photograph of Caspar Weinberger and the Standing Committee. The silent man with the red beard who sits on the front bench in every debate staggers past, drunk almost beyond recognition. No, he replies to your swift interrogation, they say the results won't there's a rumour someone's be announced for another two hours demanded a recount. Whew. So the Returning Officer and his cardinals are still in camera upstairs, locked in bitter dispute over the interpretation of a mark that could be a 1 or an X, and could well determine your fate.
The building is boiling with people you have never seen before, rugby teams, rowing eights, people with no interest in the Union. They've come for some first-rate carousing and the chance to scoff and cheer like a mediaeval mob at a hanging. On your right as you stand in the hall the provident Union staff are selling pasties and pies. On your left, in the bar, ugly scuffles, repressed all term, are breaking out between factions. In one corner of the bar a portly student clutching his pint of Blue Lagoon is leading the antiphonal chant of the Christ Church mob: 'UGGI! UGGI! UGGI!' he goes. 'HOUSE! HOUSE! HOUSE!' they reply. Not far away a band of rowers, nominally supporting the
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college candidate for the Secretary's Committee, are competing for attention with their hideous low droning: 'Oorielllll!' Automatically you scan the room for your opposing candidates. Some are asleep or being gently sick, tucked into the corners by the old leather chairs. Some are still hacking brightly, their faces white with drink, clacking out their chatter
like the toy with the Duracell battery.
-
it will never - be
But just as a group at the top of the stairs is beginning another verse of the TRG song (When the faction is united divided'), they fall silent and a mutter spreads down the stairs, along the passage and round the bar. Yes! It's the result, quite unexpected - the rumours were wrong! Before you can react, the Returning Officer and the Deputy Returning Officers are coming down the stairs, tight- lipped and smiling inscrutably. With a roar from the crowd the Returning Officer climbs on top of the bar, holding a piece of paper the sight of which makes you almost faint with funk.
Well, O stooge-candidate, it's hard to say what happens next. Most people who run in the Union both win and lose at least once. The chances are, I'm afraid, that if you've been bold enough to run for the Secretary's Committee in your first term, you will probably lose. And as your name is read out as a runner-up don't expect an anguished silence: a terrific cheer will smite the welkin as someone else's supporters realize that he is that much closer to winning. But all has not been in vain, for candidate, on whose behalf you toiled all term, is duly pronounced Presi- dent-Elect, and now climbs on top of the bar, still wearing his lovable your jumper and tie, to deliver a short speech of thanks. Then, as he you on the way to his champagne victory party upstairs, you hold out your hand and fight down the lump in your throat for that personal passes word of congratulation. For an instant he meets your gaze blankly, then sweeps out of the room on a tide of fawning cronies.
So what do you get from your brush with student politics? Some are so ashamed to look people in the face again that they develop nervous ticks in their eyes. Others get an appetite for it that no amount of defeat can cure. With any luck you ought to learn about debating, which is great fun. But the key thing seems to me that you pick up a load of self-knowledge: a term is a very long time in Oxford politics.
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